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Archives for March 2021

Tri-C Classical Piano: Caroline Oltmanns (Mar. 21)

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by Jarrett Hoffman

When my colleagues and I have the opportunity to both interview and review an artist, it becomes interesting to see whether the ideas behind their program translate to the actual performance. Sometimes, from my perspective, they don’t, but the concert might still flourish in some other, unforeseen way.

And occasionally, everything comes together brilliantly, almost exactly the way the artist described. That was the case with Caroline Oltmanns’ online recital for the Tri-C Classical Piano Series on March 21, which she pre-recorded at home for the occasion.

[Read more…]

Emanuele Buono makes impressive CCGS debut

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by Mike Telin

Over the years, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society has presented a seemingly endless roster of outstanding players on their International Series. That tradition continued on Saturday, March 20 when Emanuele Buono made his series debut with an impressive pre-recorded concert that left you wondering if the Italian guitarist was born with the instrument in his hands.

Seated in front of a white wall adorned with posters and a small collection of guitars, the soft-spoken Buono briefly introduced the first work — J.S. Bach’s Flute Partita in a. From the first notes of the “Allemande,” the guitarist produced a rich, unfettered tone that amplified his well-shaped phrases. [Read more…]

No Exit presents works by composers who call Cleveland home

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by Jarrett Hoffman and Mike Telin

The ensemble No Exit will continue its season on Friday, March 26 at 7:00 pm. The playlist features four world premieres — Zeke Paulowski’s 2020 Set to Viola: What We Will Remember, Nicholas Underhill’s Concerto for Piano and Midi Orchestra, Adonai Henderson’s We Tremble, but Know Better, and Luke Rinderknecht’s Resonances — as well as Timothy Beyer’s Amputate II for alto flute and electronics. As always, the concert is free. Click here at start time to view the performance.

“We love presenting concerts that celebrate some of the extraordinary musical voices that reside in Northeast Ohio,” No Exit artistic director Timothy Beyer said in a press release. “There are some great Cleveland-area composers who are really doing their own thing, thinking outside the box and writing music that is singular, unique and really worthwhile.”

[Read more…]

Apollo’s Fire: “Elegance: The Harper’s Voice” (video)

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by Daniel Hathaway

With the novel coronavirus surrounded but not yet defeated, Apollo’s Fire’s February program “Elegance: The Harper’s Voice” morphed from in-person performances to a recording session at First Baptist Church on February 27 that yielded a fine video of a high-quality concert, released on March 10. A few invited souls sprinkled throughout the pews provided enough of an audience to make a brave noise when cheering was called for, and that was often.

Apollo’s Fire moves so seamlessly from Baroque art music to folk tunes in programs like this one that Purcell and Playford sound like natural bedfellows, and Irish traditional music loses none of its allure when historically informed musicians take it on. [Read more…]

DIARY: Tuesday, March 23, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE TODAY:

On this week’s Baldwin Wallace Bachcast, released today, BachFestival Director Dirk Garner interviews Stuart Raleigh, who served as Festival Choral Director from 1974 to 2007. Watch the 17-minute conversation here.

Young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who made a sensational debut at Blossom two summers ago, joins favorite Cleveland Orchestra guest pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Orchestre de Paris today at 3:30 pm, and violinist James Ehnes is the featured guest soloist with the Dallas Symphony tonight at 8:30 pm (Katherina Wincor is on the podium).

At 6:00 pm, Dominick Farinacci hosts Trio Tuesdays and a Songbook Watch Party at the Bop Stop, and at 8:00 pm, pianist Aaron Diehl plays concert works in the jazz style on the Dacamera series in Houston. Check our Concert Listings for connection details.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

ClevelandClassical.com extends our sincere condolences to Rich Fried and family on the death of his wife, Judy S. Fried on March 11. She played violin with The Cleveland Orchestra from 1980 to 2008, and with the Cleveland Octet. Read an obituary here.

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society sent out a survey today asking its audience under what conditions they would be willing to return to the concert hall. At the moment, three live events remain on the CCMS calendar this spring: violinist Alexi Kenney and pianist Renana Gutman at the Maltz PAC on April 27, the Junction Trio (violinist Stevan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao) at CIM’s Mixon Hall on May 11, and violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong at the Maltz on May 18. Click here to access the survey (to be returned by March 29).

