Archives for April 2021

by Mike Telin

EVENTS ON TODAY’S CALENDAR:

Today’s events begin at 7:00 pm with the Overtones, Cleveland State University’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble directed by Reginald Bowens. Live streamed from the Bop Stop, the program features original arrangements and classic standards. Click here at start time. The event is free but donations are welcome.

Also at 7:00 pm, The Cleveland Orchestra debuts In Focus Episode 9, “Musical Magicians.” Franz Welser-Möst leads John Corigliano’s Conjurer: Concerto for Percussion with Marc Damoulakis (pictured) as soloist, and Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 2 in G, performed by string orchestra. Filmed March 25-27 at Severance Hall, the concert is free to subscribers and patrons who have donated $300 or more to the Orchestra. Premium subscriptions are available. View on-demand through May 13. Click here to watch.

Check our Concert Listings page for more information.  

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today we honor the births of four luminaries in music. On this day in 1916, violinist, conductor, and teacher Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City. In 1922 jazz bassist Charles Mingus entered the world in Nogales, Arizona, and 22 years later in 1944, conductor and musicologist Joshua Rifkin also made his debut in New York City.

However — today we will turn our attention to a true maverick of the music world, Dame Ethel Mary Smyth. Born on this date in 1858 in Sidcup, Kent, England, Smyth was a noted composer during her lifetime. Her catalogue includes songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestra, chorus, and operas. Still her compositions were often criticised for not measuring up to those of her male counterparts. In spite of being marginalised, she was the first female composer to be granted a damehood, the equivalent for women of a knighthood.

Smyth began studying composition with Alexander Ewing at age seventeen. After a long battle with her father, she was granted permission to further her studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she became a student of Carl Reinecke and later privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While in Leipzig she was introduced to  Dvořák, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann, and Brahms.

Smyth’s compositions of note include a Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra, the Mass in D and two operas. The Wreckers is thought to be the “most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten,” and for more than a century, Der Wald was the only work by a woman composer to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera.

In 1910, Smyth put composing aside and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU), which advocated for  women’s suffrage. Giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause, she was often seen in the company of the movement’s leader, Emmeline Pankhurst. And Smyth’s The March of the Women became the anthem of the suffragette movement.

In 1912, Pankhurst incited WPSU members to throw stones at the windows of all politicians’ houses who opposed a woman’s right to vote, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 100 women.

Throughout her life Smyth was active in sports. An avid equestrian and tennis player in her youth, she was also a passionate golfer and a member of the ladies’ section of Woking Golf Club. After her death in 1944 at the age of 86, her brother spread her ashes in the woods near the club. Click here to watch The North American Co-Premiere of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Prison (A Mini-Documentary). It’s well worth ten minutes of your time.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

At 7:00 pm via livestream from the Bop Stop, the Cleveland Chamber Collective presents “Music of America.” Built around the diverse styles and influences in the musical landscape of the USA, the program includes music for strings and piano by Reena Esmail, Andrea Clearfield, Yaz Lancaster, Ty Alan Emerson, and Saad Haddad.

More music for strings and piano arrives at that same hour, when CIM shares a virtual faculty recital of music by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.

And at 7:30, in person, Apollo’s Fire gives the first performance of “Virtuosity: Fireworks from J.S. Bach” at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights — though according to their website, tickets are sold out not only for tonight, but for the whole run of concerts through April 25. If you missed out, there is a waitlist. (Pictured above: soloist Amanda Forsythe, soprano.)

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEW PODCASTS:

In the podcasting category, the Akron Symphony’s Deep River: The Legacy of the Spirituals continues with a listening session featuring works by Morton Gould, William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Margaret Bonds. Listen to episode three here.

