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by Mike Telin
Cleveland composer Margi Griebling-Haigh has written a new piece on commission from Cleveland Orchestra assistant principal bassoonist Barrick Stees. Sortilège will have its premiere on Mr. Stees concert, “Instrument of Enchantment: the Supernatural Bassoon” in Tucker Hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights on Friday, May 6 at 7:30 pm.
Ms. Griebling-Haigh comes from a family which boasts three generations of composers, including her father, her mother, her sister and her daughter.
A native of Akron, she began music study with her parents and before graduating from high school, had already won awards for her compositions from BMI and the National Federation of Music Clubs. An oboist, she took her Bachelor’s degree from Eastman, studying with Robert Sprenkle, and Master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory, studying with Marc Lifschey.
In addition to the commission from Barrick Stees, she has been asked to compose for other Cleveland Orchestra soloists, including principal hornist Richard King and the late principal oboist, John Mack. Other commissions have come from organist Karel Paukert, the Schenectady Symphony, the Greater Akron Music Association and the Cleveland area chamber ensemble Panorámicos.
Her daughter Gabrielle (Gabby) is following in the tradition. Currently training to be a classicist at Clare College, Cambridge, where she sings soprano in the Chapel Choir, her Symphony No. 1 was premiered recently by the Monterey Symphony Orchestra.
We spoke with Margi Griebling-Haigh by telephone to talk about her career as a composer, her remarkable family and about the new work she has written for Barrick Stees.
by Mike Telin
To read Cleveland Orchestra solo English horn player Robert Walter’s resume, one could easily assume that he has not had a lot of time for anything other than music. Prior to joining the Orchestra in 2004, he served as solo English horn and oboe player with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Prior to those positions, Mr. Walters performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the American Ballet Theatre, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He also was a frequent performer with James Levine and the MET Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie Hall. As a soloist, Mr. Walters has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Beijing Radio Symphony, the New York Chamber Soloists, and the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia.
The passing down of musical traditions to young players is something that brings him great joy. He is a faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival as well as professor of oboe and English horn at the Oberlin Conservatory. But when we telephoned Mr. Walters last week to talk about his upcoming performance of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks’ English horn concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Andrey Boreyko, we discovered that his artistic interests and talents extend far beyond the concert stage.
Mike Telin: How did you discover the Vasks concerto?
Robert Walters: Actually it was through Andrey Boreyko, who is conducting the concert. I was playing in Aspen a few summers ago where he was conducting. He asked me if I knew this concerto, at which point I didn’t. I heard some of it on the radio once, and I remember thinking that it was intriguing, so with his prompting, I did some research, and discovered that it has been recorded twice — which is interesting for an English horn concerto — but even more interesting is that it was recorded by the same person. Read the rest of this entry »
by Mike Telin
Monica Houghton’s Songs Without Words will be one of the featured works on Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 3:00 pm, when the Cleveland Composers Guild teams up with the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society for “Guitar Plus” (music for guitar and other instruments) at Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights. We spoke with Monica Houghton by telephone.
Mike Telin: Is this your first work for “Guitar Plus”?
Monica Houghton: I have never written for the combination of guitar and flute before. I have written some pieces specifically for the guitarist Don Better, who I met in graduate school at CIM, and he is a colleague of mine now. I wrote some songs for soprano and guitar, as well as a solo piece for Don, which he has played quite a few times.
MT: How did Songs without Words come about?
MH. Don asked me to write a piece for him and a friend who played five string electric bass, but that project didn’t work out so well because the bassist did not read music. So we got in to this sort of never never land. I kept thinking that I would just play through the part and he could get it, but it just doesn’t work that way crossing between the classical world and the jazz world. It can be an interesting experience for both sides I would imagine. Anyway, I really liked the music, and the piece was based on a poem from the Chinese Tung Dynasty poet TuFu. He is one of the greatest poets of all time. So this was a poem that I liked called “New Moon”, and that was what I had based the piece on, I thought I didn’t want to let the piece go, so when this concert opportunity came up, I thought ‘oh well, I wonder if I just took the bass part and put it above the guitar part and messaged the music a little bit, I could make this a piece for flute and guitar?’, because for some reason, the sound of flute and guitar seemed to fit the poem. It is odd to think that you could turn a piece for electric bass and guitar into a piece for flute and guitar, that you could perform that translation without having major damage. But it seemed quite natural, and I was surprised. So I went with that, but then I saw the piece was a little short so I wrote two other pieces to go with it, which are also sort of riffs on TuFu poems. Read the rest of this entry »
by Mike Telin
CityMusic Cleveland opens its 2010-2011 season next Tuesday the 28th of September with six concerts devoted to the music of Beethoven under the direction of director James Gaffigan, who returns after a year’s absence.
