CutTime Productions LLC (aka CutTime®) adapts symphonic music with two composer-led ensembles that bring the dramatic music of symphony orchestras into intimate settings, ideally for curious newcomers, but classical music aficionados love it too. The first and largest is CutTime Players (CTP), which launched in Detroit in 1994.
The possibility occurred to then-student bassist Rick Robinson while enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Music as he was rehearsing Igor Stravinsky’s music-drama The Soldier’s Tale (Histoire du Soldat). There wasn’t much good chamber music for his instrument, and so he imagined adding flute to this mixed septet (of violin, bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and percussion) could make good chamber transcriptions of Prokofiev’s famous Peter and the Wolf and Richard Strauss’ tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.
After he was famously invited to join the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) in 1989, and bought his first personal computer, Robinson began learning digital music notation in 1992. By 1994 he proposed to test his student idea for the Lyric Chamber Ensemble series with several principal DSO musicians.