And the latest episode of Les Délices’ LD Music Meditations, this one titled “A Meditation on Change and Malleability,” features Diane Kendig’s poem Writ in Water, read by Leon Bibb, with music by Henry Purcell. Listen here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

One of the great 20th-century viola players, Emanuel Vardi, was born in Jerusalem on this date in 1915, as was American composer Randall Thompson (1899, New York City). But we’ll focus our attention today on a living composer who also shares that birthday: Hong Kong-born, Canadian composer Melissa Hui, a member of the faculty at McGill University and the recipient of a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, who turns 55.

One of the most intriguing projects of her career is the hour-long Pimooteewin (The Journey), which has been billed as the first opera written and sung in Cree (though Hui thinks of it more as an oratorio). It was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada and premiered in 2008.

Sadly, no recording seems to be available. (In one strange way, the transition to virtual for arts organizations during the pandemic has spoiled us — we expect to be able to find anything online now.) But perhaps it’s worth digging into the work descriptively to give you an idea of it, and perhaps to spark a new production in the future.

The story tells of Weesageechak (the Trickster) and Migisoo (the Eagle), who travel to the land of the dead and try to bring back the spirits of their loved ones, only for the dead souls to escape and return to their fellow spirits.

In addition to mining Cree storytelling traditions to write the text, librettist Tomson Highway drew upon a dream he had about his brother, who had died of AIDS-related causes in the ‘90s. In the dream, they were together in a boat on the way to an island shrouded in mist. “On that island, only one of us was allowed to get off and it was him,” Highway has said. “I had no choice but to go back to the mainland in that boat by myself…” (Source: Robin Elliott’s essay “Creating Pimooteewin” from the book Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures.)

In that same essay, Elliott goes on to explore the music, describing Hui’s “haunting, somber score for the work which evokes the land of the dead” and the sparse scoring — “the warm sounds of the violin and viola are absent from much of the work.” Speaking of scoring, in addition to the tenor and soprano soloists, choir, flutes, oboe, and strings, the percussion section includes both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal instruments.

As for the challenge of bringing together music and text, Hui notes that she “needed to listen intently to the rhythm of the Cree language” in order to “emphasize the right syllables in each word” and complement “the rhythm of the text.”

Finally, one visual element for us to imagine: the use of kuroko from kabuki theater, as well as puppetry, all choreographed by Michael Greyeyes, with the goal of making the story more understandable to those who don’t speak Cree.

I’ve come across two reviews of performances of Pimooteewin, both in productions put on by Soundstream Canada. In 2008 for Classical FM, Paula Citron praised Hui’s “absolutely stunning” score but was less enthused about the libretto and the production in general. On the other hand, in 2019, when the work was featured in a double-bill of Indigenous-language operas, John Terauds wrote for the Toronto Star that Pimooteewin “is one of those deftly created works that suspends time as it tells its story, and the excellent performances incite us to hope that we won’t have to leave this alternate universe for a while.”

Here’s hoping that some company out there allows us to enter into that universe sometime soon, either live or online.

by Daniel Hathaway

LOCAL GROUPS ANNOUNCE PLANS:

Quire Cleveland Artistic Director Jay White announced in an email to its patrons today that the professional choral ensemble will resume a full schedule of in-person concerts in December, 2021. Details here. Quire’s last concert, Journey Home: Finding Unity After Loss, recorded at St. Vitus Church on February 29, 2020, will be broadcast on WCLV’s Cleveland Ovations program on Wednesday, April 21at 8:00 PM. Tune in to 104.9 FM or listen online.

Cleveland Chamber Choir will release a pre-recorded concert of madrigals on May 15 at 7:30 pm contrasting settings of the same poetry composed centuries apart. Scott MacPherson will lead the professional ensemble in music by Dolores White and Adolphus Hailstork, as well as settings by Vittoria Aleotti, Thomas Weelkes, Orlando Gibbons, Josquin, John Bennet, Sir John Stainer, Morton Lauridsen, Johannes Brahms, and Andrew Rindfleisch. More information here.