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Three very different organist-composers to honor today: German Kappelmeister Johann Gottfried Walther who died in Weimar on this date in 1748, German Romantic composer Julius Reubke, born on March 23, 1834 in Hausneindorf, and Eugène Gigout, born ten years later in Nancy.

J.S. Bach’s cousin and almost his exact contemporary, Walther authored an important Lexicon, the first German-language encyclopedia of music, as well as some 132 organ works that include both elaborations of chorales and transcriptions of Italian orchestral concertos that were popular in Germany during his era.

His variations on Jesu, meine  Freude are among his best. Listen here to a performance by Tom Anschütz on the 17th-century Hoffmann organ in Langenhain (near Frankfurt), rebuilt by Knauf in the 18th century, and by Kutter (ongoing) in 2020.

Walther’s Concerto el Signr. Meck is mislabeled — it’s actually a work by Vivaldi, but remains one of Walther’s most popular reworkings. Hear it played by Dutch artist Jacques van Oortmerssen on the organ at the Smarano Organ Academy in Italy, and then in an arrangement of an arrangement — for two marimbas, played by Marimbazzi, the young Polish percussion duo of Paweł Dyyak and Jakub Kołodziejczyk.

Reubke died at 24, which didn’t give this disciple of Liszt much time to compose, but he left two relatively monumental works to posterity. Listen to his Piano Sonata played by Austrian pianist Til Fellner here, and to his Sonata on the 94th Psalm played by American organist Nathan Laube here (at a Pittsburgh regional convention of the American Guild of Organists).

And two pieces stand out among French organist Eugène Gigout’s works for the instrument. His Toccata in b minor is quintessentially French (Jonathan Moyer plays it here on the organ at Cleveland’s Church of the Covenant), while his Grand Choeur Dialogué lends itself to various call-and-response echo treatments. Jonathan Scott plays it here in its original organ solo format on the Pascal Quorin organ at Évreux Cathedral, in Normandy, France.

And now the fun begins. If you have two players and two organs at your disposal, you can play it like Peter Eilander and Jaap Eilander do at the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. If it’s just you and you have organs in multiple locations, you can arrange the work like Michael Hey did at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Or go all out and add brass and percussion as Michael Murray and the Empire Brass did in their over-the-top Telarc recording at Boston’s Church of the Advent.

DIARY: Monday, March 22, 2021

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by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY’S ALMANAC: A PECULIAR PASSING

Two little quirks of writing tributes to famous musicians for our almanac: summoning the appropriate language for the occasion, and finding synonyms to avoid repetition.

There is a convenient term for the anniversary of someone’s “entrance to this world,” shall we say — a birthday. And it’s easy to conjure an appropriate atmosphere for those: we celebrate them, as we do today for musical theater composers Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Weber (born in 1930 and 1948, respectively), Leeds International Piano Competition co-founder and longtime artistic director Fanny Waterman (who originated in 1920), humorous illustrator and musician Gerard Hoffnung (sprang into existence in 1925), and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner (issued forth in 1943).

What’s the opposite of a birthday? Technically, deathday, but if you use that word, then you are most likely a murderer. Less creepy, but more wordy: anniversary of someone’s passing.

When it comes to setting the mood on such an occasion, you’re probably aware that celebrate is not the appropriate verb to use. What about mark — as in we mark someone’s death? A bit cold. Mourn? Overdoing it, especially when the figure in question passed away long ago. Perhaps honor is best — it carries a certain distance as well as respect.

And yet, honoring is not exactly what we’ll be doing today. Instead, we’ll indulge in some slightly evil fun as we revisit the demise of that Italian-born master of the French Baroque, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who perished on this date in 1687 in Paris at the age of 54. Surely by now the ghost of Lully can laugh just a little bit at his own departure, which has been described as one of the most ridiculous, or at least most peculiar, in history.

First, a bit of background: before batons, a conductor would keep time for an ensemble by tapping a roll of paper against something, or sometimes beating a lengthy staff into the ground.

Unfortunately, it was the latter method that Lully — Master of the King’s Music under Louis XIV — used in 1687 when leading his own Te Deum to celebrate the king’s recovery from a recent illness. Lully mistakenly struck his own foot, the wound became gangrenous, and as a dancer, he refused amputation. He died two months later.

