When Franklin Cohen thinks about music, he tends not to start with the clarinet.
Not with an audition, a job, a hall or even The Cleveland Orchestra, where he served for 39 seasons as principal clarinet. He starts with the sound of the human voice. Or with his mother at the piano. Or with children playing in the yard. Or with the three things he says have mattered most to him: “family, friends and music.”
That order is deliberate. On Monday, June 15, ChamberFest Cleveland will honor Cohen with “Celebrating Frank!,” a concert at Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). The evening is a tribute to the clarinetist, teacher, co-founder, father, colleague and Cleveland musical presence whose influence has spread through orchestras, conservatories, chamber music and his own living room.
Cohen turns 80 on July 28. The ChamberFest concert will arrive a few weeks early, with colleagues, former students, alumni, friends and family sharing the stage. There will also be an after-concert birthday party.
The program was planned not by Cohen but by two of his children, Diana and Alex Cohen. Diana — a violinist, concertmaster of the Calgary Philharmonic, and co-founder of ChamberFest Cleveland with her father — said Frank’s 80th birthday provided the occasion, while the program itself took shape around the tastes and varied careers of his former students.
“What was inspiring to me about seeing what the students came up with is that, as musicians, they have gone in so many different directions and different worlds of music,” she said. “Classical, non-classical — they’re everywhere.”
Some chose klezmer-inspired pieces — music rooted in Eastern European Jewish tradition — a natural nod to music Frank Cohen loves and feels close to. Others chose jazz-tinged or new-music works that reflect their own careers. That, Diana said, is part of the point.
“Dad didn’t create students who were cookie-cutters,” she said. “Each of them has found their voice.”
That phrase — finding a voice — runs through Cohen’s thinking. He has taught at CIM for 50 years, but he does not talk like a teacher who has spent a lifetime producing audition machines. His model is more dangerous and more humane. He wants players who sing.
That lesson came early. Cohen grew up in New York playing pieces by Claude Debussy with his mother, a pianist who accompanied him and corrected him in a way he still remembers.
“Her big line was, ‘Don’t blow — sing!’” Cohen said. “She’d say, ‘No, Frank, today it sounds like you’re blowing.’ And she was right.”
The advice stayed with him. It is still at the center of his teaching. Cohen speaks of the clarinet not as an end in itself, but as a way to sing. “The sound should be alive,” he said, “but not merely pretty. A good sound that does not sing is not enough.”
“For me, a sound that sings is much more important than a very good sound that is straightforward,” he said. “When Beethoven or Weber or Debussy was writing this music, they were thinking of a sound that was singing and had almost no limits.”
Cohen’s career gave him many places to test that idea. He first made his name as a soloist in Europe, winning first prize at the Munich International Music Competition in 1968. He later came to Cleveland, where orchestral playing became his public life. But he said solo playing always fascinated him because “you were leading the way.”
He recalled auditioning as a Juilliard student for Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra. Cohen said he told Stokowski he had little orchestral experience. Stokowski was unconcerned.
“He said, ‘With your musicianship, you need to play the way you want to play,’” Cohen recalled. “And that way you’ll never fail.”
Cohen carried that confidence — or moxie — into Cleveland. He was hired by Lorin Maazel, then music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, and later developed a close relationship with Maazel’s successor, Christoph von Dohnányi. Cohen has a story about that too: one snowy afternoon before a concert, he went cross-country skiing at Shaker Country Club and collided with a sled. The boy on the sled turned out to be Dohnányi’s son.
Later, backstage, Dohnányi warned him not to go skiing on concert days.
“I said, ‘Maestro, you can tell me how to play, but you can’t tell me how to live my life,’” Cohen recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m afraid you got me there.’”
No harm was done. But the story also says something about Cohen’s relation to authority. He admired conductors, but never as a submissive. He admires orchestral discipline, but not sameness. He prefers players with temperament, color and a recognizable musical personality.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing,” as too many prima donnas in an orchestra, he said, provided the relationship between conductor and musician is respectful. “You want people to sing their little hearts out.”
That belief shapes the ChamberFest tribute. The program is less a monument than a map of influence. Bill Kalinkos, a member of Alarm Will Sound, will open with Steven Banks’ “Broken.” Jay Dubin will play Béla Kovács’ klezmer-flavored “Sholem-alekhem, rov Feidman!” Tao Ke and Ben Chen will perform Ponchielli’s “Il Convegno,” a two-clarinet showpiece that Cohen knows well. Other former students will bring works by Anvar Ergashev, Andrej Čabarkapa, Meyer Kupferman and others.
Diana said one former student, Jerry Simas, who now plays in the San Francisco Symphony but could not attend the celebration, told her he owed Cohen much of his career. Another, Patrick Messina, principal clarinet of the Orchestre de Paris, summarized Cohen’s whole method: “Your dad made me love music more and love the clarinet a little less.”
That is not an insult to the clarinet. It is a compliment to music.
“Dad’s never really been particularly interested in the clarinet, per se,” Diana said. “He’s been interested in music, and I think that comes across in his students’ playing.”
ChamberFest Cleveland began in that same spirit. Diana remembers growing up around The Cleveland Orchestra, but it was at chamber music festivals where she “fell in love with music.” Her parents played at Santa Fe and other festivals. Later, her own formative experiences at places like Marlboro showed her a musical world where artists not only performed but formed ensembles, started series and shaped the field around them.
She wondered why Cleveland, with its rich arts culture, did not have a major chamber music festival. At one point in her career, she brought the idea to her father.
“Dad, everyone in town knows you and loves you,” he remembers her saying. “Let’s start a chamber music festival together.”
“How do you refuse your daughter?” he said.
The first season, in 2012, was small by current standards — five concerts. Fourteen years later, ChamberFest has grown into three weeks of concerts and related events. In 2017, pianist and composer Roman Rabinovich — already a familiar ChamberFest presence — joined Diana and Frank Cohen as co-artistic director, the same year he and Diana were married.
Diana said the goals have not changed much. The festival still aims for a high level of playing, but also for an atmosphere that feels close, warm and informal. Somebody once called it a “chamberhood,” and the word stuck with her.
“I really like that,” she said, “because I think it’s that feeling that drew me into music.”
Many ChamberFest artists stay with host families. They share dinners, read chamber music late at night and, as Diana said, sometimes play spikeball on Guilford Road at hours when wiser people are asleep. Such offstage camaraderie makes a difference. “There’s a lot of affection among the musicians,” she said. “That energy is very clear on stage to the audience as well.”
For Frank Cohen, listening to those rehearsals at home has become one of the pleasures of age. He has stepped back from most public performing, but he still hears young musicians and imagines joining them. He still plays privately. He still reads music with friends.
“The only frustrating part,” he said, “is knowing that I’m getting older, and these kids are all in their growth or prime. I imagine what it would be like to play with them.”
Then again, a tribute concert is also a kind of performance by proxy. Cohen’s sound will be present in the players he taught, in the festival he built with Diana, and in Cleveland’s musical life, which he has helped sustain.
When asked what she would say about her father on his 80th birthday, Diana paused over the size of the question.
“He’s certainly been my most influential teacher, in addition to an amazing parent,” she said. “He has made me love music, for sure. I feel lucky to have grown up in a house that’s been so saturated in chamber music and friendships through music.”
That spirit is what ChamberFest has made public: serious music, close friendships and a community built around family.
Celebrating Frank!
Monday, June 15, 2026, 7:30 p.m.
Kulas Hall, Cleveland Institute of Music
11021 East Blvd., Cleveland
Presented by ChamberFest Cleveland and co-presented by CIM. A postlude birthday party follows the concert.
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