Classical Concert Reviews Cinci

@vaecinci opened its 2024-25 season with a fabulous program titled The Wounded Heart: Songs of Passion and Love, which featured two world premiere works mixed with works spanning the Renaissance to the 21st century, all under the direction of guest conductor Benedict Sheehan.Opening with luscious performances of two short madrigals…

@ccm’s Philharmonia continued its 2024-25 season with a unique program of new and rarely-heard orchestral works under the title Power Dressing. Opening with a sensuous reading of the Prelude from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, among the most performed operas in today’s repertoire, graduate student conductor Sandra Cepero Alvarez led the U.S.…

@cincysymphony opened its 2024-25 season in grand style with an equally grand program featuring 19th and 20th-century orchestral showstoppers (even if it was somewhat tempered by competing crowds for tonight’s FC Cincinnati match). Guest conductor Dalia Stasevska (@daliastasevskaofficial), making her third appearance in Cincinnati, opened with a truly exhilarating reading…

@uc_ccm opened its 2024-25 Choral and Orchestral Series with a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” that must be considered the finest ever given by a collegiate orchestra on this side of the Atlantic. Assembling 250 student musicians to play a work of such intensity and scale would…

@cincinnatiopera concluded its 2024 summer season with a fantastic world premiere staging of Liverpool Oratorio, with music by a figure best known as a member of the Beatles making his first foray into the classical realm, Paul McCartney. In collaboration with the American composer and conductor Carl Davis (who handled…

@cincinnatiopera continued its 2024 season with a gorgeous production of one of Giuseppe Verdi’s greatest works, La Traviata. This despite an active police presence outside Music Hall as a result of an active shooter incident in the area prior to the performance (Thanks to @cincinnatipolice and Music Hall’s house staff…

@cincinnatiopera opened its 2024 summer season with gorgeous production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which takes a very lighthearted direction in telling the story of Don Juan. First performed at the Estates Theater in Prague in 1787, the opera tells of a vainglorious nobleman who seduces any woman he…

What a spectacular way to close out @mayfestivalcincy’s 2024 season in style! Pairing one of the best-known requiems in today’s choral repertoire with one of the most inventive and exhilarating new works by this year’s festival director Julia Wolfe (@juliawolfemusic) proves that music can truly inspire new generations of audiences.Her…

@mayfestivalcincy continued its 2024 season with mesmerizing performances of two of the most unique pieces to emerge from the American contemporary music scene in the last 20 years, which celebrate natural beauty and raw hardship in one of the darkest, yet overlooked, chapters, in American history.Michael Gordon’s Natural History, commissioned…