These concerts also mark the CityMusic debut of the exuberant violinist Chee-Yun, who told us in a phone interview, “I think I have an ‘I am a student forever’ attitude”. Her love for learning and experiencing new things in life came across as we discussed her initial reluctance to perform Beethoven’s monumental concerto, as well as how teaching has made her a better performer. We also chatted about her guest appearance on the hit sit-com, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, a video of Piazzolla’s Oblivion that some viewers found to be a bit provocative for their tastes, and her upcoming debut with Chris Botti at New York’s legendary Jazz Club, The Blue Note.
Mike Telin: Have you worked with James Gaffigan before?
CY: No, this is my first time, but he is the main reason that my manager and I jumped at the opportunity to play with CityMusic. And the Beethoven is a piece that I want to play more, so this is a really good opportunity for me.
MT: I found an interview that you did for “All Things Strings” 10 years ago, and in it you said that you were not all that crazy about the concerto. What has changed in the past ten years?
by Daniel Hathway
The Cleveland Cello Society will begin its new season with Mark Kosower’s Cleveland debut recital. The new principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra made his first solo appearance with the Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the Joffrey Ballet at Blossom earlier in September. On Monday, September 27, Kosower will be joined by his wife, pianist Jee-Won Oh in music by J.S. Bach, Tcherepnin, Poulenc and Mendelssohn in an 8 pm performance in Harkness Chapel on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.
Mark Kosower was born into a family of cellists in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. After studying with János Starker at Indiana University and Joel Krosnick at Juilliard, he taught cello and chamber music at the San Francisco Conservatory before being named solo cellist with the Bamberg Symphony in Germany in 2006. We spoke with him by phone at his new home over Labor Day weekend.
Daniel Hathaway: First of all, I loved the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations with the Joffrey Ballet on Saturday evening. That must have been a new experience.
Mark Kosower: Thank you. It was a new experience. I hadn’t played for a dance company before.
Read the rest of this entry »
by Daniel Hathaway
Bruce Dickey has been largely responsible for the modern revival of one of the most fascinating instruments in the Renaissance and Baroque instrumentarium. Now living in Bologna, where he is a member of the modern incarnation of the Renaissance wind band Concerto Palatino, he returns to Northeast Ohio this month to teach at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute and play in Monteverdi’s ‘Vespers of 1610′. We interviewed him over coffee last December when he was in Cleveland to play the Praetorius Christmas Vespers with Apollo’s Fire.
Daniel Hathaway: What was your first encounter with the cornetto?
Bruce Dickey: I was an undergraduate at Indiana University when I discovered the recorder and I discovered a group there that was playing recorders, shawms, krummhorns. One of the other players in the group was Michael Lynn, who’s now at Oberlin — we were two members of the wind component of that ensemble, and we were sitting one day in the rehearsal room with all the instruments hanging in a cupboard, and he pointed at the cornetto and said “that’s your instrument”. And I said, “No, no, no.” I was a trumpet student at the time and I looked at that mouthpiece and said, “I don’t want to do that”. It took a couple of years before I came around. I did play a few pieces on the cornetto. I shudder to think that there are probably still tapes lurking in the music library there. And then I went off to Basel to study the recorder and I ordered a plastic cornetto from Christopher Monk and took it with me to Basel and started to take some lessons from Edward Tarr.
Read the rest of this entry »
Composers Connect, the last event in the Cleveland Orchestra’s current season on Saturday, June 6, features the music of four of the orchestra’s former Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellows, Marc-Andre Dalbavie (1998-2000), Matthias Pintscher, who will also be on the podium for the concert (2000-2002), Susan Botti, a Cleveland native who will also assume singing duties (2003-2005), and Johannes Maria Staud (2007-2009).
We reached Susan Botti last week by phone to ask how she became a Daniel R. Lewis fellow and how that experience has helped to advance her career.
Mike Telin: You are a Clevelander?
Susan Botti: Yes, I was not born here but transplanted at about six weeks.
MT: What part of the city did you live in?
SB: Cleveland Heights. I was schooled through the Catholic School system and I went to Beaumont High School. My father was the head of cardiology at University Hospital.
MT: You have such an interesting background, singing, composing and you have also embraced so many musical styles; does this or at least part of it come from the fact that you were raised in a city like Cleveland?
