Archives for December 2020

by Daniel Hathaway

A CORNUCOPIA OF ONLINE HOLIDAY EVENTS:

We’ll start with Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights that began last night and runs through December 18. It’s a family affair celebrated at home, which makes it perfect for these socially distanced times. On Sunday at 4:00 pm, the Ariel String Quartet is hosting a Hanukkah Baking Special live from the Cincinnati Conservatory that features Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1, Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 18, No. 2 & Steve Cohen’s A Klezmer Nutcracker, along with family recipes for Viennese Apple Strudel and Chocolate Babka, and a bake-off matching up Lebkuchen and Hanukkah doughnuts.

Northeast Ohio holiday concerts include programs by the Factory Seconds Brass Trio, Cleveland Chamber Choir, Oberlin large ensembles (including the premiere of a violin concerto by Liam Kaplan) and the most recent complete Beethoven piano sonatas recital by Daniel Shapiro hosted by Music From the Western Reserve. And recent Clevelander Buck McDaniel joins tenor Matthew Jones from New York’s Church of St. John’s in the Village for a McDaniel premiere and music by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, and Nico Muhly on Sunday.

Casting a wider net, you can enjoy what Trinity Church, Wall Street advertises as “the best Messiah in New York,” and such groups popular with Northeast Ohio audiences as the Tallis Scholars and Voces8 (performing from London and other European venues). Check out our Concert Listings and Musical America’s Guide to (mostly) Free Streams and the concert world is at the tip of your cursor.

DISPATCHES FROM NORTHEAST OHIO:

Bop Stop manager Gabe Pollack writes that “This week’s ‘At Home Listening Session’ includes a variety six pack of beer and a copy of either Sophie from guitarist Sebastian Albornoz, or After Hours by pianist Jackie Warren. Each Session is $30. Additional CD’s can be purchased at check-out as well. These make great holiday gifts and are a fantastic way to support the local music scene.” Email Gabe to order and schedule your pickup.

Speaking of Jackie Warren, today’s print edition of The New York Times heads up its list of 20 recommended jazz CDs with Christmas in 3D, the latest album featuring the 3D (“Three Divas”) Jazz Trio of Warren, bassist Amy Shook, and drummer Sherrie Maricle. Critic Giovanni Russonello writes,“The latest flaunts the kind of powerful locomotion that drives the DIVA big band, steaming through 10 holiday tunes — Warren’s buoyant improvising right hand leading the day.”

And Jane Berkner, the flutist behind Akrton’s Urban Troubadour roaming concert series, writes that “Since we can’t create live events these days, we’ve been putting up video events each month that include music and various Akron artists. For November, Stephen Aron showed what it’s like to study music at Oberlin during COVID, and we featured John Sokol’s art while he read from his poetry. The holiday video is like an Akron postcard with lots of flute music. It’s fun!” Visit the Urban Troubadour website and scroll down to watch the videos.

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society president Erik Mann notes that Anastasia Sonaranda, its Creative Fusion artist-in-residence, will repeat the survey of traditional music from five Mexican regions she gave last weekend, but in English this time, on Saturday at 7:30 pm. Send an email to register for the Zoom session

Cleveland Opera Theater wants the community to know that it will continue its holiday tradition of presenting Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, but virtually this time, on Wednesday, December 17 at 7:00 pm. Donations support The City Mission.

And stay tuned for next Tuesday’s rundown on various events that will mark Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th Birthday on Wednesday, December 16.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

French composer Hector Berlioz entered the world on December 11, 1803. A seasonally appropriate way to celebrate would be to listen to his Sacred Trilogy, L’Enfance du Christ, for which he wrote the libretto, and intended it to be staged. The quirky and ultimately charming work treats the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, where they suffer antisemetic taunts but find their way into a Jewish household that welcomes them with a wonderful trio for two flutes and harp. Other luminous moments include the “Shepherds’ Farewell” and the concluding chorus where the orchestra drops out, leaving the narrator and a choir of angels to finish the piece a cappella. 

Spotify will provide you with a number of complete performances of the work, but having sung in it, I have a personal preference for the December 13, 1966 performance led by Charles Munch with the Boston Symphony, Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society, and soloists John McCollum, Florence Kopleff, Theodor Uppman, and Donald Gramm. You can still purchase the DVD. Here’s just a taste: the aforementioned “Shepherds’ Farewell.”

Speaking of Boston, in December 1835, Phillips Brooks, Rector of Trinity Church and briefly Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, was born in 1835. He employed the architect H.H. Richardson, the muralist John LaFarge, and the stained glass artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to create an architectural masterpiece in Copley Square. But Brooks is probably best known for authoring the words of O Little Town of Bethlehem for a children’s service in 1868. The tune, known as St. Louis, was written at the last moment by his organist, Louis Redner, who later noted that “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

Live on it has, but with a different tune when the carol crossed the pond to England, where it’s sung to Forest Green, a folk tune collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal in 1906, but also to Wengen, a tune by Henry Walford Davies.

Which tune do you think fits the words best? If your vote goes to St. Louis, you’ll enjoy this setting by Stephen Paulus performed by Painesville Native Tom Trenney and the choir of First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska (who sing with face masks on.)

