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By Megan Emberton
It was destiny. I was a weary piano student, disenchanted with life at a music school, home for an entire summer because I had felt far too wretched to land myself a spot at any summer festivals. And then we met. The accordion was waiting for me, behind the jewelry counter at a local junk shop. It was very 1960s, gold accents, ridiculous, smelled like mildew, and it was the answer to all of my problems. I hemmed and hawed for a couple of hours, then blew three hundred bucks on an instrument I couldn’t really play. My visiting aunt chipped in because when I strapped that box on my shoulders, my gloomy face lit up for the first time all summer. We were made for each other, the accordion and me.
My instrument and I were relegated to playing outside for the first few weeks. With every push and pull, the bellows would billow a musty plume of dust. My mother said that sunlight exposure is key for getting rid of mold and mildew — oh, and accordions are loud instruments whether or not you can play them properly. I spent a lot of time sitting on a stool in the driveway, getting used to playing a keyboard sideways and negotiating the mysteries of the 120 bass buttons my left hand had to contend with. I am still not sure what the neighbors thought. Read the rest of this entry »
Cleveland, OH — August 3, 2011
The four finalists, who will play concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall under maestro Christopher Wilkins, were announced late Wednesday evening at the Cleveland Play House (photos left to right in performance order). The performances will be broadcast live over WCLV, 104.9 FM but will not be available on the Web. For tickets, call the Severance Hall Box Office, 216.231.1111 or order online. The winners will be announced at the end of Saturday’s performance, and the four finalists will give encore performances of solo repertory on Sunday at 3 during the Awards Ceremony in Severance Hall (tickets required).
Friday, August 5 at 8 pm
Kyu Yeon Kim (Brahms, Concerto No. 1)
Eric Zuber (Rachmaninoff, Concerto No. 2)
Saturday, August 6 at 8 pm
Alexey Chernov (Brahms, Concerto No. 1)
Alexander Schimpf (Beethoven, Concerto No. 4)
Cleveland, OH, July 30, 2010
The order of performance for tonight’s finals with Jahja Ling and the Cleveland Orchestra:
George Li — Chopin’s Concerto No. 1
Kate Liu — Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3
Intermission
John Chen — Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1
The concert will be broadcast live at 8:00 pm EDT over WCLV, 104.9 FM and streamed via the Internet at wclv.com.
Oberlin, OH, July 28, 2010
The following young pianists will play the solo finals round on Wednesday evening, July 28 at 8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time in Warner Concert Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory. The concert is free and will be broadcast live on WCLV, 104.9 FM and streamed on the Internet from www.wclv.com.
John Chen (16, Virginia, USA)
Anna Han (14, Arizona, USA)
Sahun Hong (16, Texas, USA)
George Li (14, Massachusetts, USA)
Kate Liu (16, Illinois, USA)
Tristan Teo (13, Canada)
The three winners of the solo finals round will play concertos with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall in Cleveland, on Friday, July 30 at 8:00 pm EDT.
We invited our readers to submit outstanding performances of the 2009-2010 season (September through June). Here are the submissions we received.
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I’d like to nominate Akron Baroque for Cleveland Classical’s Best of the Season highlights. I’m so proud of the growth of this little orchestra in such a short period of time. Not only has our audience quadrupled since Akron Baroque’s birth in 2006, but this May’s concert introduced our new Akron Baroque Chamber Chorus to an overwhelmingly warm community response. It’s truly the realization of a dream.
Amy Barlowe – June 2
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Akron Symphony: Mahler 9 at Severance Hall.
Akron Symphony: Opera Exerpts November 2009 at E.J. Thomas Hall
Richard A. Dee – June 2 Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Welsh is assistant director for music at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Here are his highlights from the series at the Museum last season.
Thanks for letting me indulge in some delightful recollections of our last season, it was another exciting and diverse year of music. Here are a handful of personal highlights, in chronological order:
Garth Knox performing solo and duo (with cellist Lauren Radnofsky) on viola and viola d’amore, blending very old with very new – from Marin Marais to Salvatore Sciarrino. [8 November 2009 @ Plymouth Church of Shaker Square]
NYC-based composer/sound artist Marina Rosenfeld led her Sheer Frost Orchestra, an ensemble of 15 floor-bound electric guitars, as part of the CIA student exhibition in the museum and the special event called “After Hours” (and the electro-duo Eats Tapes were great, too.) [13 November 2009 @ CMA]
On the heels of the successful debut of his opera “A House in Bali,” about Colin McPhee, composer/performer Evan Ziporyn brought his Gamelan Galak Tika to town for a fascinating east-meets-west program. [8 January 2010 @ Cleveland Museum of Natural History] 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 Daniel Hathaway
David Finckel, Wu Han & Philip Setzer
The trio with no name, but made up of three eminent musicians (violinist Philip Setzer, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han) plays Schubert Trios on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on Tuesday, March 23 at Fairmount Temple Auditorium. Finckel and Setzer play in the Emerson Quartet; Finkel and Wu Han are husband and wife, owners of the recording company ArtistLed and co-artistic directors both of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center and Music at Menlo in California. Their Schubert tour derived from an ArtistLed recording project. Due to their busy schedules, we spoke with the trio in three different conversations. We reached David Finckel in Vienna, Wu Han in New York between rehearsals, and spoke with Philip Setzer soon after he returned from Europe.
DAVID FINCKEL
DH: I just read the interview the three of you had with Classical Archives’ artistic director Nolan Gasser in February, and you touched on every subject I could possibly think to ask you about!
DF: That was quite some interview, wasn’t it.
DH: It must have taken some time to do, but I’ll try to find some interesting questions for you. First off, congratulations on the 13th anniversary of ArtistLed. How is the company doing in the current economic climate?
DF: Fine, because our decimal point is in another place. We manage to make ends meet because we have a loyal following. We keep our costs low without having it affect quality at all and we always manage to recoup our expenses through the sales of the recordings, which I think is the golden rule. So as long as we can do that, we can just keep going ahead and making more recordings.
Read the rest of this entry »
—a conversation with Mike Telin
On Saturday, March 20, Randall Craig Fleischer conducted the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra and Time for Three in Chris Brubeck’s new concerto for two violins, double bass and orchestra. We talked with the composer by telephone about the new piece.
Mike Telin: You are in Ft. Meyers Florida, with the Gulf Coast Orchestra?
Chris Brubeck: Yes, they are doing the piece I wrote called Quiet Heroes. So I am around for advice, and my buddy on this project Wilfred Brimley will be narrating, and it’s a triple bonus because I get to visit my dad. It’s much better for him here than taking the chance of slipping on the ice back in Connecticut where he used to live.
MT: Yes I just read about this piece on your website, in fact you have a number of interesting orchestral projects happening.
CB: Yes, I think they are interesting. I try to do a couple every year, although almost all of my energy during the past year has been focused on the new Time for Three piece. We are at the countdown to its birth, since I started it nine months ago.
MT: Yes, this sounds like a very interesting piece. I know it was an eight-orchestra commission, but who was it that approached you about being the composer?
CB: Well, to me anyway, it is an interesting and funny story. First, I am not sure if you know that I wrote a violin concerto for Nick Kendall, who is one of the three of Time for Three. But, so much credit needs to be giving to Randall Fleischer, the music Director of the Youngstown Symphony, the Anchorage Symphony and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. I’ll tell you the whole story.
Read the rest of this entry »
A Musical Offering
to honor the memory of
James Fowler Meyers
(June 7, 1947 — January 23, 2010)
Ludwig Hall, Kent State University
Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 3:00 pm