The Canton Symphony will return to the stage after a 15-month silence on May 21 at 7:30 pm with a hybrid concert of Mendelssohn and Mozart led by Gerhardt Zimmermann, presented for a live audience in Umstattd Hall as well as broadcast online. A limited number of attendees will be permitted with the customary health protocols in place. Details here.

Western Reserve Chorale has scheduled a virtual performance of “In Her Voice, songs of hope, gratitude, and comfort celebrating the poetry of women” for release on June 4, 2021. The event will incorporate eight new recordings by the Chorale, led by David Gilson, with art provided by students from Cleveland Heights High School, and poetry readings by local students.

Les Délices: Music Meditations will launch this week in conjunction with National Poetry Month. Available as a podcast, each three to six-minute episode will feature readings of classic or contemporary poetry by residents of Northeast Ohio by veteran broadcaster Leon Bibb, along with selections from Les Délices’ archives. Details here.

HAPPENING TODAY:

Earth and Air String Orchestra releases a farewell concert featuring violinists Andrew Sords and Mari Sato, London’s Wigmore Hall broadcasts the first of two Bach recitals by controversial harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, Gordon Square Classical Concerts present Ryan Charles Raymer’s Suite of 33 Miniature Solo Pieces That Fit on the Front of a Postcard, Akron’s Tuesday Musical brings bassist Edgar Meyer to E.J. Thomas Hall for an in-person recital, and Carnegie Hall presents “Metamorphosis” with Third Coast Percussion and Movement Art, illustrating “universal themes cast through the experiential lens of young Black men growing up in America today.” Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On April 20, 1941, British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born in Fontmell Magna, Dorset, where he grew up with the famous Elias Gottlob Haussmann portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach hanging on the wall — lent to the Gardiner family for safe keeping during World War II  by Walter Jenke, who had bought it in a curiosity shop in Breslau. (The painting was later acquired by William H. Scheide, the Princeton-based Bach scholar, who transferred it to the Leipzig Bach Archives in April of 2015.)

Gardiner went on to study at King’s College, Cambridge, where he began his conducting career with the Monteverdi Vespers in King’s Chapel in 1964, and in subsequent years established the Monteverdi Orchestra, which took up period instruments in 1998, and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique, which has specialized in 19th century repertoire. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

Tonight at 7:30 pm, as part of its SalonEra series, Les Délices will explore “The Orpheus Myth” through different artistic interpretations of that story over the centuries, including music by Monteverdi, Charpentier, and Rameau, as well as Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus. Joining host Debra Nagy are soprano Michele Kennedy, tenor Jason McStoots, and musicologist Susan McClary. Click here at start time, or watch on-demand for 48 hours. It’s free, but a $10 donation is suggested.

Speaking of Les Délices, today is also the last day to watch “Machaut’s Lai of the Fountain” on their ticketed Concert Series. Read Daniel Hathaway’s review, and watch the concert here.

And Carnegie Hall delves into Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk today through two events. Learn about the opera at 5:00 through a presentation titled “The Tragedy of Katerina Ismailov,” then watch a rebroadcast of a 2006 Dutch National Opera production at 8:00 pm.

More details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Three particularly notable birthday anniversaries to celebrate today. Two of these figures were born in New York City: Kay Swift (b. 1897, the first woman to write the complete score to a Broadway musical) and Murray Perahia (b. 1947, considered one of the greatest living pianists).

And third, an underrecognized Parisian composer on whom we’ll train our focus today. Born on this date in 1892 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, southeast of the City of Light, Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of the post-World War I group of composers known as Les Six. Her varied output included operas, ballets, film music, concertos, songs, and orchestral and chamber music.

One of the best ways to celebrate her career is by listening to her Le marchand d’oiseaux. Full of fresh-flavored neoclassicism, it’s no wonder that it was the Ballet Suédois’ most frequently performed ballet in the 1920s. A performance led by Perry So (with perhaps the BBC Welsh National Orchestra, as one commenter suggests) is available on YouTube.