Back to Cleveland to note the birthday of Russian pianist and composer Victor Babin on December 13, 1908. One-half of the celebrated piano duo Vronsky and Babin, he served as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music for eleven years beginning in 1961.

Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin recorded the two Rachmaninoff two-piano Suites twice. It’s fun to compare their 1938 performances (11 sides of 78 rpm records with side breaks) with the re-do in 1961. How technology had changed!

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB TONIGHT:

Three very interesting Northeast Ohio programs debut this evening around the same time, but thanks to on-demand streaming, you can enjoy them later as you choose.

The Cleveland Orchestra is up first at 7:00 pm, with guest conductor Nicholas McGegan leading a program of Handel, Corelli, J.S. Bach, and Mendelssohn from the harpsichord in the fourth episode of “In Focus” on the Orchestra’s Adella platform. McGegan talked with ClevelandClassical.com’s Mike Telin about the program in a wide-ranging conversation that also touched on the conductor’s love of mystery novels. Did you know that some examples of the genre are based in Cleveland? [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Two of the foremost performers of their time were born on this date in history: American violinist Joshua Bell in 1967, and German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in 1915.

Bell turns 53 today — nearly four decades after his orchestral debut at 14 with The Philadelphia Orchestra. In that time he’s won an Avery Fisher Prize, a Grammy for his recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto (written for him — listen here), has made his mark in the world of film with his solo playing in The Red Violin (music by John Corigliano), and has stepped in front of an orchestra in a different way: as artistic director of The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a post he’s held since 2011. He’s also performed incognito at a subway station in Washington, D.C.

Now, in these “uncertain times,” to quote all the commercials encouraging the purchase of a new car, Bell is still keeping active. His latest venture is a new salon series streaming on the Mandolin platform, beginning on December 19 in a recital with his longtime collaborator Jeremy Denk.

Another important date for Bell on the calendar this month: on December 17, he’ll help celebrate those on the frontlines of the battle with COVID-19 in a guest appearance with the National Virtual Medical Orchestra, presented by Carnegie Hall.

Schwarzkopf passed away in her sleep at age 90 in 2006. She was most celebrated for performing Lieder, and in that arena, she helped inaugurate Blossom Music Center — listen here to Strauss’s Four Last Songs performed live by Schwarzkopf, George Szell, and The Cleveland Orchestra in a radio broadcast from the venue’s first season. (Read more about the first season of Blossom here.) Or head to Spotify for those Strauss works in another Schwarzkopf-Szell pairing, this time in a recording with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin.

Complicating Schwarzkopf’s legacy is her involvement with the Nazi Party, including in ways that were far from routine at the time, as Michael H. Kater wrote in The Guardian in the weeks after the soprano’s death.

SPEAKING OF DEATH AND MUSICIANS…

Names like Frank Sinatra (left), John Lennon, and Whitney Houston have joined the video-sharing social network TikTok, though not exactly from the afterlife — rather, it’s the work of estates and record companies, as Kara Weisenstein writes for Mic.

That raises an important question: which performers from the deceased side of the classical world would you like to see digitally rise from the grave? Or from another perspective, which ones would you prefer to stay dead?

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865, an event The Cleveland Orchestra marked in an amusing little 2019 video. “Things got a little crazy as you can see.”

The composer’s symphonies have been played frequently by the ensemble over the years. Here’s a rare performance of the four-movement version of the Fifth from December, 1941 led by Artur Rodzinski (taken from 78 rpm discs with side breaks left intact).

There’s also a recording of a live performance of the Second led by George Szell in May, 1970 in Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan Hall, and Christoph von Dohnányi led a performance of the Fifth in June, 1999 when the Orchestra was in exile at the Allen Theater in Playhouse Square during the renovation of Severance Hall.

More recently, here’s a promotional snippet for a performance of the Second led by Franz Welser-Möst during the Orchestra’s Miami residency in February, 2017.

Finland — which didn’t yet exist as a country when Sibelius was born — celebrates the composer’s legacy each year on December 8 with “A Day of Finnish Music.” Although, rather like Rossini, he stopped composing in mid-life, he has inspired a widespread national educational initiative which has produced a distinguished list of musicians, classical, folk, and popular.

Celebrate Sibelius’ birthday with Fifteen Fun Facts from Classical FM.

Other celebrities blowing out the candles today include composers Manuel Maria Ponce (1882), and Bohuslav Martinu (1890), American singer Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925) and French baritone Gerard Souzay (1918). On a more somber note, the Beatles’ John Lennon was shot and killed on this date in 1980 outside his apartment in New York, shortly after a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. And in American history on this date, Washington crossed the Delaware with his retreating troops in 1776, and Congress declared war on Japan in 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6.

To end on a lighter, non-musical note, American humorist James Thurber was born on December 8, 1894 in Columbus, Ohio. His drawings and writings for The New Yorker include updated versions of such fables as Little Red Riding Hood, and the following, which, like all good humor, has a timeless quality:

INTERESTING READ:

On his ‘Unanswered Question” blog, American cultural critic Joe Horowitz refers his readers to his 8,000-word American Scholar essay about the impact of the pandemic on the arts in the US. Check out his abbreviated readers’ guide here, and follow a link to the entire piece.