Archives for February 2021

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE TODAY:

The Cleveland Orchestra debuted Bonus Episode 1 of its In Focus series last night, featuring pianist Mitsuko Uchida in Schubert’s Sonata in C and the Orchestra in Mozart’s String Serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik. The former is a live performance captured in London’s Wigmore Hall last month, and the latter was recorded in Severance Hall last fall. The programs remain available on-demand on the Adella platform.

Cleveland Chamber Music Society has posted the latest Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Front Row National program featuring pianist Gloria Chien, violinists Benjamin Beilman and Sean Lee, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan. The free program, John Field’s Nocturne No. 2, Liszt’s Grand duo concertante ‘Le Marin’ & Mendelssohn’s Quartet in c, Op. 1, remains available on demand through February 16.

Violinist Leonidas Kavakos turned many heads with his account of Shostakovich’s First Concerto with Gianandrea Noseda and the Cleveland Orchestra back in November of 2015. Open your browser to a Dallas Symphony webcast to hear what Kavakos and Fabio Luisi have in mind for the Beethoven concerto.

Other far-flung performances tonight include the Detroit Symphony with jazz violinist Regina Carter, Opera Philadelphia’s production of Save the Boys, based on an 1887 abolitionist poem, and a concert by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society with clarinetist Anthony McGill, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and pianist Gloria Chien

On the opera stage, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, starring countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, makes its way out of the MET Opera Archives tonight. While enjoying that production, save the date for Roth Costanzo’s virtual appearance on Youngstown State’s Pipino Series in April.

See the Concert Listings for details.

NEW VIOLIN CHANNEL SERIES DEBUTS:

The Violin Channel, a content-rich web presence, announces the Vanguard Concerts, an original series of free live-streamed performances by top string players. The debut concert, set for February 18, features violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Alessio Bax, and subsequent performances include such artists familiar to Cleveland audiences as the Dover Quartet, Nathan Meltzer, Tessa Lark, and the Junction Trio (Stevan Jackiw, violin, Jay Campbell, cello, and Conrad Tao, piano). Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Only four figures to raise up today: American composer Roy Harris, born in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma; French composer, conductor, and pianist Emile Waldteufel, who died in 1915 in Paris; French composer Henri Duparc, who died in Mont-de-Marsan in 1933; and American composer and inventor George Antheil, who died in NewYork in 1959.

As we wrote back in October to mark Harris’ death, “Born in rural Oklahoma, with the help of Aaron Copland he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and went on to write numerous works on American themes. His big breakthrough was his Third Symphony, captured here in a live performance by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra in 2010.

Waldteufel’s principal claim to fame is as the composer of the Skater’s Waltz, known in French as Les Patineurs and less elegantly in German as Die Schlittschuhkläufer.

Beset by increasing blindness, Duparc destroyed all but some 40 of his works. The best-known that survived are his 17 Mélodies or art songs, a number of which can be enjoyed here in performances by such singers as Measha Bruggergosman, Susan Graham, Natalie Dessay, Régine Crespin, Jessye Norman, Lawrence Brownlee, and Renée Fleming.

And George Antheil is simply an American original. His Wikipedia biography includes vivid descriptions of his music, concerts, and inventions, one of which was a radio-controlled torpedo he developed with the actress Hedy Lamarr during World War II. The article is well worth a read, and you can watch his Ballet méchanique here.

by Mike Telin  

If you’re in need of a respite from life’s daily grind, there’re plenty of concerts to take in today. At 12:00 noon it’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV 104.9 Ideastream. The playlist includes the “Largo” from Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 as well as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. You can also listen on the web.

At 7:00 pm, Local 4 Music Fund’s “Tuning In” series features Hammond B-3 virtuoso Eddie Baccus in a live streamed performance from the BOP STOP. Baccus will be joined by trombonist Chris Anderson, and percussionist Elijah Gilmore. The event is free, but donations are welcome. Click here at start time.

At the same time, The Cleveland Orchestra will debut In Focus Bonus Episode 1, featuring pianist Mitsuko Uchida. 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.

At 7:30 pm Oberlin Stage left presents a Black History Month Faculty Concert live streamed from Warner Concert Hall. The free event features violinists Sibbi Bernhardsson and David Bowlin and pianists Haewon Song and Robert Shannon William, performing works by William Grant Still and Jeff Scott. Watch here.

