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To•Day

DIARY, Thursday March 6, 2025

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

This evening at 6 at Market Garden Brewery, Les Délices takes a break from its usual French Baroque fare to play a pirate-themed event including a costume contest and sea shanty singalongs, and at 7 at Heights Arts, violinist Emily Cornelius and percussionist Ross Karre join in a pay-what-you-can concert.

More this evening: at 7:30 in Mandel Hall at Severance, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole and Concerto in G with pianist Seong-Jin Cho (pictured), and at at 8 in Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater opens a four-performance, double-cast run of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, directed by Stephanie Havey and conducted by Christian Capocaccia.

INTERESTING CLIP:

Film concerts: Performing movie music live

“An increasingly popular symphony orchestra concert is a movie screening accompanied by a live performance of the film’s music—reeling in new audiences to the concert hall. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue attends a New York Philharmonic screening of Jaws, featuring John Williams’ iconic score, and finds out how the technically complicated concert is managed.” Watch here (Tattled from The Cleveland Orchestra’s newsletter entry about the forthcoming screenings of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther with score led by expert film conductor Anthony Parnther.) [Read More…]

Pre•Views & Features

Oberlin Opera embraces the fun and games in La finta giardiniera

by Stephanie Manning

The Oberlin Opera students have recently been learning to see their stage as a playground — literally.

In Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, “ these characters are sort of playing games in regards to their romantic relationships,” director Stephanie Havey explained. “ So we’ve incorporated different children’s games and playground activities into the action, as a metaphor for how they’re manipulating each other.”

This comedic Mozart opera from 1775, which boasts enough mistaken-identity plotlines to set one’s head spinning, will be presented this weekend at Oberlin’s Hall Auditorium. Conducted by Christian Capocaccia, the Thursday, March 6, Friday, March 7, and Saturday, March 8 performances are at 8:00 pm, while the Sunday, March 9 performance is at 2:00 pm. [Read on…]

Cleveland Chamber Symphony puts its annual spotlight on composing’s next generation

by Stephanie Manning

The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has changed plenty since its founding more than 40 years ago. But some things are still the same.

In addition to the Symphony’s performing work, founder Edwin London “firmly believed that it could be an educational tool as well,” music director Steven Smith said. So in 1983, the Young & Emerging Composers Concert was born — an annual opportunity for the ensemble to play an entire program of new works by local student composers.

This tradition is set to continue on Saturday, March 8 during the Symphony’s “NEOSonicSpring” program, presented at 4:00 pm in Baldwin Wallace Conservatory’s Gamble Auditorium. [Read on…]

BlueWater Chamber Orchestra turns fifteen! (Part 1)

by Mike Telin

Conductor Carlton Woods led the Midland, Michigan Symphony from 1997 to 2007 while teaching at Central Michigan University. When he and his wife Ladonna retired, they chose to relocate to Westlake, where they spent their first year soaking up all that Northeast Ohio’s classical music scene had to offer.

“We had season tickets to everything — The Cleveland Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire — and we went to concerts at CIM, Baldwin Wallace, Oberlin, and Cleveland State University,” Ladonna said during a Zoom conversation.

Describing her late husband as the quintessential promoter in the world of classical music, Ladonna Woods said that after spending a lifetime in music, during that first year of retirement she could see that her husband was getting bored. Then one day he asked her what she would think if he started a chamber orchestra.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no, here we go.’ I knew that he wasn’t asking my permission, he was telling me that he had already worked all out. So I told him, ‘I think you’re crazy, and I was really looking forward to us just going places and being a normal everyday couple.’ The interesting thing was that he had so much fun conducting. It was his love. And he kept saying, ‘Ladonna, someday they’re going to find out how much fun I’m having.’ When he said that, I thought, ‘Well, this is a done deal.’”  [Read on…]

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