The incident is captured in a dramatic scene (screenshot up top) from the 2000 movie Le Roi danse. Thanks to the internet, you can zero in on that one clip, whose title on YouTube can only be described as pure poetry: “Jean-Baptiste Lully stabs himself in his foot and dies.”

On an exclusively musical note, watch a performance of the Te Deum by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants here — the unnamed soloists are fantastic, as are the double chorus and orchestra.

And finally, an idea for a particular brand of historical performance. Will some ensemble out there embrace theater to “recreate” that ill-fated 1687 Te Deum? No harm done to any conductor, of course — no one would ever wish for that. The music wouldn’t even have to suffer: it could continue while the conductor — doubling as a good actor — limps offstage. And in this case, for the sake of the concert, why not brighten up history? The conductor could return fully healed in just a moment, do a short dance in honor of Lully, and then climb back onto the podium and finish things out, back from the dead, to uproarious applause.

TMA SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS:

Moving back to the celebratory category, Tuesday Musical has announced the 21 college and university music students who have won the 2021 Annual Scholarship Competition, receiving awards totaling $23,500. This 65th edition of the Competition was all-virtual and drew a record number of applicants. Also new this year was the Howard E. Leisinger Viola Prize, established by brothers Richard Zook and Douglas Zook Jr. to honor their maternal grandfather.

See the official announcement and list of winners here, and read Mike Telin’s interview with Richard and Douglas Zook about the creation of that new prize.

DIARY: Weekend, March 20-22, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

IT’S SPRING!

No snow on the crocuses and daffodils this time around in Northeast Ohio. To celebrate, we recommend a few poems by e.e. cummings, for whom spring was a recurring theme. Revisit (or discover for the first time) [in Just-], Spring is like a perhaps hand, and [O sweet spontaneous], or listen to the first movement of Vincent Persichetti’s Spring Cantata for soprano and alto voices and piano sung by the Dr. Phillips High School Cora Bella ensemble at the March 2012 Southern Division ACDA Conference in Winston-Salem, NC. There are three more cummings poems that Persichetti set to music in the cantata, but no recording of the complete set seems to exist. A shame.

ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:

The schedule is teeming with concerts this weekend. Here are some highlights, but check our Concert Listings for a more extensive list:

On Saturday, Oberlin Stage Left’s large ensemble performances include Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Italian classical guitarist Emanuele Buono plays on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series.

On Sunday, take a day trip to Baltimore for the 45th Annual Bach Marathon, hear Caroline Oltmanns on the Tri-C Classical Piano series, catch the Cleveland Composers Guild’s 60th anniversary concert from the Maltz PAC, virtually attend a recital by organist Steven Young in Huron or by the Strasera Duo at Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran arts series, or hear the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra’s Early Music Day Concert.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

Overshadowing the birth of Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on March 20, 1915, and the 1948 duel on that date between CBS and NBC to broadcast the first symphony orchestra concert (CBS won by 90 minutes with a Philadelphia Orchestra program, and NBC was the runner up with a Toscanini-led NBC Symphony performance), German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685.

Bach’s output was so extensive that there’s no paucity of music to recommend to mark his birthday, But because he was occasionally called upon to create birthday or name-day cantatas for his employers, let’s spin his cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd, BWV 208, written for the 31st birthday of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels in February, 1713. Here’s a complete performance led by Helmuth Rilling.

It’s fun to run down a list of available arrangements of the most famous movement in BWV 208, “Schafe können sicher weiden,” or “Sheep may safely graze.” The original, sung by the character of Pales, is a charmingly simple thing scored for soprano and continuo with two obligato recorders.

Although it’s most frequently performed by pianists including Leon Fleischer, Lang Lang and Gina Alice, and Murray Perahia, you can also find the “Sheep” aria in versions sung by Kirsten Flagstad, played by classical guitarist Christopher Parkening, or the Canadian Brass, or in a full orchestral elaboration by Leopold Stokowski. What would Bach have thought? Had he lived in the 21st century, would he have earned royalties?

Organizations over the globe have scheduled Bach Birthday Bashes this weekend. Here’s one from the South Dakota Chapter of the American Guild of Organists that took place last Friday evening. Watch here and view the complete program here.

DIARY: Friday, March 19, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

MEMORIALIZING JAMES LEVINE:

More than one commentator has struggled to respond to news of the death of longtime Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine in Palm Springs, California on March 9 (an event that went unreported for several days). Read the New York Times Obituary by Anthony Tommasini here, the Washington Post obituary by Tim Page here, and a blog post by Philadelphia Inquirer critic David Patrick Sterns here.

