Archives for October 2020

TODAY ONLINE:

Live-streaming tonight at 8 from CIM is a duo recital by one former and one current Mary Hamlin Memorial Presidential Scholar: violinist Shannon Lee and percussionist Jeremy Sreejayan. Click here to watch, and to view their program.

Both have impressive resumes — top prizes at the Sendai Competition and the Modern Snare Drum Competition — but they also seem like really interesting and nice people. CIM has shared a little bit about their stories and personalities with a profile of Lee (beginning with the time she helped fix the computer system at the Curtis Institute of Music) and a “Day in the Life” video with Sreejayan (including his warm-up with hip-hop music, and his home-cooked spinach and steak).

Also tonight: the Met begins “Politics in Opera” Week at 7:30 pm with a 1980 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo. More details in our Concert Listings.

PLAYING WITH FIRE:

Playing With Fire, Allan Miller’s documentary about Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, won the award for Best U.S. Documentary at the Chagrin Documentary Film Fest earlier this month. ClevelandClassical.com’s Daniel Hathaway spoke to Sorrell about the project in April: 

“Three or so years ago, we played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a gentleman came backstage afterward and introduced himself as Allan Miller, a film director. ‘I’m retired,’ he said, “but I feel that I have one more film left in me, and I want to make it about you.’ I thought, this is so sweet, but it will never happen — and everybody I talked to told me the same thing,” Sorrell said.

Read the full interview here.

LABÈQUE SISTERS:

A profile of duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque in The New York Times covers their wide musical interests, unconventional career path, differing personalities, embrace of the visual side of concertizing, and their new recording, out this week — an adaptation of Philip Glass’s opera Les Enfants Terribles. Read here.

It’s also fun to look back on the Labèque sisters’ last visit to The Cleveland Orchestra, in May 2019, when they brought along Bruch’s Concerto for Two Pianos. In a preview conversation, Mike Telin spoke to Katia Labèque about the fascinating history of that concerto:

Interestingly enough, Bruch composed the concerto for the American duo-pianist sisters Rose and Ottilie Sutr in 1912. However, without the composer’s permission, the sisters rewrote the concerto to accommodate their technical abilities. “I think it was massacred by the sisters,” Labèque said. “Bruch was furious with them, and he forbade them to play the piece in Europe. So I think it is great to come back to America and present it the way that it was written.”

Read more of that interview here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

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by Daniel Hathaway

READ AND WATCH THIS WEEKEND:

The 40-degree temperature drop between yesterday’s summery conditions and today’s reminder of what’s coming (or is already here) suggests that indoor activities are on the agenda this weekend.

Last we heard, Oberlin College Choir was going ahead with their plans for a rescheduled outdoor concert tonight at 7:30 pm at the Mudd Learning Center Patio off of Wilder Bowl on the Oberlin Campus. This event will also be streamed live.

Matthew Robertson’s The Thirteen Choir, who appeared at St. John’s Cathedral just a year ago, are broadcasting a performance of Heinrich Schütz’s exquisite Musicalisches Exequien today at 7:30 pm as part of their program “Sorrow to the Stars.” Tickets and connection details here.

Writing in the New York Review, conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin re-evaluates the legacy of Pierre Boulez. Read Sound and Fury here.

And a New York Times feature by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim visits Peruvian-born composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank and her husband on their farm in Mendocino County, California, where she raises chickens and hosts an academy for young composers. Read Part Teacher, Part Den Mother, a Composer Fosters Diversity here. Frank wrote a piccolo concerto for Mary Kay Fink and The Cleveland Orchestra in 2014 (read our preview here). She was to have been the featured guest composer with the Cleveland Institute of Music New Music Ensemble in November, 2019, but had to cancel because of the California wildfires.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Among the decedents on October 24 and 25 in music history are French composer and organist Jean Titelouze (1633), Austrian violinist and composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1799), Hungarian operetta composer Franz Lehar (1948), and American composer Carl Ruggles (1971).

We’ll pick one work to memorialize Ruggles, the prickly New England composer who was also a prolific painter,  Listen to his Sun Treader, recorded in a live performance in February, 1988 by Christoph von Dohnányi and The Cleveland Orchestra.

The storks were busy on this weekend in history, delivering Italian composer Luciano Berio in Oneglia (1925), Russian composer Sophia Gubaidulina in Tchistpol Tatarstan (1931), American harpsichordist and pianist Malcolm Bilson in Los Angeles (1935), German composer Hans Leo Hassler in Nuremberg (1564), English composer Thomas Weelkes in Elstedt (1576) and Russian composer Alexander Tikhonovich Grechaninov in Moscow (1864).

Here are just a few suggestions to mark those birthdays:

In the Berio documentary Voyage to Cythera, in addition to “interviews with conductors such as Riccardo Chailly and Riccardo Muti who shed light for us on Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berio,” the composer unpacks his Sinfonia, a tribute to Gustav Mahler, and rehearses it with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun was performed by the Oberlin College Choir, Gregory Ristow, conducting, with Darrett Adkins, cello, on October 18, 2018. Here’s an earlier college performance of her dynamic setting of Francis of Assisi’s words by the Indiana University Contemporary Ensemble from February, 2013.