SB: Yes in many ways it was, because music is something that is kind of hard to escape here. We have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to our credit and the R&B scene was good. It was like it just sort of came to me, it wasn’t even going out and getting it. I am also the 6th of 7 children, so I had 5 personalities older then me that went through all kinds of musical events. So I absorbed all of them, whatever they were going through. I have vivid memories of the Beatles from my oldest sister, and I remember when Miles Davis, “Man with the Horn”, came into the house with one of my older brothers. There were a lot of musical styles. My oldest sister was also trained as a ballerina, so that music was probably my very earliest classical music memory. Then, of course there was the Cleveland Orchestra, so yes, there were a lot of different styles. Read the rest of this entry »
Composers Connect, the last event in the Cleveland Orchestra’s current season on Saturday, June 6, features the music of four of the orchestra’s former Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellows, Marc-André Dalbavie (1998-2000), Matthias Pintscher, who will also be on the podium for the concert (2000-2002), Susan Botti, a Cleveland native who will also assume singing duties (2003-2005), and Johannes Maria Staud (2007-2009).
We reached Matthias Pintscher last week by phone to talk about how he finds conducting and composing to be complimentary, and how he defines himself as a composer.
Mike Telin: It is a pleasure to speak to you and we are looking forward to your return to Cleveland.
Matthias Pintscher: Thank you and I look forward to being back in Cleveland. I have many fond memories, and the people are so proud of their orchestra. I remember my very first trip; I landed at the airport and I told the taxi driver that I needed to go to Severance Hall. He asked me why, and I told him that I was a composer and they were playing one of my pieces, and he looked back at me and said, it is an honor to drive anyone who is connected to the Cleveland Orchestra. Yes, the people are so friendly and very proud of the orchestra.
MT: You have had a very non-traditional educational path, and I was reading that composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono recognized your ability at an early age.
MP: I was privileged to meet all these great people such as Henze, Nono, and lots of wonderful conductors at a very early age, Claudio Abbado was an early supporter of my work. He brought me into his room and said, Matthias, I had a look at your scores and this looks really difficult, but we want a piece from you. I was in my early twenties. So this is how it happened, people trusted me, but I also worked very hard. Read the rest of this entry »
by Daniel Hathaway
Baritone Jordan Shanahan is in town to sing the role of Enrico in Opera Cleveland’s upcoming production of Lucia di Lammermoor on May 20, 22 & 23. He recently sang Horatio in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Ambrose Thomas’ Hamlet and has been featured in Opera News’ column “One to Watch”. We had the opportunity to interview Jordan at Opera Cleveland’s offices earlier this month.
Daniel Hathaway: Is this your first time in Cleveland?
Jordan Shanahan: It is. I’ve driven through it, passing back through between New York and Chicago but this is the first time I’ve spent time.
DH: We’re kind of in the way between New York and Chicago. But you’re Hawaiian by birth, right?
JS: I am! I grew up in Hawaii — on Oahu — and was there until I was 21.
DH: It must be a hard place to leave.
JS: Oh, you have no idea! Sometimes when I have two weeks off I go home to Chicago and it’s ten degrees! The weather in Hawaii is always nice, the atmosphere is good with the ocean breezes, people are friendly. It’s a great place.
DH: So you started your career as a trombonist?
JS: Actually I started as a tuba player for a year, then I switched over to trombone. I was pretty good at it. I got a scholarship to go to the university. My trombone teacher said, “you should take some voice lessons”, which led to my doing a couple of choruses with Hawaii Opera, and a couple of musicals. I enjoyed it. Read the rest of this entry »
by Mike Telin
Cleveland Orchestra principal trumpet Michael Sachs plays the Neruda Trumpet Concerto this weekend with the Cleveland Orchestra (April 29-May 2). We reached him at his home in Cleveland to talk about the concerts.
Mike Telin: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk, I think this is going to be an exciting concert. I am wondering why you chose to perform the Neruda concerto?
Michael Sachs: Outside of the trumpet world it is not that well known of a piece. But it is a piece that is kind of in the vein of both the Haydn and Hummel concertos. It is a piece that I have been playing for a while, and I have often performed it in recital with piano and with organ. I have also recorded it with Todd Wilson at the organ, in recital about five years ago.
MT: Yes and I understand that you will be signing copies of the recording at the Cleveland Orchestra store following this week’s concerts?
MS: Yes I will, and I believe it will be after all of the concerts except for the Friday concert, because the Fridays @ 7 has the special things happening after the concert with Jamey Haddad and his guest artists. So I believe it will be on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
MT: I was doing a little reading about the Neruda concerto, and I discovered that it was originally written for Corno de Caccia, have you ever performed it on that instrument?
MS: I have not, but the Corno de Caccia is an interesting instrument, I don’t know if you have seen a picture of it, but it kind of looks like a small-coiled horn very similar to a posthorn, which is what I would use for the offstage solo in Mahler’s 3rd symphony. Read the rest of this entry »
