Arnold Schoenberg

Did Schoenberg have a heart?  The chamber group Concert:Nova, joined by actor Michael Burnham and soprano Meng-Chun Lin showed that he did, both in words and music, April 5 in C:N's current home on the "garden" level of the Metaphor Building on Reading Road in Cincinnati.
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Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg

Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla has been getting attention in Cincinnati, with the Cincinnati Symphony premiere of his "Cuatro Estaciones Portenos" ("Four Seasons of Buenos Aires") with guest artist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg April 2 at Music Hall and Piazzolla on Cincinnati Pops concerts led by Doc Severinsen March 29 and April 5, also at Music Hall.  Guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier did the honors on the CSO concert, which also included Ravel's "Rapsodie Espagnole" and selections from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet suites.
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Anyone tempted to think Veljo Tormis' Overture No. 2 is just a filler on this new Telarc release of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 by Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is in for a surprise. 
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Jennifer Higdon

Beethoven would have loved Jennifer Higdon and Jeffrey Mumford, who shared the program with him on the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's March 27 concert at Music Hall.  Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was new once, too.  Heard on this well-attended concert led by guest conductor James Gaffigan were Higdon's 2005 Percussion Concerto performed by charismatic Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, and Mumford's "...and symphonies of deepening light...expanding...ever cavernous."   
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Alice Parker

Folk music seen through contemporary eyes has added greatly to the richness of music in the 20th and now the 21st century.  The Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and the Vocal Arts Ensemble made that the theme of their annual collaboration March 22 in Memorial Hall downtown and Anderson Center in Anderson Township.  From pagan frolics in ancient Greece to hymns of pioneer America, it was an intriguing and ear-ravishing experience.
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Emmanuel Pahud

From Gabriel Faure to Marc-Andre Dalbavie, it was all things French March 22 at Music Hall in Cincinnati.  Giving it even more of a Gallic flavor was the flute, an instrument given its modern solo voice in France, and Swiss-French flutist Emmanuel Pahud.  CSO music director Paavo Järvi conducted the well-received program.
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Bela Bartok

Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony completed their 2009 Bartok Project March 13 with a performance of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.  Also on the program were Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467, with guest artist Louis Lortie, and Gyorgy Ligeti's early, atypical Concert romanescu.  It was an outstanding performance, given poignancy by the fact that the CSO just canceled its recording activities to help cope with the difficult economic climate. To have been featured on their next CD were the two orchestral works on this program.
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Nicholas Muni

Richard Strauss' comic opera "Ariadne auf Naxos" got the Muni treatment March 7 in Cohen Studio Theater at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.  Director/CCM Artist-in-Residence Nicholas Muni found lots of angles to dangle in the Studio Opera series production, re-set from 18th-century Vienna to present day Cohen Theater, giving it a you-are-there aspect that literally made the audience a part of the action.
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The Cincinnati Symphony Chamber Players are full participants in this season's CSO Bartok Project, with two concerts on their season schedule.  The first, March 6 at Memorial Hall, featured Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, given a compelling performance by pianists Michael Chertock and Frank Weinstock and percussionists Richard Jensen and Patrick Schleker.  Also on the program were well chosen works by Vaughan Williams, Poulenc and Arnold Bax.
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Yefim Bronfman

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's Bartok Project, a 2009 focus on the music of Bela Bartok, continued with his Two Portraits, Op. 5 (1916) and Dance Suite (1923) March 6 at Music Hall.  Soloist was "monster pianist" Yefim Bronfman (CSO music director Paavo Järvi's "endearing" term) in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2.  Coincident with it, the CSO is offering a $10 ticket to anyone bringing a canned food product to the March 7 repeat, part of an initiative by American orchestras to feed the hungry during the economic down turn.
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Paavo Järvi conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (photo by Julia Baier)

Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen are on a trail-blazing journey to make Beethoven's symphonies newly relevant.  In a four-symphony marathon March 2 in newly reopened Alice Tully Hall in New York, the dedicated ensemble excited their listeners with energized, physically exuberant performances of the Symphonies No. 1, 3, 7 and 8.  They broke the mold in more ways than one, since 1,000-seat Alice Tully Hall, even with its new wood veneer lining, did not do them justice acoustically.
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Robert Porco

There was a new journey to be had at the Cincinnati Symphony Feb. 22 at Music Hall, Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony," led by May Festival chorus director Robert Porco.  It was a CSO premiere featuring the May Festival Chorus and guest artists Brett Polegato, baritone, and Kelley Nassief, soprano.  The addition of selections from Handel's "Water Music" furthered the aqautic theme splashingly.
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Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos

Inadvertently or not, someone at the Cincinnati Symphony got it right when they scheduled Berlioz' "Symphonie fantastique" for Friday the 13th at Music Hall.  Love doesn't conquer all in this programmatic score about a lovestruck artist whose opium-induced fantasies include his own execution.  However, there was a corrective on the program led by guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos:  selections, including the "Wedding March," from Mendelssohn's incidental music for"A Midsummer Night's Dream."  The concert, dubbed "Hopeless Romantics," repeated on Valentine's Day, complete with champagne, chocolates and flowers on sale in the lobby.
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R. Kenneth Stavert as Figaro and Andrea Shokery as Rosina in Rossini's "Barber of Seville" at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

The greatest of all comic operas (even Beethoven liked it) receives a great performance in this production by the opera department of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.  Directed by CCM graduate student Karen Coe Miller, here is singing/acting in a superlative froth of what keeps people coming to opera.
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Juilliard String Quartet. L to R: Joel Smirnoff, Joel Krosnick, Samuel Rhodes, Ronald Copes

The legendary Juilliard Quartet made a welcome visit to Cincinnati Feb. 10 with a generous program of Haydn, Beethoven and Dutilleux.  It was a farewell of sorts, too, being their last tour with first violinist Joel Smirnoff, who became president of the Cleveland Institute of Music in July, 2008.
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