And Thomas Weelkes, one of the greatest madrigalists and church music composers of the Elizabethan period was also one its most colorful personalities. Listen here to his Hark, all ye lovely saints above, in a performance by the Sidonia-Ensemble, and here to his Gloria in excelsis Deo as sung by King’s College Choir in 2000. For insights into the craft of the English madrigalists, watch Texting With Madrigals, an Early Music America lecture by retired Oberlin English professor (and ClevelandClassical.com board member) Nicholas Jones.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S UPDATES AND NEWS:

Cleveland Chamber Music Society releases its first Front Row program from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center today, an episode available for viewing through October 27. Featuring pianist Michael Brown and friends, the concert includes music by Barber, Mendelssohn, and Brown himself. Click here to watch on demand.

And in the latest Cleveland Orchestra podcast in its On a Personal Note series, cellist Paul Kushious revisits the excursion he and his wife took to Switzerland to follow “in the footsteps of Richard Strauss.” Listen here.

After consulting the weather forecast, Oberlin College Choir has postponed its Friday evening outdoor concert to Saturday, October 24th at 7:30 pm at the Oberlin Seeley G. Mudd Learning Center Patio off of Wilder Bowl.

New to the calendar: Trinity Cathedral music director Todd Wilson plays a live-streamed recital tonight at 7:30 pm from Christ Church in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Music by Dupré, J.S. Bach, Bizet arranged by Lemare, Gerre Hancocki, and Widor, and improvises on a submitted theme. Details in the Concert Listings.

In the market for a piano? Catherine Brulport of Steinway Gallery Cleveland writes that their Boston Heights warehouse is teeming with “an unexpected high number of used instruments as trade-ins from colleges and universities.” The Gallery is also offering recent Steinway-designed instruments at used piano prices during a three-day sale from October 29-31. Viewing is by appointment only: call or text 234.788.1678.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Russian choral director and composer Alexander Andreyevich Archangelsky was born on (or near) this date in 1846. A niche figure in the greater stream of Russian music, he mainly wrote Russian Orthodox Church music, including an All Night Vigil and masses, and led a choir that made successful tours of Russia and Europe, eventually transitioning from all-male voices to male and female singers.

Listen here to his chilling anthem about the day of judgement, and here to his setting of the Song of Simeon or Nunc Dimittis. Note the octave doublings of the bass line (octavism), which are such a unique feature of Russian choral music.

And American composer and diarist Ned Rorem was born on this date in 1923 in Richmond, Indiana. A prolific composer of art songs, he penned a few operas as well — listen here to a performance of his musical version of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Baldwin Wallace produced the work in 2010.

Rorem’s tell-all diaries have tended to overshadow his compositions. The New Yorker published The Ultimate Diary, a wicked parody of his writings in 1975, and The Paris Review wrote about them in 1999. Rorem sat for an interview with New Music USA’s Frank J. Oteri in 2006. Watch “Ned Rorem at Home” here.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY ONLINE:

Les Délices launches its online subscription series with Bewitched, in which soprano Hannah DePriest channels the sorceress Circe and the witch Medea in works by de Blamont, Clérambault, and Charpentier — a bit early for Halloween, but the episode will be available through November 2. Above, DePriest and Artistic Director Debra Nagy talk over the scores. Check the Concert Listings for details, and read a preview article by Jarrett Hoffman here.

NEWS BRIEFS AND INTERESTING READS:

In a ground-breaking deal financed by an anonymous donor, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music has acquired the artist management firm Opus 3. Read a San Francisco Chronicle article where SFCM president David Stull (formerly dean of the Oberlin Conservatory) talks about the deal and its ramifications with Joshua Kosman.

Director Yuval Sharon, who has staged operas for The Cleveland Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has begun his Michigan Opera tenure with Twilight:Gods, a compressed version of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung set in a Motown parking garage. Read a New York Times article by Joshua Barone and watch a television story from Detroit’s Channel 4 here.

The latest entry into the ongoing debate about coronavirus transmission through aerosols involves a study of Minnesota Orchestra wind players by the University of Minnesota. Read the Star Tribune story here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today’s calendar mostly records historic finales, perhaps none so tragic as that of French Baroque composer Jean-Marie Leclair. On this date in 1764, he was murdered in his home, supposedly by his jealous nephew, although no one was ever tried for the crime.

Making a more natural departure, Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the prolific keyboard composer Domenico, died on this date in 1725 in Naples at the age of 65. In his memory, we suggest his extraordinary setting of Stabat Mater for ten solo voices and organ, sung here by Ars Nova Copenhagen, led by Paul Hillier and recorded in the Garnisonskirken in April, 2014.

Another in memoriam is due to Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, who was welcomed into the heavenly cello section in San Juan, Puerto Rico on this date in 1973 at the age of 96. In a 1955 documentary filmed at his home in Prades, France, he talks with a former student about various subjects including his exile during the Franco regime, and plays one of Bach’s solo suites, in the revival of which he played a central role.