If you’re in the mood for opera, also at 7:30 pm, the MET Opera Nightly Streams presents Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, starring Aprile Millo, Carolyn Blackwell, Florence Quivar, Luciano Pavarotti, and Leo Nucci, conducted by James Levine.  Click here at start time.

And Cleveland Pops has recently released the latest episode of Conversations with Carl. Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne Milburn (ret.) reflects on how not seeing people who looked like him holding high profile orchestra positions helped shape his career. Click here to view.

It’s hard to believe that not long ago people were predicting the end of the recording industry. And while much about that industry has changed, there is certainly no shortage of new releases.

One that caught my eye, and ears, is composer George Lewis’ The Recombinant Trilogy. Released on New Focus Recordings last Friday, the album includes three works for solo instrument and electronics performed by flutist Claire Chase, cellist Seth Parker Woods, and bassoonist Dana Jessen. The digital album Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Remember the days when pretty much the only way to purchase a recording was to go to a record store, and the only way to listen to it was on a turntable?

This brings us to today’s Almanac. On February 11, 1847 the inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Alva Edison, was born in Milan, Ohio. Of course, Edison is responsible for inventing many things that make our lives more pleasant, including the incandescent light bulb, the motion picture camera, and the fluoroscope, as well as improving the telegraph and telephone. Click here for a list of his 1,093 patents.

Of all his inventions, Edison’s favorite was the phonograph, which came about from his work on the telegraph and the telephone when, in 1877, he discovered a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders. He set the invention aside for ten years, and when he returned to work on his phonograph, he began using wax cylinders.

And what were the first words Edison recorded on his new machine? Click here to listen to him recite “Mary had a little lamb” (recorded in 1927 for the 50th anniversary of his invention).  Upon hearing his voice Edison said “I was never so taken aback in my life — I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”

Edison believed the phonograph would eventually be used for letter writing and dictation, phonographic books for blind people, a family record — recording family members in their own voices — music boxes and toys, clocks that announce the time, and a connection with the telephone so communications could be recorded. Click here to visit the informative entries about Edison on the Library of Congress website.

Always striving to improve on things, Edison was once asked to give his opinion on the role that physics and mechanical instruments will play in the future. “A great deal — an enormous part,” the inventor responded. “The present instruments of the orchestra are very crude. Take the violin for instance. Don’t tell me that even the best violin cannot be improved. One of the worst things in all music in the E string on the violin.” Click here to read the interview titled New Aspects on the Art of Music.

So happy 174th Mr. Edison! Without you, nothing I’ve written about in this article would be possible.

I leave you with an inspiring quote by Thomas Edison. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

by Jarrett Hoffman

JAZZ ON THE WEB:

Today you can hear local jazz online, both at noon and at night. For the price of a freewill offering, catch pianist Jackie Warren on Trinity Cathedral’s Virtual Brownbag series at 12:00 pm (streaming on the Cathedral’s website and on Facebook). And in a free concert, though donations are welcome, vocalist Evelyn Wright joins pianist David Thomas at the Maltz Performing Arts Center at 8:00 pm (streaming here).

Looking ahead, Wright and Thomas represent the start of a three-concert partnership between Jim Wadsworth Productions and the Maltz. Brazilian guitarist Moises Borges is up next on March 12, followed by trumpeter Dominick Farinacci and the students of the Tri-C Spirit of the Groove ensemble on April 6.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Leontyne Price — considered one of the greatest sopranos in history, and the first African-American vocalist to reach international acclaim in opera — turns 94 today. She was born in 1927 in Laurel, MS.

There are many lenses through which to examine her career, including the racially motivated obstacles she overcame, which could constitute a whole article. But it’s also important to simply appreciate her artistry. In an article for NPR published on Price’s 90th birthday, Tom Huizenga wrote, “Over years of interviewing singers and critics, whenever Price’s name comes up, something special happens. The talk turns to that powerful, gleaming voice and the strength of her artistic convictions, even in the face of adversity.”

That article contains thoughts on Price from soprano Jessye Norman, baritone Sherrill Milnes, and critic Tim Page. Norman reflected on being in middle school, when she first heard Price sing through a record her brother brought home:

Hearing this voice — this vibrant, beautiful, soaring, amazing voice, on whatever that stereo equipment was at the time, was quite overwhelming. I used to sit — very often alone — just listening to the sound and wondering what she really looked like and what her friends were like and what it must it be like to carry such an instrument around in one’s own body.

