Blue Streak Ensemble Musically Remembers the Cuyahoga River Fire 50 Years Ago and the Rest of the Classical Music to Catch This Week

The Oberlin Orchestra and Oberlin College Choir will be performing at New York City’s iconic Carnegie Hall later this week. They’ll have a dress rehearsal in the form of a send-off concert in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel on Wednesday, January 16 at 7:30 pm, when Gregory Ristow will launch the evening with Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych and Stravinsky’s Les noces (“The Wedding,” a souvenir of pagan Russia with percussion and four — count them — grand pianos). To complete the program, Raphael Jiménez will lead the orchestra in Oberlin faculty composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s All These Lighted Things and Claude Debussy’s tone poem La Mer (“The Sea”). The performance is free, but if you can’t make it to Oberlin you can catch a webcast here.

Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer will bring her Blue Streak Ensemble to the Bop Stop on Thursday, January 17 at 7:30 pm for performances of Matthew Saunders’ Channels, Derek Bermel’s Tied Shifts, and two of her own works: Running Wild for solo percussion, and movements from Diary of an Alien for solo flute. Tickets go for $15, and you can buy them in advance online.

The Cleveland Institute of Music’s Art Song Festival zeroes in on the art of the solo vocal recital every other year. In between, they present a recital by a world-class artist. This time around, it’s the riveting young German baritone Benjamin Appl, who’s making his U.S. solo recital debut this month with concerts in New York, Portland (Oregon), New Orleans, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. He joins pianist James Baillieu in CIM’s Kulas Hall on Friday, January 18 at 8:00 pm for songs by Schubert, Schumann, Duparc, and Grieg, as well as Nico Muhly’s The Last Letter, written for Appl by the New York-based composer using letters sent between soldiers and their loved ones during the First World War. Reserve tickets online here.

Another organization that sponsors concerts during the gap years between its main event is the Cleveland International Piano Competition. First up on CIPC’s 2019 series is Oberlin grad and MacArthur Fellow Jeremy Denk, who will treat the audience in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on Saturday, January 19 at 8:00 pm to music by Beethoven, John Adams, Bizet, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. Reserve tickets here.

“Unbelievable. It’s like suddenly finding a dozen new drawings by Rubens!” That’s what one scholar had to say about the discovery of the Leuven Songbook, a miniature 15th-century collection of songs that turned up in Brussels in 2014. Cleveland’s Les Délices will join Chicago’s Newberry Consort this weekend in a multimedia production that includes six of the twelve previously-unknown songs as well as other other late Medieval pieces by Ockeghem, Busnois, and others. Ellen Hargis (soprano), David Douglass (vielle and rebec), Allison Monroe (vielle and rebec), Jason McStoots (tenor), Daniel Fridley (baritone), Charles Weaver (lute), Charles Metz (organetto), and Debra Nagy (harp, voice, Medieval winds) will be the featured performers. There are three concerts: Friday, January 18 at 7:30 pm in Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Saturday, January 19 at 8:00 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church, and Sunday, January 20 at 4:00 pm in Herr Chapel at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Tickets can be ordered here.

All the free tickets will have been distributed, but you can still tune in to live broadcasts of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert from Severance Hall on Sunday, January 20 at 7:00 pm via IdeaStream — WCLV, 104.9 FM and WCPN, 90.3 FM. Vinay Parameswaran conducts the Orchestra and the MLK Celebration Chorus, and the evening features a cameo appearance by tenor Lawrence Brownlee. On Monday, January 21, Severance Hall invites the community to an open house with performances from 12:30 pm to 5:30 pm and lots of family-friendly activities in between. Monday’s events are free.

And the next Tuesday Musical concert will bring pianist Inon Barnatan together with the Calidore String Quartet for an all-J.S. Bach program at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron on January 22 at 7:30 pm. The program includes selections from The Art of Fugue and four keyboard concertos. Reserve your tickets online.

Check out details of these and other events on our Concert Listings page.