Cleveland Museum of Art Hosts Transformer Station Concerts

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s successful Ohio City Stages program, which debuted this summer with a series of free outdoor concerts at the Transformer Station at West 29th and Church, continues this fall with a new series of performances. 

“The Transformer Station will be a space for adventurous music as much as adventurous visual art,” says Tom Welsh, Associate Director of Music Programming at CMA. “This is the museum’s great strength and role to play – this is something different, I think, a pretty terrific series of first-class international artists.”

The concerts, which will be held inside the Transformer Station, are intimate, mostly solo performances with limited seating. They are intended to showcase artists that typically do not appear in Cleveland, especially ones whose work is not easily categorized. Tickets cost $20 ($18 for members) and concerts begin at 7:30 pm.

Performers include Maja Ratkje, a young, classically-trained Norweigan composer who will do a program featuring voice and electronics, and Mark Dresser, a California-based musician who Welsh describes as “one of very few people on this planet who can do an entire program on the double bass – he has a huge body of work for the instrument.”

Welsh says he believes it is CMA’s role to bring such vanguard performers to Cleveland, and he can’t imagine a better place to do it than the Transformer Station. “These are unexpected artists only because we haven’t seen them in Cleveland before. Their music is undefined, but it’s very much in the language of our time.”

CMA is planning to offer music programs throughout 2014, and the summer concert series is expected to return next year.

Tickets available at http://www.clevelandart.org/TSconcerts or by calling 216-938-5429.