Music schools are your best friend

They often offer free classical music concerts and the quality is often good

I feel blessed in a number of ways to live in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, and one reason is that there are so many high quality music schools: The Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin College’s conservatory, the Baldwin Wallace conservatory, and others. All such schools often offer concerts that include faculty recitals, student recitals and student musical groups, and many such concerts are free.

It’s undeniable that pursuing a classical music hobby can cost money (although it’s often true that going to see the Cleveland Orchestra, say, is going to be less expensive than sitting in a football stadium or a large arena to see an aging, creatively washed up rock star.) But if you don’t have much money but still want to hear good music, music schools are a gift.

Perhaps a couple of examples will illustrate the point.

On Nov. 20, I attended a free New Music Ensemble concert at the Cleveland Institute of Music in a small, beautiful auditorium at Mixon Hall. There were pieces by Stravinsky and Ptaszynska, but the concert also featured two pieces by a modern American composer, Sebastian Currier, and I discovered that I quite liked his music.

Sebastian Currier (photo from composer’s website)

Two points: Given the playlist at most classical music stations, you aren’t likely to have a chance to discover modern composers such as Currier unless you get out to such recitals. And I was able to chat with Currier for a few minutes in the lobby after the show. This is a more intimate experience than at many paid shows: If the Cleveland Orchestra performs John Adams, the music will be good, but you aren’t likely to be able to talk to Adams afterward.

More recently, on Jan. 29, I went to a “Faculty and Guest Recital” at Oberlin that featured prominent piano professor and music artist Peter Takács and two violinists, Michelle Abraham Kantor and Francesca dePasquale, performing three Beethoven violin sonatas, numbers 3, 7 and 8. I confess that although I know a lot of Beethoven, I have neglected the violin sonatas, and Professor Takács and his friends brought it forcibly to my attention that I’d made a mistake. Since then, I’ve been listening over and over to a recording of Sonata No. 7 in C Minor, Opus 30 No. 3.

This Substack is largely about lesser known Russian composers who deserve to be remembered, such as Gavriil Popov, Nikolai Roslavets and Alexander Mosolov, and similar most recent composers such as Edison Denisov. I have yet to catch a local concert that features any of those four, but I’ll bet my chances of hearing a live performance is more likely at a music school event than at a Cleveland Orchestra concert. I did meet a cello professor years ago who told me he was going to perform a Roslavets recital, but as it was in New York, it was too far away for me to attend.

Cleveland is a good place to hear such concerts, but in many smaller communities, the situation is not hopeless. When I lived in Lawton, Oklahoma, I heard quite a few good concerts at Cameron University, a small public university, including full stagings of Mozart operas. The department chairman is a cellist named Kirsten Underwood; years ago, I discovered Beethoven’s “Ghost” trio when I heard her perform it with two other musicians.