Another highlight is her impressionistic and deeply atmospheric Ballade for piano and orchestra, heard here in a recording by the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern, led by Pablo González and featuring Florian Uhlig as soloist.

It’s also important to understand how sexism obstructed Tailleferre’s career and legacy, a topic that Timothy Diovanni (now an arts writer for Dallas Morning News) explored in two articles written for Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy in 2017.

In the first essay, Diovanni delves into the men in her personal life who impeded her artistic progress: her discouraging, hostile, and verbally abusive father, as well as her two husbands, whose behavior ranged from jealous to controlling, threatening, and violent.

The second covers the ways that critics and historians have described her work — often dismissively, using gender-coded language, and training their focus on her appearance rather than her music.

In history, it’s very easy to oversimplify the lives of the characters who appear along the way, so that they barely seem like real people at all. Indeed, many well-regarded encyclopedias do just that with their short and useful summaries that, in the end, leave out so much about a person’s life. On that note, Diovanni makes an important point near the conclusion of his first article:

Tailleferre is not just an eleven-letter name in a music history textbook, but rather she was a real, living woman who had to negotiate social pressures and overcome tremendous injustices.

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE TODAY:

This weekend, and for the first time since 1933, the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival will be presented as a series of online events, beginning tonight at 7 with a virtual concert honoring cello professor Regina Mushabac (pictured), who will retire at the end of her 46th year at BW.

At noon, sit in on a master class by multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey via a Zoon webinar from Youngstown State University.

Two broadcasts from New York’s Carnegie Hall include Reiner Moritz’s documentary about Shostakovich (at 3:00 pn) and Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli in “American Voices,” a program of works by Black and Native American composers (at 7:00 pm).

Buffalo Symphony music director JoAnn Falletta leads the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in a 7:00 pm online concert of works by Nathaniel Heyder (a premiere), Debussy, Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer (The Art of Sailing at Dawn) and Stravinsky.

And this evening’s events conclude with opera: a 2017 production of Dvořák’s Rusalka from The MET, and Caroline Shaw’s We Need to Talk from Opera Philadelphia.

Check our Concert Listings for links and connect!

INTERESTING READS:

The Detroit Symphony was uniquely situated to move to an online presence when the pandemic reached our shores a year ago, having made its first foray into webcasting on April 10, 2007 as part of the strategy for renewing itself after a six-month work stoppage. Read about what took place over that decade in the Orchestra’s news article “Precedented Times: 10 years of Webcasting at the DSO.”

Organist Paul Jacobs, featured in the Poulenc Concerto in The Cleveland Orchestra’s In Focus 8, is highlighted this week in a newsletter from the public relations firm of Hemsing and Associates. Follow the links to read Jacobs’ recent Wall Street Journal article about contemporary music for the organ, and to catch up on his activities.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Among its many quirks, the ClevelandClassical.com Diary is a rich source of cultural trivia. Did you know that American silent film icon Charlie Chaplin was actually born in England on this date in 1889, composed most of the music for his own films, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975? (“Sir Charles!”)

Or that American composer Henry (Enrico) Mancini was a native Clevelander, born on this date in 1924 in Little Italy, whose first instrument was the piccolo? Or that he auditioned (successfully) for Juilliard in 1942 with a Beethoven sonata and an improvisation on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day?” Or that he made a cameo appearance in the first season of Frasier as a call-in patient to Dr. Frasier Crane’s radio show, followed by the playing of Moon River?

Tuck those useful factoids away while celebrating Chaplin’s life in this 90-minute documentary and viewing his 1931 film, City Lights, for which The Cleveland Orchestra played Chaplin’s score under the big screen in Severance Hall in March of 2021, William Eddins conducting.

Tunes from Mancini’s scores to such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther are surely still circulating in our ears. The latter is played here by a combo with the composer at the piano, and Swiss organist Guy Bovet was moved to make the theme into a cheeky polyphonic piece in his Fuga sopra un sogetto.

