Previews & Features

Piano Competition to pay tribute to

retiring executive director Karen Knowlton

By Mike Telin

For the past twenty-three years, Karen Knowlton has quietly led the Cleveland International Piano Competition with one guiding principle: “It's all about the music”. Knowlton retired from her position as CIPC's executive director on January 1. She will be honored on Saturday, February 4 at 4 pm with a concert in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music appropriately entitled “It's all about the music”, featuring former competition winners Antonio Pompa-Baldi (1999), Chu-Fang Huang (2005), Margarita Shevchenko (1995) and Roberto Plano (2001), and incoming executive director Pierre van der Westhuizen with Mark Dumm, violin. A dinner will follow.

     CIPC was born out of the breakup between the French and Cleveland ends of the former Casadesus Competition. Longtime CIPC board member L. Max Bunker recalls, “we were not sure that it was going to work. It was a big break, because it had been set on Casadesus's name, and Madame Gabby was still very much alive. But the French did not want to go in the direction we wanted to go, so we reorganized and took the risk of stepping out on our own. Since Karen had already been executive director of the Cleveland end of the Casadesus, and because she had also been involved in many other areas of the arts in town, she came with a lot of credentials. So she was the perfect person in that respect. She had a lot of ideas, contacts, and a sense of how it worked — the problems as well as the positive things that could come out of it”.

>>read on

CMA Gallery Concerts continue on February 1

By Mike Telin

The Cleveland Museum of Art continues its free First Wednesday Concerts in the Galleries on Wednesday, February 1 beginning at 6:00 pm. A new initiative this season, the First Wednesday concerts take profit of the talented music students at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Historical Performance program at Case Western Reserve University. “Obviously there is no shortage of fantastic talent right here in our backyard,” says Tom Welsh, the Museum’s associate director for music, who curates the concerts along with Adrian Daly from CIM and Peter Bennett from CWRU. “It’s an idea that has been brewing for quite some time, and we finally got it together to make it part of this current season. Musically it’s been great because there are so many superb young players who are working on such interesting repertoire – both well known and unusual.”

     The First Wednesday concerts are casual, lasting roughly fifty to sixty minutes, and are presented in somewhat of a tag team style with each player or ensemble performing one piece. >>read on

Baldwin-Wallace takes on Don Giovanni
By Daniel Hathaway

College opera directors casting about for a title that fits the abilities of young singers don't usually settle on Don Giovanni. As guest conductor Dean Williamson recently told his Baldwin-Wallace singers and instrumentalists, “You have to realize you've chosen to climb the Mt. Everest of Mozart operas. Usually you start with Figaro or something that's more straightforward. Don Giovanni is the one you do later in life. Friends who have sung the roles many, many times say that it takes even seasoned professionals three or four productions before they finally find it in their bodies and brains”.
      But stage director Benjamin Wayne Smith saw an opportunity and leapt at it. “We're an undergraduate institution and Don Giovanni is a hard opera. But we have an amazing senior class right now that's rich with guys. If we were ever going to do it, this was the year!”
      Smith has such depth of talent that he's been able to double-cast the work, which opens at the Kleist Center on the B-W campus in Berea on Wednesday, February 1 at 7:30 and runs through a Sunday matinee on February 5 at 2. “We're blessed to have two principals in each role, and they're really living up to the requirements of the piece”. Smith agrees that one of the things that makes Don Giovanni work with undergraduate singers is that they're fearless and in this case find themselves on top of the heap. “Since we don't have any graduate program, they have to be the leaders. Once you're a senior, you're the boss”. >>read on

St. Olaf Choir visits Cleveland on 100^th Anniversary Tour

By Daniel Hathaway

To celebrate its centennial, the St. Olaf Choir from Northfield, MN, has embarked on a ten-state, sixteen city tour that began on January 21 in Fergus Falls, MN and will end in Minneapolis on February 12. The famous choir, founded at the Lutheran college in 1912 by F. Melius Christiansen, was last heard here at a concert in Severance Hall on February 1, 2010. The choir, led by Anton Armstrong, will sing at Mary Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Cleveland on Tuesday, February 7 at 7:00 pm.

