Archives for September 2020

by Jarrett Hoffman

“RESTARTS” OF DIFFERENT KINDS IN MUSIC & BASKETBALL

On September 9, 1972, the Soviet Union defeated the United States, 51-50, in the Olympic Men’s Basketball Final, considered one of the most contentious sporting matches in history. The final three seconds were played out three times — a succession of confusing, controversial restarts.

That got me thinking about classical music “restarts,” a term that before the coronavirus pandemic meant something different: a pause in a performance, maybe because of a cell phone going off. (A small thing to complain about these days — though can you imagine that happening in the first concert after COVID?) Classic FM gathered video of a few such instances, some painfully awkward, some passive-aggressive, some creative, some humorous.

The NBA is well into its own restart in a carefully managed “bubble” near Orlando, Florida. There’s a lot to discuss about that — health, economics, the use of testing, time away from family, the emotional importance of entertainment for the public, and the worry about distracting from the Black Lives Matter movement. Those are all serious issues with potential connections to the return of classical music concerts (though the two fields are different in many ways).

On a more light-hearted note, those games have included artificial crowd noise and virtual fans (above, from a recent playoff game) — an interesting if slightly dystopian way to imitate the normally buzzing atmosphere of an arena.

The classical music world is familiar by now with the strangeness of audience-less concerts. Has anyone tried pumping in a little bit of fake applause to fill the silence after a performance? What about playing to an audience of digital faces or cardboard cut-outs? It might be interesting to see if any historical figures appear in the crowd — a new version of the “guests at a dinner party” question. And at the very least, it could be worth a laugh. 

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra includes works by Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Verdi — the “Libera me” from his Requiem, featuring soprano Twyla Robinson and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. The Met Opera brings back a 2008 performance of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust. See our Concert Listings for details.

by Daniel Hathaway

NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA BRITTEN VIDEO:

In the latest in a series of summer sessions, Cleveland Orchestra Associate Concertmaster Jung-Min Amy Lee, Principal Oboe, Frank Rosenwein, violist Joanna Patterson Zakany and cellist Tanya Ell returned to the Severance Hall stage to record Benjamin Britten’s “intricate, and at times bright and striking” Phantasy Quartet. Watch the performance here.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF LINCOLN CENTER CHAMBER MUSIC:

The Violin Channel is celebrating the half-century mark of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with a two-day festival featuring eight full-length concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 8 & 9. Details and streaming links here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1613, Italian composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died in Naples. Distinguished for his harmonic adventures in madrigals and sacred music, Gesualdo was also notorious for having murdered his first wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante delicto. Cecil Gray and Peter Warlock (the nom de plume for composer Philip Heseltine) tell the story in their 1926 book, Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer. A court refused to prosecute.

Click here to watch Gesualdo, Death for Five Voices (described by the poster as “an odd documentary film about a very odd man”). There are English subtitles. And here to watch a performance of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae factae sunt (a responsory for Good Friday) by TENET Vocal Artists, including tenors Owen McIntosh and Jason McStoots, who have recently performed in Cleveland with Apollo’s Fire and Les Délices. Or take a deep plunge into his madrigals courtesy of Ensemble Métamorphoses with this recording of his Sixth Book (score included).

This date in September also witnessed the births of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841) and Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Laureate Christoph von Dohnányi (1929), as well as the death of composer Richard Strauss (1949).

Listen to Dohnányi’s interpretations of Dvořák’s 6th Symphony and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche with The Cleveland Orchestra as an efficient way of celebrating three anniversaries with two recordings!

by Daniel Hathaway

CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR LABOR DAY:

By the time that Labor Day was established as an official national holiday in 1894, 30 states were already setting a day aside to honor workers — an observance that became increasingly vital as the effects of the Machine Age unfolded. Among others, photographer Lewis Wickes Hine captured laborers with dignity in his fine art “photo stories” (above, his Powerhouse Mechanic, c. 1921).

“Work” has expanded to encompass a wide variety of human activity, as evidenced by a 2014 WQXR poll that asked listeners to nominate classical works that best capture the spirit of Labor Day. Submissions ranged from Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 2, from Copland’s Fanfare For the Common Man (countered by Joan Tower’s Fanfare(s) for the Uncommon Woman) to Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated,

One interesting suggestion was Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony (No. 45), the musical documentation of a labor dispute between Prince Nikolaus Esterházy and his court orchestra that seems ironic during these trying times, when musicians of all kinds are experiencing furloughs, layoffs, and the disappearance of work.

BARD FESTIVAL BEGINS ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:

On four Saturdays in September, the Bard Music Festival will livestream its 2020 festival from the Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Artistic Directors Leon Botstein and Christopher H. Gibbs have curated “Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music,” a series of concerts “celebrating the joy of music-making and Bard’s commitment to presenting unjustly neglected works.

“Programs will feature works by prominent Black composers alongside a selection of pieces from the Bard Music Festival archives, together tracing the history of classical music from the late 18th century to the present and affirming the centrality of music to life and our public culture.”