Final tribute of the day: the birth of Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks in Aizpute on this date in 1946. Cleveland Orchestra solo English horn Robert Walters performed his concerto for that expressive instrument with Andrey Boreyko and the Orchestra in February of 2011, and talked about it in a preview. And Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla, who has appeared twice on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series, plays Vasks’ The Sonata of Loneliness here.

by Mike Telin

EVENTS ON TODAY’S CALENDAR:

Today’s events begin at 7:00 pm with the Local 4 Music Fund’s “Tuning In” series. Livestreamed from the Bop Stop, the program features the jazz trio of Barbara Knight (vocals), Phil Lantry (piano), and Tim Powell, bass, in music for jazz trio. Click here at start time. The concert is free, but donations are welcome.

A half-hour later at 7:30 pm the CWRU Symphonic Winds will present a Spring Virtual Concert as part of the Silver Hall Series, streamed from the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Reserve your free tickets here.

Other offerings of note include the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at 7:20 pm, The Philadelphia Orchestra at 8:00 pm, and pianist Jeremy Denk (pictured) on Cal Performances at 10:00 pm. Check our Concert Listings page for more information.  

IN THE NEWS:

Oberlin Conservatory has announced that its successes in implementing online education over the past year have given rise to entirely new opportunities for virtual learning developed for a worldwide audience. This summer marks the launch of Oberlin Conservatory Global, which begins with a series of courses designed for music students, teachers, and lifelong learners of all backgrounds.

“Through the effort and expertise of countless members of our campus community, Oberlin rose to meet those challenges in ways that have inspired us anew to reconsider previously held ideas of what music education in the 21st century can look like,” Conservatory Dean William Quillen said in a press release.

Initial OC Global offerings include programs dedicated to music theory and pedagogy, a guide to technology-assisted musical collaboration, topics in advanced string playing, and a course dedicated to the enduring impact of 1970s rock and roll. They vary in duration from four days to six weeks, and sessions take place primarily in the evening. Fees range from $150 to $250 per program.

Click here to learn more about Oberlin Conservatory Global.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

We begin today’s birthday celebrations back in 1688 when German violinist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch entered this world on April 15 in Buttelstedt, Thuringia.

Fasch’s work took him to Prague, where for two years he served as Kapellmeister and court composer to Count Morzin. In 1722, he accepted the same position at Zerbst, where he remained until his death. Also in 1722, Fasch was recruited for the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, but withdrew his name for consideration. The position was later filled by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach.

Fasch, a prolific composer whose music was often performed in his lifetime, wrote cantatas, concertos, symphonies, and chamber music. Sadly, most of his catalogue has been lost.

Johann Friedrich Fasch did leave us with a lovely bassoon sonata. Click here to hear the 4th movement performed by Katarzyna Zdybel (bassoon) and Katarzyna Kluczewska (piano).

This date in 1894 saw the birth of American blues singer Bessie Smith in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Nicknamed the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was one of, if not the most popular female blues singers of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

After the death of her parents, Smith and her siblings earned money by performing on street corners. She later toured in a group that included Ma Rainey before setting out on her own. Smith was signed to  Columbia Records in the 1920s, and her songs such as  Jail House Blues, Prison Blues, and Send Me to the Lectric Chair addressed social issues including chain gangs, the convict lease system and capital punishment. Unfortunately her life was cut short when she was killed in a car accident at the age of 43. Click here to listen to a 1929 recording of Smith singing St. Louis Blues.

We conclude today’s birthday celebrations in the year 1924 when English conductor and violinist Sir Neville Marriner entered the world in Lincoln. As a violinist, Marriner played with the Philharmonia and London Symphony orchestras. He also performed with the chamber orchestras of Reginald Jacques, Boyd Neel, and the London Mozart Players.

Marriner is best known as the founder of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, of which the ensemble’s discography is legendary. He was also the founder and first music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, and principal conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. Click here to read more about his productive career, and here to listen to Marriner conduct the ASMF in the Orchestral Suites of J.S. Bach.