     Armstrong, only the fourth conductor in the choir's hundred year history, is creeping up on a quarter century at its helm, having sung in the group as an undergraduate then gone on to conduct it for the last twenty-three years. The centennial festivities began last year with a 900-singer reunion, continued with national PBS broadcasts of the Thanksgiving edition of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion and the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, and conclude with the choir's tour to Norway. We reached Anton Armstrong by Skype at his home in Northfield the day after the choir's performance in Moorhead, MN to chat about the program he has selected for this celebratory tour.

     That had been a long evening, complicated by a snowstorm, but Armstrong was ebullient about the pre-tour weekend. “If they sing this tour the way they sang that concert! The St. Olaf kids really knocked it out of the park last night. They just rose up and sang beautifully”. >>read on



 

 



 

 

 

 

 

Four Evenings in Finney Chapel at Oberlin
By Daniel Hathaway

In order to provide raw material for the first Rubin Institute for Musical Criticism, Oberlin College compressed four of its Artists Recital Series concerts onto four adjacent evenings, creating what could truly be called a Critical Mass. Everybody got to be a music critic last week — from the ten Rubin Fellows selected from a fall term Introduction of Musical Criticism class to the all-star panel of national critics, to the audience members who submitted overnight critiques for consideration by the teaching panel for the Public Prize. Taken together, the four concerts amounted to a celebration of the Oberlin Conservatory's impressive impact on the world of music. Here's our take on the four performances. To read what others thought, the Fellows' reviews and the eighteen top public reviews can be found on the Rubin Institute website, and another overview appears on Oberlin English professor (and CC.com correspondent) Nicholas Jones' blog.
     The Cleveland Orchestra took the first slot on Wednesday evening, January 18, pride of place for an ensemble that has played annually on the 133-year-old Artist Recital Series since 1919 — just half a year after the orchestra was founded. Music Director Franz Welser-Möst led the ensemble in the first three movements of Smetana's My Vlast, Kaija Saariaho's Orion and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6. >>read on

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society: Dale Kavanagh at First Unitarian Church
By James Flood

For the third installment of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society's 2011-2012 season, last Friday January 27 at the First Unitarian Church in Shaker Heights, Canadian-born classical guitarist Dale Kavanagh drew what appeared to be the best crowd thus far of the CCGS's season. Ms. Kavangh, now living in Germany, maintains a busy international concert schedule that takes her to four continents. With a program of all 20th century music, Kavanagh brought many fine moments, but not without a somewhat steady stream of less than ideal ones.
     The program opened with ten of Leo Brouwer's Simple Etudes, a work Brouwer intended for intermediate-level students. This apparently functioned as a kind of warm-up set. For the most part, the set of etudes lacked interpretive conviction. There were some exceptions, however, in the sixth and seventh, where Kavanagh's interpretive sense and technique began to establish themselves. >>read on 

A Midwinter Night's Dream from the Canton Symphony Orchestra
By Tom Wachunas

The history of Western orchestral music is replete with works that have reverberated far beyond the concert hall to become practically ubiquitous cultural fixtures. Among those, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons ranks high on the list, particularly with the first in that set of violin concertos, Winter, which opened the January 28 concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra at Umstattd Hall. For many, the work is so familiar, and heard in so many contexts (from elevators and malls to television commercials and doctors’ waiting rooms), that it has become something of a musical banality. But the CSO reading of the work was a delightful reminder of just how deeply engaging the piece really is.
     CSO violinist Emily Cornelius’s performance intensity and technical bravura were riveting, and invested the work with a truly invigorating lyricism. Her tonal range was a seamless blend of silken delicacy and velvety muscularity, and always in fine balance with the orchestra (pared down to 15 pieces here). >>read on

