Archives for February 2021

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society has posted the latest Front Row National program from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center featuring violinist Arnaud Sussmann with pianists Hyeyeon Park and Wu Han, violinists Francisco Fullana, Bella Hristova and Kristin Lee, violists Yura Lee and Richard O’Neill, cellists Dmitri Atapine and Nicholas Canellakis, bassist Xavieer Foley, and flutists Sooyun Kim and Tara Helen O’Connor, flutes. You can summon up J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 and Ernest Chausson’s Concerto in D for violin, piano and string quartet for free any time you like through March 2.

In more news from the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, two forthcoming concerts have now been cancelled due to the pandemic: the Takács Quartet on March 16 and the Pavel Hass Quartet on April 13.

Also online on Friday: the CIM Orchestra, saxophonist Howie Smith at the Bop Stop, and Stile Antico sponsored by the Boston Early Music Festival.

Saturday’s lineup includes Australian artist Stephanie Jones on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International Series (pre-recorded), and the Cleveland Orchestra’s archived performance of Hansel and Gretel.

Sunday brings a Close Encounter from Heights Arts, the final Oberlin Black History Month event — a faculty recital — and, in case you missed it the first time around, a rebroadcast of CIM’s Music for Food benefit concert.

Details about these performances are to be found in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

February 26 saw the births of French Bohemian composer Anton Reicha (Prague, in 1770, who went on to teach Liszt, Berlioz and Franck at the Paris Conservatory and write early wind quintets) and English composer Frank Bridge (Brighton 1879, who taught Benjamin Britten), as well as the death of Italian composer Giuseppi Tartini (Padua, 1770, the first known owner of a Stradivari violin and author of the “Devil’s Trill” Sonata which still frightens modern fiddlers).

And Howard Hanson, American conductor, composer, and longtime director of the Eastman School of Music, died on this date in 1981 in Rochester, NY.

An unrepentant Romantic, Hanson left a legacy of expressive works that deserve more performances than they receive these days. His Second Symphony, subtitled “Romantic” sets the tone here in a performance by the Peabody Symphony led by Joseph Young.

Flutist Erika Boysen illustrates a performance of his Serenade for flute, harp, and strings with American artwork here, and organist Thomas Sheehan is featured in his Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Harp in a concert from Harvard’s Memorial Church led by University Organist Edward Elwyn Jones.

And here’s a performance of Hanson’s mystical Cherubic Hymn led by the composer.

On February 26 of 2013, French organist Marie-Claire Alain made her sortie at the age of 86 in the Paris suburb of Le Pecq. She succeeded her father as organist of the church of Sain-Germain-en-Laye, playing there for 40 years. 

Among her 260 recordings are three complete cycles of the works of J.S. Bach. Watch a brief documentary here, and hear her perform his Fantasia in G (aka Pièce d’Orgue) here. And be a fly on the wall as she gives a lesson to a Czech organ student in 2006.

Some big names to mention for February 27: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, born either on the 27th or the 25th in 1873 in Naples, Russian composer Alexander Borodin, who died during a ballroom concert in St. Petersburg in 1887, German soprano Lotte Lehmann, born in Perleberg in 1883, and Texas pianist Van Cliburn, who lost his struggle with bone cancer in Fort Worth in 2013 at the age of 78.

Cliburn helped take the chill off the Cold War in 1958 when he won the inaugural Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Cheered by Muscovites and given the first New York ticker tape parade for a classical musician when he returned to the U.S., Cliburn founded his own competition in his hometown of Fort Worth later that year.

Click here to listen to a live recording of his winning performance of Tchikovsky’s First Concerto. A 58-minute film by Peter Rosen on Medici-TV documents that event for subscribers (watch a free trailer here).

To wrap up an eventful weekend in the milestones department, Gioachino Rossini was born on February 29 in 1792 (we’ll relax the date criteria in this non-leap year). [Read more…]

by Mike Telin

Welcome to Thursday the 25th of February.

ON THE WEB TODAY:

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
— Charles Mingus

At 7:00 pm The Cleveland Orchestra debuts its In Focus Bonus Episode 2 featuring cellist Alicia Weilerstein in performances of J.S. Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites, recorded live at Severance Hall in January, 2021. The concert is available to current subscribers and donors at no additional charge, or for Adella Premium subscribers on the Adella digital streaming app and adella live.

I think that the artists who don’t get involved in preaching messages probably are happier — but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult. 
— Nina Simone

A half-hour later at 7:30 pm, Oberlin Black History Month: A Celebration of Black Artistry continues on Stage Left with a pre-recorded program hosted by associate professor of horn Jeff Scott. The evening features three of his own compositions as well as works by Ulysses Kay and Duke Ellington. The concert is free. Click here at start time.

