Thu 10/19 @ 7:30PM
Fri 10/20 @ 8:30PM
Sat 10/21 @ 7:30PM
Sun 10/22 @ 4:30PM
CityMusic Cleveland’s next series of concerts is titled “Celebrating Black Excellence,” it does so on two levels: in the repertoire it’s performing and in the talented soloists who are joining the orchestra for these concerts.
The program includes a piece by one of the most prominent Black American contemporary composers, Jessie Montgomery, titled “Strum.” It also features pieces by two of her most noted precursors, 20th-century composer William Grant Sill (“I Dream a World”) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912,“Onaway! Awake, Beloved).
They’ll open with the Clarinet Concerto by jazz composer/clarinetist Artie Shaw, one of the first white bandleaders to hire a Black singer to tour the south when he hired Billie Holiday in 1938. Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s 1915 “Ritual Fire Dance,” and excerpts from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess round out the program.
The vocal soloists are all students at Oberlin Conservatory, where Still also studied in the early nineteen-teens: tenor Travis Guillory, soprano Elizabeth Hanje, and bass-baritone Benhur Mosazghi. All are making their debuts with CityMusic Cleveland. Former Cleveland Orchestra clarinetist and current member of the CityMusic Cleveland Orchestra as well as faculty member at Case Western Reserve University, Daniel Gilbert, will be the soloist in the concerto.
The concerts take place at University Circle’s East Mount Zion Baptist Church on Thursday; La Sagrada Familia in Detroit-Shoreway on Friday; Slavic Village’s Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus on Saturday; and St. Sebastian Parish in Akron on Sunday. It will be the group’s first performance in Akron.
CityMusic concerts are always free and open to all.