Les Délices at Tregoning & Co., January 28
By Mike Telin

A well-conceived and inventive program expertly performed in an acoustical environment that enhances the listening experience presented with an air of casual sophistication: once again Debra Nagy and her Les Délices colleagues achieved all of the above on Saturday, January 28 at Tregoning and Co. with their program titled Caractères de la danse, The program included music by Hotteterre, Rebel and Boismortier and took the audience on a journey back in time to the world’s first ballet school, The Académie Royale de la danse, which was founded in 1661 by King Louis XIV.
     The program, which as one might assume from the title, consisted of music inspired by dance, began with the full ensemble, Debra Nagy, baroque oboe and recorder, Julie Andrijeski, violin, Josh Lee, viola da gamba & Michael Sponseller, harpsichord, in a captivating performance of a Suite from Psyché (1678) by Jean Baptiste Lully. Anne Lockard kindly loaned her Earl Russell harpsichord for the occasion, and its rich tones added to the pleasure of the evening. >>read on

















Karen Knowlton Tribute Concert: Special Ticket Offer to our readers

The Cleveland International Piano Competition has made free tickets available to ClevelandClassical readers for "It's all about the music", a concert honoring retiring executive director Karen Knowlton on Saturday, February 4 at 4 pm at Kulas Hall of the Cleveland Institute of Music. The program features past Competition winners Antonio Pompa-Baldi (1999), Chu-Fang Huang (2005), Margarita Shevchenko (1995) and Roberto Plano (2001), and incoming executive director Pierre van der Westhuizen with Mark Dumm, violin.
     To claim a pair of tickets, just call the CIPC office at 216-707-5397 and mention ClevelandClassical. The first ten callers win!

Opera Western Reserve announces auditions
Mainstage auditions will be held on Monday, March 5 for Opera Western Reserve's November 30 production of Rossini's Barber of Seville, featuring Lawrence Brownlee as Almaviva and conducted by Susan Davenny Wyner. All other roles (including Almaviva rehearsal cover) are open. Send a headshot and resume to Opera Western Reserve, 1000 FIfth Ave., Youngstown, OH 44504 by February 17. Preference given to singers from or with strong ties to Northeast Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. More information here.

Ivan Zenaty to join CIM violin faculty in the fall
Czech-born violinist Ivan Zenaty has been appointed to the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music beginning in the fall of 2012. A former student of Josef Suk, Zenaty has taught for the past fifteen years at the Dresden Hochschule but will now make Cleveland his base while maintaining an international career as concerto soloist and recitalist. He will hear auditions at CIM on February 19 and spend the week meeting students, faculty and staff.



Antonio Pompa-Baldi on Tri-C Classical Piano Series
By Daniel Hathaway

With his stylish elegance, easy virtuosity and impeccable taste, Antonio Pompa-Baldi held a large crowd in rapt attention on Sunday afternoon, January 29, throughout an imaginative recital that closed (all too early) the 2011-2012 Tri-C Classical Piano series. The performance in Gartner Auditorium of The Cleveland Museum of Art was co-sponsored by the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, who have recently collaborated with other local organizations in concerts featuring Italian natives (Cleveland Orchestra principal trombonist Massimo La Rosa and Ohio Philharmonic conductor Domenico Boyagian. The Tri-C series is also run by Italian-born Emanuela Friscioni, Pompa-Baldi's wife).
     For the first half of his program, Pompa-Baldi chose works by two 19th century composers who were close to but overshadowed by Beethoven. >>read on

Blue Water Chamber Ensemble at Breen Center
By Mike Telin

Blue Water Chamber EnsembleFrom the lobby of the Breen Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, January 29, looking though the large window one could witness Mother Nature's own performance as bright sun reflected off the ornate 1891 main building of St. Ignatius High School - followed by blowing snow - returning to sunshine. The only thing more beautiful was the music of Haydn and Beethoven being performed inside the lobby by musicians of the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra.
     First up on the afternoon's musical menu was Beethoven's Duo for Clarinet and Bassoon in F major, WoO 27 no. 2. Beethoven composed three duos for this combination, and although they are rarely performed on the concert stage, clarinetist Amitai Vardi and bassoonist George Sakakeeny's performance was so musically captivating, one does wonder why they are not heard more often. >>read on