Concerts are free and will be streamed only at the scheduled time. Reservations are requested.

WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:

You can get outdoors on Saturday morning and enjoy an Akron Symphony duo while picking flowers, and take in an al fresco concert by the Russian Duo at a historic Akron mansion on Sunday.

Indoors, there are a number of streaming events on the schedule, including a Friday live concert by pianist Conrad Tao — Rzewski’s piece mentioned above — and MET Opera streams of Porgy & Bess, Thomas Adès’ The Tempest, and Massenet’s Manon. And on Monday evening, the second episode of Les Délices’ SalonEra series features Aisslinn Nosky (violin), Allison Monroe (violin), Yvonne Smith (viola), Rebecca Reed (cello) & Thomas Carroll (clarinet). Check the Concert Listings for details.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

There are lots of anniversaries to take note of this weekend: the births of composers Anton Bruckner in 1824, Amy Beach in 1867, Darius Milhaud in 1892, and Joan Tower in 1938, the death of Edvard Grieg in 1907, and the births of pianists Marc-André Hamelin in 1961 and Jean-Yves Thibaudet in 1961.

Bruckner’s symphonies have inspired The Cleveland Orchestra to sonic heights over the seasons. Click here for a complete, live performance of No. 8 led by George Szell in 1964, and here for a fragment of No. 5 led by Franz Welser-Möst performed at the Abbey of St. Florian in 2006, near Welser-Möst’s home town of Linz in Austria. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION:

Two recent online articles explore the issue of built-in racial discrimination in classical music.

In a WQXR editorial, Philadelphia Inquirer critic David Patrick Stearns traces the later careers of Black conductors who were prominent during the 1970s in “America’s Lost Generation.”

And in “The Last Water Fountain,” a long article on San Francisco Classical Voice, Mark Macnamara considers the persistent issue of systemic racism in the classical performing arts.

OPERA UNDER THE BIG TOP:

Opera Atlanta will present nine performances each of its October and November titles — Pagliacci and the The Kaiser of Atlantis — to live audiences of 240 in an airy circus tent set up on a baseball diamond, with a maximum of 13 orchestral musicians. Read the ArtsAtl article here.

EVENTS STREAMED AND LIVE:

Our pandemic standbys — WCLV and the MET Opera — are on duty as usual today, WCLV with Johann Strauss Jr. waltzes and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony on Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, and the MET with Alban Berg’s Lulu during its 20th century opera week.

And a head’s up: on Friday evening at 7 in St. Peter’s Church in Canton, harpist Parker Ramsay will present the first local, live performance of his transcriptions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Ramsay, who recently received his artist diploma from the Oberlin Conservatory, recorded the work in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where he previously served as organ scholar. The CD will be released on September 18 on the King’s College label.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Speaking of the harp, the famous Franco-American harpist, composer, and pedagogue Marcel Grandjany was born on this date in Paris in 1891, and continued his career in the U.S. beginning in 1940. In this documentary video, Grandjany shows us his approach to playing and teaching the instrument. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Apologies to 14th-century Italian composer Francesco Landini, but today’s edition of this musical almanac seems like a good day to focus on someone who was not a musician, but whose name invariably makes you think of music. That would be J.R.R. Tolkien, who died on September 2, 1973 in Bournemouth, England.

Depending on how you’ve experienced the tale of The Lord of the Rings, the music that comes to mind will be different. For many, it has to be that of Howard Shore, who scored the film version of the trilogy (released from 2001 to 2003), winning three Oscars and four Grammys in the process.

Even if you haven’t seen the movies, you probably know the music, considered among history’s greatest film scores. Most memorable is the Fellowship Theme, representing the cast of characters who come together to destroy that darn, evil ring. Depending on the strength of that fellowship, the music waxes and wanes in emotional and instrumental power — when it’s epic, it’s epic.

A close second is the Shire Theme, which often shows the Hobbits thinking back to their simple and fun-loving home, back before they got involved in any dreadful adventure. If the wistfulness and then the playfulness of that theme aren’t enough to charm you, then your soul might need a tune-up. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

SEPTEMBER!

Welcome to what should from its name be the seventh month of the year — if we had the good sense to begin the annual cycle in March with spring, like the Romans, who also gave us October, November, and December. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the beginning of the academic year as well as the usual beginning of the concert season.

Faculty, students, musicians and other performing artists will be facing unprecedented challenges in 2020-2021 and are addressing the resumption of activities in a number of ways, many of them innovative, and some that may be carried over as opportunities once the pandemic is history.

At ClevelandClassical.com, we’re seeing a gradual resumption of live events — some to be streamed without audiences, some with limited attendees, some designed as hybrid events that will permit in-person as well as remote experiences. Some organizations are developing pre-recorded content for streaming, while others are taking a pass for the fall months in hopes of better conditions after the first of the calendar year.

[Read more…]