ONLINE TODAY:

Former Clevelander Nathan Carterette plays a recital on Pittsburgh’s Chatham University Friday Afternoon Musicales today at 4 pm, with works by J.S. Bach, Schubert, Debusy, Medtner & Rachmaninoff. The video will be available for on-demand viewing indefinitely.

CityMusic Cleveland will broadcast an online version of its “New Voices” program featuring Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, Denise Ondishko’s Cloudshifts, Elena Ruehr’s String Quartet No. 3 & Amy Beach’s String Quartet Op. 89 at 7 pm in advance of a live, in-person performance at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus on Saturday.

Also at 7:00 pm, the CIM Orchestra goes online with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, Op. 20, and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10, led by student conductor Duo Shen.

And a few in-person seats for Apollo’s Fire’s Tapestry program in Avon Lake are still available for this evening, and seats may open up for Saturday and Sunday at First Baptist in Shaker Heights. If you can’t attend a live show, there’s a video in the works.

Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Not a busy day for Almanac Entries. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev was born on March 19, 1873 in Novgorod, followed exactly one year later by German composer Max Reger in Brand, Bavaria.

The history of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1909-1929 is featured in a documentary film from the National Gallery of Art. “He persuaded, cajoled, and charmed the greatest talents of the early twentieth century to join his company. Artists (Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse), composers (Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie), choreographers (Michel Fokine and George Balanchine), and dancers (Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova) all collaborated to realize Diaghilev’s dream of a seamless fusion of the arts.” Watch the film here.

Until his death in 1916, Max Reger enjoyed a distinguished career as composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and teacher. Among his students were Rudolf Serkin and George Szell.

Reger’s organ works combine classical forms with Romantic rhetoric, and his complex scores can be thick with notes.

Follow along with the score to his Variationen und Fuge über ein Originalthema, Op. 73, played by Dutch organist Willem Tanke. The performer describes the work as “A forty minute battle with immense technical difficulties and emotions.” He describes his approach to performing such works on his website.

“From when I was a student I based my ideal of playing the organ on a passage from Forkel’s biography on Bach (1802), in which he points out that the great man achieved a maximum of expression with a minimum of movements of hands and feet only. Achieving more by doing less became a guideline for my daily practice and I recorded Messiaen’s complete organ works and monumental compositions of Max Reger in this spirit. I call this way of making music “The art of playing with relaxed precision” or—on a spiritual level, as a way of submitting the ego—”The Art of Doing Nothing”.

For another Reger performance, watch Ken Cowan navigate the Phantasie über Wie schön leucht’ uns der Morgenstern, Op. 40 on the Fisk-Rosales organ in Edythe Bates Old Recital Hall at Rice University in Houston.

DIARY: Thursday, March 18, 2021

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by Mike Telin

TODAY ON THE WEB:

Happy Thursday.

At 12:00 pm it’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV 104.9 Ideastream & on the web. Music Director Franz Welser-Möst leads performances of Sibelius’ Tapiola, Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari as well as Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.

At 7:00 pm, the Local 4 Music Fund: Tuning in series continues with the Beta Collective — Brad Wagner, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet, Chris Cole, alto sax, tenor sax, vocoder, Paul Ferguson, trombone, Theron Brown, keyboards, melodica, Aidan Plank, bass, Anthony Taddeo, drums, percussion, and Dan Bruce, guitar. The free event is live streamed from the Bop Stop. Click here at start time.

A half-hour later at 7:30 pm, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble Les Délices debuts Women of Genius (photo). The program features Music and poetry of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marie de Louvencourt, Mme. Duval, Julie Pinel, Marie-Françoise Certain & Marguerite Louise Couperin.

You can enjoy a pre-concert conversation with art historian and National Gallery of Art curator Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. The topic: female visual artists of the Baroque period and their powerful interpretations of the Judith story, including a focus on paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.

Read our preview here and our review here.  The program will be available on demand through March 29. Click here for tickets and connection details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today we celebrate the birth of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1844 in Tikhvin. Who doesn’t remember the first time they heard Scheherazade?

Other noteworthy births include ragtime composer Frank Losey in 1822 in Rochester, New York, and composer Clara Edwards in 1887 in Blue Earth County, Minnesota.