In a more civilized era, Casals played at the White House during the Kennedy Administration on November 13, 1961, a performance captured here on an LP recording.

Enough departures! Our birthday boy is Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, born near Bayreuth on October 22, 1811. His eventful life and career included his single-handed invention of the solo piano recital, for which he wrote an enormous number of pieces to challenge keyboardists and make listeners swoon.

One familiar example from that repertoire is his Mephisto Waltz No. 1, played here by Megan-Geoffrey Prinz at the Cleveland Institute of Music on May 20, 2018 (the fantastic story behind the piece is included in the notes).

Liszt also invented and championed the tone poem, of which he wrote a dozen during his years in Weimar. Orpheus tells the tale of the singing poet and lyre player who learned his art from Apollo himself. It was first performed as an orchestral introduction to Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, but Liszt later made a transcription for organ. So did Jean Guillou, who played the work in 1977 at Notre-Dame in Paris. Listen here.

TODAY ONLINE:

Two options at noon — catch either “Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra,” or organist Michael Messina in a Virtual Brownbag Concert from Trinity Cathedral. Then take in a 2:30 symposium on the impact of dance on the suites, sonatas, and partitas of J.S. Bach, led by violinist and dancer Julie Andrijeski (with a second part beginning at 4:15). And cap off the day with Mozart’s Così fan tutte from the Met at 7:30. Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today’s a happy day in our almanac: no deaths, all birthdays. We’re throwing a six-way party for — count ‘em — Henri Reber, Joseph Canteloube, Georg Solti, Malcolm Arnold, Shulamit Ran, and Lera Auerbach. And just like the real thing, none of them will get their deserved level of attention. A few might even leave bitterly because we won’t talk about them at all. (That would be a little sad at a real birthday party.)

We’ll focus just on the two living members of that group, both of whom have visited the Cleveland Institute of Music in recent years, and both of whom have been interviewed by ClevelandClassical.com’s Mike Telin.

Ran — an Israeli-American composer born on this date in 1949, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1990 Symphony, and who taught composition at the University of Chicago for 42 years — gave a residency at CIM in 2016, shortly after retiring from academia. That visit included a CIM Orchestra concert dedicated to her works. And one of those performances, of her Legends, made it to YouTube — listen here, and read our preview conversation with Ran here.

A few years earlier, in 2013, CIM used its Mixon Masters Series to celebrate composer-performers, including Russian-born Lera Auerbach, who was born on October 21, 1973, and is a winner of the Hindemith Prize. Thus Auerbach sat down at the piano in Mixon Hall in September of that year to play her own 24 Preludes as part of her Cleveland debut recital.

Here’s Auerbach playing eight of those preludes as part of the Grand Piano Series in Naples, Florida, and here’s cellist Kellen Degnan and pianist April Sun at CIM playing selections from a different set of two-dozen preludes by Auerbach. (As she told Mike Telin in an interview, “I have always loved cycles of 24 preludes.”)

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC — CHARLES IVES:

American experimental composer Charles Ives, whose day job was serving as executive of several insurance companies in New York City, was born on October 20, 1875 in Danbury, Connecticut. Regarded as an American Original, early on Ives was influenced by the whole panoply of 19th century music he encountered as a young man as well as such sonic experience as hearing bands playing simultaneously in small-town parades. Having formally studied with Horatio Parker at Yale, Ives later went off on his own, experimenting with polytonality and polyrhythm, microtones, tone clusters, and improvisatory elements. Somewhat mysteriously, he stopped composing in the late 1920s, well before his death in 1954.

An hour-long documentary by Anne-Kathrin Peitz, The Unanswered Ives: Portrait of a composer, Wall Street giant and pioneer of sound, is available on Medici-TV.

Today at 7:30 pm, the Charles Ives Society is airing a free concert at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of his Concord Sonata. 

Listen to a performance of Ives’ First Violin Sonata by Stefan Jackiw and Jeremy Denk here, and of his Fourth Sonata by Jinjoo Cho and Shuai Wang here.

And watch a full-length concert of Ives’ hymns, songs, and violin sonatas at the 2014 Ojai Festival, performed by pianist Jeremy Denk, violinist Jennifer Frautschi, and the male vocal ensemble Hudson Shad.

Ives’ orchestral experiments are especially interesting. Click here to watch The Way Things Work, a short lecture by Detroit Symphony Conductor Leonard Slatkin on Ives’ Fourth Symphony, and here to listen to Pierre Boulez lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Three Places in New England in 1970.

And experience one of Ives’ experiments in bitonality: his setting of Psalm 67 in which the upper voices sing in the key of g minor, and the lower in the key of C Major. San Francisco Choral Artists perform at St. Luke’s Church.

Finally, one of Ives’ most amusing pieces is his Variations on ‘America’ for organ, written when he was only 16. Oberlin graduate Joseph Ripka plays it here on the Visser & Associates organ at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in Phoenix. E. Power Biggs is rumored to have once programmed it on a patriotic program at Princeton. The organizers were not amused.