One recording that stood out in Norman’s mind was of Price singing Il trovatore with frequent collaborator Herbert von Karajan at the Salzburg Festival (listen here).

…that is truly, truly, truly great singing. And because it is what it is, it is more than simple singing. It is much more than that. Whatever those words should be, I don’t have them this moment, but it’s far more than singing.

Listen to that recording, especially towards the end, to discover what a perfect description that is.

Norman concludes her thoughts thus:

I hope that at this point in her life, that she’s able to understand and appreciate the amazing artistic life that she shared with the world.

Happy 94th.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Historical events in classical music that took place on February 9 range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Let’s start with Austrian composer Alban Berg, who was born in Vienna on this date in 1885. A student of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg is credited with humanizing his mentor’s 12-tone compositional system, overlaying it with a veneer of expressive Romanticism. His fame is inversely proportional to his output, which includes two operas — Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu — a violin concerto, and some smaller works.

Alas, the pandemic resulted in the cancellation of Cleveland performances of the two-act concert version of Lulu, starring Barbara Hannigan, which was to have anchored The Cleveland Orchestra’s “Censored: Art and Power” Festival in May of 2020.a

The BBC highlighted Berg’s life in a documentary, and ChamberFest Cleveland included his Adagio for violin (Diana Cohen), clarinet (Franklin Cohen), and piano (Roman Rabinovich) on a concert in CIM’s Mixon Hall on June 21, 2018. That movement was extracted from Berg’s Concerto de chambre for piano, violin, and 13 instruments. And Pierre Boulez chose Berg’s Der Wein to open the 2011 Salzburg Festival with soprano Dorothea Roeschmann and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Two important figures in British choral music were born on this date, Sir George Guest in 1924, and Paul Hillier in 1949.

Guest, born in Wales, was the longtime organist and choirmaster of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he saved the day school that provided trebles for the chapel choir, and developed a choir that rivaled that of King’s College. Perhaps by design, John’s and King’s scheduled their Choral Evensong services so you could catch both at the expense of a brisk walk.

Guest is the subject of the documentary, “A Guest at Cambridge,” and his last Evensong service, including Gerald Finzi’s Lo, the Full Final Sacrifice was broadcast by the BBC in 1991.

And baritone and conductor Paul Hillier, known for his equal interest in early and contemporary music, founded the Hilliard Ensemble in 1974 and the Theatre of Voices in 1990. Having crossed the pond to direct the Early Music Institute at Indiana University, he extended his geographical reach with the directorship of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (2001), Ars Nova Copenhagen (2003) and the National Chamber Choir of Ireland (2008).

For a taste of his work with the Estonian choir, listen to Baltic Voices I, and/or his recording of Arvo Pärt’s Da Pacem.

Some will remember a remarkable noonday concert by Ars Nova Copenhagen at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral some years ago, thanks to a happy gap in their touring schedule. I will remember their visit because we all went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Playhouse Square where the proprietor had just installed a new karaoke machine and was eager to have the Danes try it out. That didn’t happen, but it would have added to the fun.

And in the end-of-career category, Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor Ernst Von Dohnanyi died on this date at the age of 82 in New York. Grandfather of Cleveland Orchestra music director laureate Christoph, Ernst (Erno) was an important figure in the Hungarian resistance movement against the Nazis. He moved to Florida after the War and taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee for ten years.

Two early works suggest the range of Dohnanyi’s compositional style: on the one hand, his Piano Quintet No. 1 in c, here played by the Cleveland Quartet and Barry Snyder, and on the other by his Variations on a Nursery Tune (the same song Mozart later used). It’s subtitled, “For the enjoyment of humorous people and for the annoyance of others.” The composer plays it here at the age of 79 with Sir Adrian Boult and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

And to end with the ridiculous, it was on this date in 1967 that cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman was arrested “by two policemen who interrupted her performance at the Cinematheque in Manhattan of Opera Sextronique by Nam June Paik, a composer, video artist and performance artist.” (NY Times Obituary). Moorman was playing in the nude for an invited audience, an episode that branded her as “the topless cellist.”

by Jarrett Hoffman

HALFTIME SHOW: THE WEEKEND

Whether or not Super Bowl LV interested you at all (and many football fans found that it did not), there’s something amazing about an event that routinely draws over 100 million viewers, and the national conversation that creates. It means that once a year, seemingly the whole country is talking about not just a sporting event, but also music — or at least performance in all its aspects — thanks to the hype and spectacle of the halftime show.