There was a time when the American music industry focused its attention on the sale of printed music rather than on the sales of recordings. On March 18, 1911, Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band was copyrighted and quickly sold over one-million copies of sheet music.

And on this day in 1927, legendary composer of musical theater John Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri.

A classically trained musician, Kander studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and later at Columbia University, where his teachers included Douglas Moore, Jack Beeson, and Otto Luening.

Early in his career he served as rehearsal pianist and then dance arranger for the original productions of Gypsy and Irma la Douce. He composed his first Broadway score, A Family Affair, with lyricists and book writers (and brothers) James and William Goldman.

Kander began his nearly four-decade-long career with lyricist Fred Ebb with the 1965 musical Flora, The Red Menace, starring the young Liza Minnelli. The song-writing duo (photo: Kander on the left) went on to write such classic musicals as Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spiderwoman, along with many other shows.

Since the passing of Fred Ebb in 2004, Kander has continued to write musicals with other lyricists. He composed an eloquent art song, The Ballad of Sullivan Ballou, for soprano Renée Fleming.

Some of this information came in an email from music critic Donald Rosenberg, who has a special interest in American musical theater and has written about Kander. “He’s really nice,” Rosenberg wrote. “I interviewed him in Oberlin a bunch of years back when the college did a production of Flora, The Red Menace.”

Summarizing his music, Rosenberg noted that Kander “exemplifies a Broadway composer steeped in classical traditions while also being fully versed in popular musical forms (jazz, Latin, folk) that have long been woven into musical theater. He can be effortlessly hip, as in the vamps that run through many of his scores (think All That Jazz) or lyrical (the waltzing “You” from The Visit is particularly haunting).”

During his prolific career, Kander has amassed numerous awards including three Tonys, two Emmys, and two Grammys. In 1991 he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1991 and along with his long-time collaborator Fred Ebb, was the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors award for Lifetime Achievement.

Click here to watch a video interview with Kander produced by the Dramatists Guild Foundation as part of the organization’s Legacy Project.

Happy 94th, Mr. Kander!

DIARY: Wednesday, March 17, 2021

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by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Sometimes, history just works out. So it is that during Women’s History Month, and falling right in between two programs by Cleveland’s Les Délices that feature her music, we celebrate the birthday (or maybe the baptism) of French Baroque composer and harpsichordist Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, whose career included making history as the first French woman to write an opera.

Those Les Délices programs not only share the music of Jacquet de La Guerre, but also help us understand her life and career more deeply.

The SalonEra episode “Women in Music,” which premiered on Monday and remains available here until midnight tonight, includes the G-major Sarabande from her 1707 collection Pièces de clavecin. Find the 15:06 mark of that video to hear the performance by harpsichordist Byron Schenkman.

Track back a little earlier, to about 11:27, to hear Schenkman share his experience discovering the music of Jacquet de La Guerre — and indeed discovering the music of women composers, period. And rewind to 5:30 to hear Les Délices artistic director Debra Nagy introduce the episode. Nagy delves into the circumstances that helped shape what opportunities were available to composers such as Jacquet de La Guerre, whose family connections allowed her to perform for King Louis XIV at the age of five.

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm to watch “Women of Genius,” the latest program on Les Délices’ Concert Series (tickets here), which will be centered around Jacquet de La Guerre’s cantata Judith.

But in the meantime, you have your choice of articles to get yourself up to speed. In Daniel Hathaway’s preview, soprano Clara Rottsolk describes Jacquet de La Guerre as “an unparalleled dramatist, so good at taking this miniature cantata form and telling compelling stories.” Rottsolk goes on: “One often gets colorful storms or beautiful dreams in the French repertoire but not her kind of depth. She takes it to a realm where it’s both psychological and cinematic.”

And in a review of the concert video, Mike Telin describes a “tour-de-force” performance of Judith, adding that Rottsolk’s “pure voice shudders at the thought of taking revenge, and turns majestic as Judith triumphs and Israel is saved.”

DEATH OF JAMES LEVINE:

On a more complicated note, reports have emerged today that conductor James Levine is dead, having passed away on March 9 in Palm Springs, California at age 77. In an obituary for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini grapples with Levine’s legacy as “one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors until allegations of sexual abuse and harassment ended his career.”

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