There is a staggering number of exciting Classical music concerts coming up in 2018, everything from Early Music to new compositions, with an opera based on Pink Floyd’s The Wall in the mix.
This year also marks the centennial of the birth of the late Leonard Bernstein, the great American composer, conductor, educator and activist. Bernstein at 100 is a national observation, and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music has an impressive schedule of his music as well as work by composers in his orbit. (It presented Candide last year.) Its wide-ranging series features Bernstein’s works for symphonic orchestras, theater, ballet, chorus and small ensembles, performed by CCM’s instrumental, vocal, dance and theater groups.
I’m looking forward to the Opera d’arte Series of undergraduate productions’ presentation of three one-act operas Feb. 2-4, including Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. On Feb. 11, fans of choral music won’t want to miss Dale Warland, an esteemed conductor as well as composer-in-residence, lead the CCM Chamber Choir for Bernstein’s Missa Brevis as well as the world premiere of Warland’s own I Hear America Singing, commissioned by the CCM Choral Department for the school’s 150th anniversary.
Bernstein’s greatest work for musical theater is West Side Story. You can hear its suite of “Symphonic Dances,” performed by the CCM Wind Orchestra on March 2. And April 27-29, Cincinnati Pops joins the Bernstein Centennial by playing the entire score of the musical while the Oscar-winning film is screened at Music Hall.
Elsewhere around town during 2018, the brilliant mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton appears for a Matinée Musicale-sponsored recital at Memorial Hall on Jan. 26, accompanied by Kathleen Kelly. This will be the first evening recital for the organization, which was formed in 1912. Barton’s program will have recital standards, but there are also songs by Nadia Boulanger, Amy Beach and Libby Larsen. Barton has won major awards for young Opera singers and garners raves for her performances.
Cincinnati has a number of thriving new music organizations with edgy and creative programs. Cincinnati Song Initiative, devoted to vocal performances of art songs, teams up with the Cincinnati Chamber Opera to offer two song cycles by American composers based on famous writers — Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Reilly Nelson, accompanied by Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, will perform these at a series of free shows from Monday through Jan. 14 at area libraries.
Cincinnati Soundbox, which presents new works by local and international young composers, has a festival of 18 solo works planned for April 5-12. Guest artists include Allen Otte, Lauren McAllister, Jack Bogard and Andrea Vos-Rochefort. Specific details have not yet been released.
Queen City Opera, a showcase for emerging talent, has a May 25 and 27 production of Iolanta, Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera about a princess who does not know she is blind, scheduled for the Arts Center at Dunham in Price Hill. It will be in collaboration with the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
On June 3 and 10 at Memorial Hall, concert:nova presents one of this year’s most intriguing offerings: The Bradbury Tattoos: A Rock Opera, based on writer Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. It’s a collaboration between the progressive ensemble, fusion composer Zac Greenberg, librettist and playwright Michael Burnham and tattooist/surfboard shaper Steven Mast.
And speaking of Rock operas, Cincinnati Opera hosts the U.S. premiere of Another Brick in the Wall, created by French-Canadian composer Julien Bilodeau by reworking Roger Waters’ original music from Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic album, The Wall, into a score for eight soloists, 48 choristers and a 70-piece orchestra. It debuted last year in Montreal. Scheduled for five performances at Music Hall between July 20 and 31, it will be the season’s grand opera extravaganza.
Cincinnati Opera’s As One, a chamber opera scheduled for four performances between July 25 and 30, features a score by Laura Kaminsky and uses two singers and a string quartet to tell the story of a trans woman (based on the life of filmmaker Kimberly Reed). It will be held in Music Hall’s new Wilks Studio.
This article appears in Jan 3-10, 2018.
