Pianist Mitsuko Uchida returns to Severance Hall on Thursday, April 6 at 7:30 pm and Friday and Saturday, April 7 and 8 at 8:00 pm to lead and solo in performances of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 13 and 20 with The Cleveland Orchestra. The program also includes Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia No. 2. Tickets available online.
This year marks the 85th anniversary of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, and to celebrate, this year the Festival will focus on the theme of how Bach inspired the music of another German composer, Johannes Brahms. There are three major concerts on Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday evening, April 7 and 8, the first two featuring the Westhuizen Duo, pianists Pierre and Sophié van der Westhuizen, the third starring Brahms’s German Requiem with the BW Festival Chorus and Symphony Orchestra conducted by Octavio Más-Arocas. Lectures and other events take place in between, including a “BYOB” (“Bring Your Own Bach”) event on Saturday at 4:30 pm for which Bach fans are invited to bring their instrument or voice and a short piece to share with others. See the full schedule and check out ticket prices here.
The Artists Formerly Known As Opera Circle Cleveland — now renamed The Cleveland Opera — will stage Mozart’s Don Giovanni at First Baptist Church. Watch the womanizing Don get his comeuppance (or since it’s in a church, maybe his redemption) on Friday and Saturday evenings, April 7 and 8 at 7:30 pm. Grzegorz Nowak conducts. Tickets available online.
Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble Les Délices will bring its season to a conclusion with “Fated Lovers,” featuring soprano Clara Rottsolk, soprano and tenor Jason McStoots, tenor, in Clérambault’s cantatas Pyrame et Thiseé and Leandre et Héro, and excerpts from Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie. You can catch the show twice: on Saturday, April 8 at 7:30 pm in the Galleries at Cleveland State, and on Sunday, April 9 at 4:00 pm in Herr Chapel of Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Come at 3 on Sunday to learn all about the program. Tickets available online.
Jazz composer Vijay Iyer has created a new concerto for Jennifer Koh, an Oberlin graduate and violin superstar. You can hear a workshop performance of Trouble, bound for its world premiere the Ojai Festival in California in June, on Sunday, April 9 at 2:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Timothy Weiss conducts the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in the new work as well as in BW composer-in-residence Cline Needham’s Chamber Symphony. Tickets available online.
One of the famous collections of 15th century English church music, the Eton Choirbook, is missing a number of pages, but CWRU scholar-sleuth Ross W. Duffin has reconstructed one of its most important pieces, Richard Davy’s Matthew Passion. Quire Cleveland will perform the dramatic piece, which mixes chant and elaborate polyphony, twice on Palm Sunday, April 9. You can hear it at Historic St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland at 3:00 pm, or later at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights at 7:00 pm. Tickets are available online.
The Oberlin Artist Recital Series presents pianist Richard Goode in a program of Bach, Beethoven (one of his specialties), and Chopin in Finney Chapel on Sunday, April 9 at 4:00 pm. There are lots of piano recitals on the docket in Northeast Ohio, but this one promises to be one of exceptional depth. Tickets available online.
For details of these and many other events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page.