Click here to read our interview with Scott where he talks about why it was important for him and his Imani Winds colleague, Mark Dover, to make an arrangement of Abel Meeropol’s classic Strange Fruit, a song made famous by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. He also talks about his admiration for Simone as an artist and as an outspoken critic of social injustices.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On February 25 in 1890, English pianist Dame Myra Hess was born in South Hampstead, London. She made her professional debut in 1907 playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham. Hess toured extensively throughout Britain, the Netherlands, and France and made her U.S. debut in New York City in 1922.

The pianist may be most remembered for her performances during The Blitz of World War II. During that time Hess organized nearly 2,000 lunchtime concerts in Trafalgar Square’s National Gallery. The concerts were held every Monday and Friday for six-and-a-half years. And every performer was paid five guineas for their services. In 1941 King George VI made Hess a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In addition to an active performing career, Hess was a dedicated teacher. One of her students was Clive Lythgoe, the long-time Dean of Faculty at Cleveland’s Music School Settlement.

Hess’s legacy lives on at the Chicago Cultural Center with its Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts. The free lunchtime series is produced by Chicago’s International Music Foundation and broadcast live on WFMT and streamed on WFMT.com.

Click here to listen to an interview with Hess, and here for a performance of Chopin’s Waltz No. 1 in E flat Op. 18.

We also celebrate the birth of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher, who entered this world in 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TUESDAY MUSICAL SCHEDULE CHANGES:

First the pandemic, and now the vaccination schedule for artists, has changed two dates in the spring lineup for Akron’s Tuesday Musical series, to be held in-person at E.J. Thomas Hall.

Bassist Edgar Meyer, originally scheduled for March 4, has moved to Tuesday, April 20, so that he can complete his COVID vaccine shots. Meyer’s concert will range from bluegrass to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.

Chanticleer, originally scheduled for April 20, has moved to Tuesday, July 27, to give the San Francisco-based “Orchestra of Voices” more time to rehearse together in person.

The remaining three concerts will proceed as scheduled: pianist Emanuel Ax on March 25, clarinetist Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet on May 4, and the Sphinx Virtuosi on May 26. Visit the TMA website for health protocol details and other information.

CIM’S MUSIC FOR FOOD:

The annual Music for Food concert, sponsored by the student government association of  the Cleveland Institute of Music and featuring both faculty and student performers, will be performed online this year. All proceeds will go to the Kosher Food Bank. The concert will originally be live-streamed from CIM on February 24 at 7 pm. This performance will be repeated on Music for Food’s YouTube channel on the 28th at 7:30 pm and on The Violin Channel’s VC Live on March 2 at 5 pm. Details about performers, repertoire, and how to donate here.

ON THE WEB TODAY — iCELLISTI:

Round Two of the Cleveland Cello Society’s “iCellisti! 2021” tonight at 7:00 pm features cellists Sharon Robinson, Dmitry Kouzov, and Dane Johansen with pianists Anita Pontremoli, Yulia Fedosseva, and Evan Solomon in an all-Beethoven event: his Sonata in g, Op. 5, No. 2 (Robinson and Pontremoli), Sonata in A, Op. 69 (Kouzov and Fedosseva), and Sonata in D, Op. 102, No. 2 (Johansen and Solomon), live streamed from the Bop Stop. Click here at start time. Free but donations welcome.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

There are two major British composers to celebrate today, one adopted, the other very much a native of “England’s green and pleasant land.”

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle, Saxony on February 23, 1685. Details of his life are so well known — except perhaps his recently documented financial involvement with the slave trade — that a few random references may be welcome.

Like the British monarch at the time, Handel’s native tongue was German, which didn’t prevent him from becoming an English musical icon — but still gave him a bit of trouble when composing. In his book Handel, Christopher Hogwood relates this story told by John Taylor in 1832:

I heard [Morell] say that one fine morning he was roused out of bed at five o’clock by Handel, who came in his carriage a short distance from London. The doctor went to the window and spoke to Handel, who would not leave his carriage. Handel was at the time composing an oratorio. When the doctor asked him what he wanted, he said, ‘What de devil means de word billow?’ which was in the [libretto of the] oratorio the doctor had written for him. The doctor, after laughing at so ludicrous a reason for disturbing him, told him that billow meant wave, a wave of the sea. ‘Oh, de vave,’ said Handel, and bade his coachman return, without addressing another word to the doctor.

In 1723, Handel moved into rooms at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, where he remained until his death in 1759. Some 230 years later, Jimi Hendrix moved into No. 23, and now you can visit a joint museum featuring the two musicians. Imagine if those two had been occupying adjacent digs at the same time.

When tastes changed away from Handel’s main source of income, Italian opera, he applied his dramatic gifts to oratorio. One of the most dramatic of those — and one that has in fact been performed as opera — is Belshazzar, performed here by René Jacobs and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. [Read more…]