The Songs of Cole Porter and 6 Other Classical Music Events You Shouldn't Miss This Week

Cleveland’s “Queen of Jazz Piano,” Jackie Warren, usually plays well after dark, but on Wednesday, March 30, she’ll appear at high noon (really 12:10 pm) on the Brownbag Concert Series at Trinity Cathedral (East 22nd & Euclid in downtown Cleveland). Pack a lunch or buy one for $5. Ushers will pass the hat for donations to the series.

Violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, a member of the Mark O’Connor String Quartet, will play music by Sergei Prokofiev, Jeffrey Mumford, Richard Strauss, and William Grant Still, plus some lighter tunes — “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and selections from Fiddler on the Roof — on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 pm as part of the Signature Series in the Studio Theatre at the Stocker Center in Elyria. It’s free.

The Cleveland Orchestra welcomes guest violinist Leila Josefowicz and composer Anthony Cheung this weekend. Franz Welser-Möst will lead the Orchestra in Cheung’s Lyra and British composer Thomas Adès’s Concentric Circles for violin and orchestra. Then they’ll bring down the curtain on the old Norse gods with selections from the fourth and final opera in Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, Götterdämmerung. Tickets can be reserved online for Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 pm, for Friday, April 1 at 11:00 am (no Cheung), or for Saturday, April 2 at 8:00 pm.

Cleveland’s beloved Cavani Quartet (Annie Fullard and Mari Sato, violins, Kirsten Docter, viola, and Merry Peckham, cello) will team up with poet Mwatabu Okantah to bring together the worlds of contemporary urban poetry and standard classical music on Friday, April 1 at 7:30 pm in the Mandel Theatre at Tri-C East (4250 Richmond Rd. in Highland Hills). Buy tickets at the door for $20, or save 5 bucks by reserving in advance: call 216.987.4444.

When he’s not working behind the scenes putting together the 2016 Cleveland International Piano Competition, Pierre van der Westhuizen often joins his wife Sophié to play concerts of four-hand piano music. They’ll do that on Sunday afternoon, April 3 at 1:00 pm at Fairmount Presbyterian Church (2757 Fairmount Blvd. in Cleveland Heights), following an optional brunch at 12:15 Noon. The program includes music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Antonín Dvořák, Claude Debussy, Samuel Barber, and Francis Poulenc, and it’s free. For brunch information, call 216.321.5800.

Cleveland Opera Theater will take over Nighttown on Sunday, April 3 at 6:00 pm for a program of music by Cole Porter sung by Andrea Nelli and Rebecca Freshwater, sopranos, and Benjamin Czarnota, baritone, with Marge Adler at the piano. Hear Porter’s immortal lyrics exploring life, loss, love, and relationships, along with food and drink. Tickets are $40, and you can reserve online.

What may sound like a dental convention will actually be two evenings of scintillating contemporary music for voices when the Grammy-Award winning vocal project Roomful of Teeth brings its astonishing singers to Northeast Ohio. They’ll perform in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace on Sunday, April 3 at 8:00 pm, and on Tuesday, April 5 at 7:00 pm at the Akron-Summit County Library in downtown Akron under the banner of Tuesday Musical. Tickets for the BW concert can be reserved here, and for the Akron performance here.

For details of these and other events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page.