Fri 10/31 @ 7:30PM
Sat 11/1 @ 8PM
Sun 11/2 @ 8PM
Fri 11/7 @ 8PM
When Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s baroque orchestra, performs its latest series of concerts The Monteverdi Vespers, it’ll be warming up the program to take on the road for a national tour November 4-14.
Voices will be in the foreground for this program, which features the Apollo’s Singers, along with tenors Oliver Mercer and Karim Sulayman, sopranos Molly Quinn and Nell Snaidas, mezzo-soprano Kristen Dubenion-Smith, and basses Jesse Blumberg and Jonathan Woody in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, long a favorite program with Apollo’s Fire audiences. They’ll surely be eager to hear it again, as artistic director Jeanette Sorrell and her musicians polish it up for the nine-city tour that will take them to Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Texas and California.
Because the piece, which is set to biblical texts primarily from the Songs of Solomon, was written to be performed in a cathedral, the group will perform it in a series of cathedrals and stone churches. And the ensemble of singers and musicians playing period of instruments will be one of Apollo’s Fire’s largest to date as they tackle this adventurous and groundbreaking work, which they group says “unites the structure and counterpoint of the West with the exotic flamboyance of the East,” while “evoking the struggle between the archaic and the revolutionary.”
Friday night’s concert is at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron; Saturday’s is at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral. On Sunday, they’ll perform at St. Mary of the Falls in Olmsted Falls (25615 Bagley Road). And they’ll conclude their local concerts with a performance at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Fri 11/7.
Italian renaissance and baroque expert Dr. Marica Tacconi will present lecture “Venice and Mantua at the Dawn of the 17th Century,” an hour before the 10/31, 11/1 and 11/2 concerts.
Tickets are $20-$68.