Last night’s featured artist was Canadian singer-songwriter and producer Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd (the name is spelled that way for copyright reasons, the artist has explained).

His Super Bowl performance did not include an exit via helicopter (see Diana Ross, 1996), or an entrance atop a 16-foot tall, 1,600-pound puppet lion (Katy Perry, 2015).

As pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times, “What would ordinarily be a hyperchoreographed spectacle with countless moving parts was instead something more focused and, at times, unnervingly intimate…the Weeknd found several ways to make the performance appear small, a kind of secret whispered in front of an audience that tops 100 million.”

The performance also dabbled in the bizarre, especially the scene featuring dancers stumbling into each other, their faces covered in bandages — made all the more chaotic by the shaky, hand-held camera. It felt like a crossover between the mainstream and the avant-garde.

Read the Times article to learn why all that was fitting not only for pandemic restrictions, but for “pop music’s greatest hermit,” someone who’s also quite leery of celebrity worship. And watch the full performance here.

ROMANCE WITH THE ASO

With Valentine’s Day coming up, if you can’t quite manage that most spectacular offering of love — say, a ride together on a giant robotic lion — the Akron Symphony has the next best thing. Support local music by sending your special someone a musical Valentine’s Day card featuring an embedded video performance from an ASO musician. The ordering deadline is February 10, and cards will be emailed on the 14th — rates and more info here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC, “ALL-AMERICAN”

Margaret Brouwer — chair of the composition department at CIM from 1996 to 2008, founder of the Blue Streak Ensemble, and recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship — was born on this date in 1940 in Ann Arbor, MI.

Brouwer has often been inspired by the environment, and that was certainly the case with her oratorio Voice of the Lake, premiered in its revised version in 2018 in Cleveland. The piece portrays both the magical side of Lake Erie as well as its many environmental problems — and the work that’s being done to solve them. Watch a live performance of Parts I, II, III, and IV, and read Mike Telin’s preview article about the revised version of the oratorio here.

Brouwer’s current commission, to be premiered by the American Wild Ensemble in June, also relates to the natural world. As she told us in an article last year about how composers have responded to the pandemic, the piece evokes fear on the part of animals whose habitats and lives are being threatened. But since COVID-19 arrived, it has also drawn on human fear. “Perhaps the greatest part of the fear — for us and for the animals — is not knowing when or if the threat will strike,” Brouwer said.

Another composer to celebrate today is John Williams, born on February 8, 1932 in Queens, NY. You very likely know at least a few of his classic film scores, such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Schindler’s List, Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter. He’s also composed music for several Olympic games, as well as a long list of concert works, including many concertos.

Here’s one of those for today: The Five Sacred Trees, inspired by ancient Celtic mythology, and written for the New York Philharmonic and principal bassoon Judith LeClair for the orchestra’s 150th anniversary. LeClair recorded the work in 1997 with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by none other than John Williams (who in that arena of music-making notably led the Boston Pops for thirteen years). Listen to the concerto here.

(As announced last week in a press release, The Cleveland Orchestra’s “John Williams Conducts” concert, previously slated for April 26, has been cancelled due to the pandemic, as with all in-person concerts in the next few months. “We are still actively looking to schedule Mr. Williams to perform with The Cleveland Orchestra at a future date,” president and CEO André Gremillet wrote.)

Now we pass the baton to the pioneering figure of James DePreist, who died on this date in 2013 in Scottsdale, AZ, and who achieved international renown in a time when Black conductors were rare in the world of classical music.

His most famous position was as music director of the Oregon Symphony (1980-2003). DePreist was heralded for transforming the ensemble from a part-time, regional group to an esteemed one, whose recordings under his leadership were widely acclaimed, including albums devoted to Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky. Listen to their recording of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 here.

He also served as music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, the Malmö Symphony, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, as permanent conductor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and as director of orchestral and conducting studies at the Juilliard School.

