Cleveland new music highlights

This is the time of the year when the newspapers write end-of-the-year news highlights (I wrote the "Top Ten News Stories" piece for The Sandusky Register) so the Cleveland Plain Dealer's classical music critic Donald Rosenberg weighs in with a roundup of the biggest local classical music news. Some of his items will interest fans of modern classical music.

Rosenberg doesn't mention the Grammy nomination announcement late in the year for Cleveland State pianist Angelin Chang and for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (see previous post), but he does mention the death of local composer Frederick Koch.

Rosenberg also mentions Kent State University's Halim-El Dabh, under a brief piece headlined, "Opera Circle transcends time." He writes, "The tiny local opera company did a lovely job juxtaposing Mozart's incidental music for 'Thamos, King of Egypt' with an original score by Halim-El Dabh. The result melded the 18th and 21st centuries into an opera of universal delight." (El-Dabh's web site bio explains, "Halim El-Dabh is internationally recognized as Egypt's most important living composer of classical music.")