SUMMERMUSIK – WEEK TWO

ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

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Celeste Golden Boyer will take the solo violin part in Vivaldi’s The Seasons. 

Kimberly and I just got back from one of those days that makes one feel grateful to be living in Cincinnati, highlighted by a wonderfully crafted, curated, and played concert at the Taft (be sure to check out the Ansel Adams exhibition before it closes), helmed by violinist Manami White, with violinist Amy Kiradjieff, violist Heidi Yenney and bassist Tom Guth, with a few selections played by Eckart Preu, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff playing up a storm in a Haydn Divertimento. All of this was thematically linked by Jane Austen and the Regency period (that’s when George III went bonkers and they put his son on the job to keep things together…)

But you would not know bonkers from the music played today, which was a becalming mix of the well-worn (Beethoven, Handel, Mozart) with the obscure (Dalayrac …Pleyel…) But this is less than a review and more of a preview, so suffice for you to know that it was lovely and civilized, and that Summermusik has some gems in store up ahead.

Read on.

Tuesday August 7 @ 7:30 PM Chamber Crawl at Microbrass@ Fretboard – CCO Brass Section players, led by trumpeter Wesley Woolard sharing Mozart, Purcell, Monteverdi, Mascagni, Puccini, Wagner, Gershwin and Freddie Mercury (!) with guest soprano, Melissa Harvey.

Saturday August 11 @ 7:30 PM The Four Seasons Imagined – at the SCPA – Mind you, the opener is a world premiere of Draumalandið by Valgeir Sigurðsson (don’t even try to pronounce it) an Icelandic composer whose magically conceived music can haunt you for days.

Leave it to Eckart Preu to rattle our preconceptions: he is pairing this up in the same evening with Max Richter’s reinvention (!) of Vivaldi’s The Seasons followed by the…mmm…traditional one. Celeste Golden Boyer, the orchestra’s concertmistress will take the solo violin part, and the entire CCO will help us all forget this heat wave as they take us through Vivaldi’s spring rainstorms, snowy evenings and autumnal landscapes in nice weather music.

Sunday August 12 @ 4:00 pm The Carnegie in Newport – Postcards from the Sky, with musical messages from Marjan Mozetich, Vivaldi (encore), Alan Hovahness, and Max Richter (encore) with Preu and Golden Boyer center stage.

And that’s just this week at Summermusik.  Tickets and information: http://www.ccocincinnati.org

Published by ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Rafael de Acha has enjoyed a distinguished career in the arts as a performer, stage director, producer, and educator. He was born and grew up in Cuba. At the age of 17 he moved to the United States to study Drama at the University of Minnesota, and later Languages at L.A. City College, Music at the Juilliard School of Music, at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, and at the New England Conservatory of Music, from which he received the Master's degree. He has taught courses on the History of Music at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and at Florida International University, and contributed writings and reviews to Seen and Heard International (www.seenandheard-international.com ) and to this blog. He co-founded the award-winning New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he produced and staged twenty seasons of classical and contemporary theater, including fifty world premieres of plays that went on to have international and national productions on and off Broadway, including Ana in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2002 and Tony Nomination 2003.) In 2006 he was presented with a citation from The Dade County Cultural Affairs Council for “trailblazing contributions to the arts in South Florida.”