As Allan Kozinn wrote in an obituary for DePriest in The New York Times, the conductor “was reluctant to be seen as a role model on the basis of his race, rather than purely for his musical accomplishments,” but he also understood the impact he could make as a world-renowned Black musician, just like his aunt, the vocalist Marian Anderson.

Using that power was something he did not take lightly. “I think if I’m seen as a role model, I would like it to be for conducting the subscription weeks, and not just the concert at the Apollo,” he said, referring to a performance he turned down at the Apollo Theater in New York with the Boys Choir of Harlem and the Modern Jazz Quartet. He was wary of tokenist programs, “especially if it’s the only time you see black artists or hear works by black composers.”

No doubt his voice would be a valuable one in classical music today.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Reaching back into the 15th century, we’ll begin by marking the death of Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem in Tours on February 6, 1497. The most important composer between Dufay and Josquin, his name has been spelled in creative ways (Ogkegum, Okchem, Hocquegam, and Ockeghama, to name a few variants).

Cleveland Chamber Choir featured his Alma redemptoris mater, paired with a setting of the same words by contemporary British composer Cecilia McDowall in its December, 2019 concert at First Baptist Church.

The 16th century painting above shows the composer (wearing eyeglasses!) with his choir singing from a large choirbook — standard practice before the invention of music printing and copy machines. Schola Cantorum Brabantiae performed Ockeghem’s Missa l’Homme Armé in authentic style in a 2005 concert in Slovenia. Watch here.

Ockeghem also left a significant number of secular pieces, collected in this LP by the Medieval Ensemble of London.

French organist André Marchal was born blind on February 6 in 1894, an affliction that didn’t prevent him from becoming a skilled improviser and teacher. Hear him play improvisations on three different instruments — at the Palais de Chaillot, the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris here.

Marchal’s most important post was the Eglise Sainte-Eustache, situated in Les Halles, the medieval market neighborhood of Paris, where he recorded Franck’s Grand pièce symphonique in 1958. He resigned over a disagreement with the authorities about which builder should be entrusted with the renovation of the instrument.

And February 6, 2005 marked the demise of Karl Haas, the German-born commentator who hosted “Adventures in Good Music,” one of the longest running daily programs in classical music broadcasting.

On February 7, 1652, Italian composer and Papal Chapel singer Gregorio Allegri breathed his last in Rome. His noble setting with ornate embellishments of Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Dei, was closely guarded by the chapel singers until 14-year-old Wolfgang Amadé Mozart heard and transcribed it. Not to diminish his achievement, but the setting is repetitive enough that few trained ears should have any problem reconstructing the work. Here’s a video that tells the story of the work and includes a performance by Harry Christopher’s The Sixteen.

American composer Quincy Porter was born on February 7, 1897 in New Haven, going on to teach on two separate occasions at the Cleveland Institute of Music, as well as serving on the faculties of Vassar, the New England Conservatory, and Yale. Cleveland Orchestra violist Eliesha Nelson chose to include his 1948 Viola Concerto on her 2009 all-Quincy Porter album. Listen to her performance here with John McLaughlin Williams and the Northwest Sinfonia, and click here to hear the violist and the conductor answer some questions.

And Polish composer and conductor Witold Lutoslawski died in Warsaw on February 7, 1994. The BBC joined other news sources to produce a documentary about his life and work in 1990. Watch his conversation with Krzysztof Zanussi here.

When the composer fled Warsaw in 1944, he left most of his manuscripts behind, and those were lost in the almost complete destruction of the city by the Germans. His 1954 Concerto for Orchestra established his prominence as a composer. Listen to a Cleveland Orchestra performance of the work under Christoph von Dohnányi here. (The recording pairs the Lutoslawski piece with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.)

ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:

Saturday’s highlights include the opening panel discussion that prefaces Oberlin’s Black History Month events, a concert from the Boston Early Music Festival by Quicksilver featuring Cleveland violinist Julie Andrijeski, and WCLV’s archive recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. 

On Sunday, watch Boston’s A Far Cry chamber orchestra perform Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings from memory, along with works by Arvo Pärt and Chevalier de Saint-Georges, catch the Isaiah J. Thompson Quartet from The Gilmore in Kalamazoo and an Oberlin faculty recital by violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson and pianist Peter Takács, watch Rachel Barton Pine talk about the solo part of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and enjoy another extended work on WCLV — this time, a concert performance of Verdi’s Falstaff.