Archives for July 2021

by Jarrett Hoffman

GUITAR SOCIETY NEWS:

As we wait for the organization’s final three Creative Fusion videos to emerge in the last week of July and first week of August, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society has made an announcement to tide us over: the lineup for this fall’s International Series, set to be presented in person.

The season opens with the free Showcase Concert on September 18 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, featuring a triple billing of artists from around the region: the Gruca White Ensemble (guitarist Robert Gruca and flutist Linda White), guitarist Andy Poxon with violinist Jeanelle Brierley, and Cincinnati composer and guitarist Jeremy Collins.

That will be followed by solo recitals from Celil Refik Kaya (October 23) and Andrea González Caballero (November 20) at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Tickets for those two events are available here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Russian composer Anton Arensky, German flutist and composer Johann Quantz, and English composer and folksong collector George Butterworth turned up in the calendar last year on July 12. This year we’ll turn our attention to American clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, born on this date in 1942 in Omaha.

A two-time Grammy winner, Stoltzman has also achieved some important firsts among the woodwind family, and of his instrument in particular. He was the first wind player to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, and he gave the first clarinet recitals in the history of Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. He’s also a rare breed as a solo clarinetist rather than an orchestral player.

Acclaimed in both the classical and jazz realms, for a long time Stoltzman struggled with being musically categorized. As he told Kathy Wilson of Cincinnati-based publication CityBeat in 2000, “When I was younger, RCA would say, ‘We have to figure out what bin you’re in.’”

Musicians who occupy multiple genres are often asked how they change gears when the time calls for it. “What I like to feel is that I don’t switch from a so-called Classical person to a Jazz person, but that I listen to what the composer is saying,” he told Wilson in that same interview.

On that occasion, Stoltzman was returning to Cincinnati, the city where he graduated high school (one of two significant regional connections — he’s also an Ohio State grad), to join the Cincinnati Symphony for Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, which moves from a smooth, elegant, and beautiful first movement to a jaunty, modernist, and jazz-influenced second, with a fascinating cadenza bridging the gap stylistically.

About that cadenza, he said, “…you turn around the corner, and that’s where Copland basically says, ‘Kick it up a notch.’ That changes how you’re going to play…how you’re going to use your tongue, your breath, your bravado.” Listening to the composer — and responding.

Click here to watch him perform that work with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony in 1993, in a recording full of incredible playing, engaging videography, and old-fashioned hairdos. (The cadenza begins at 6:25.)

Chamber music is what won Stoltzman both of his Grammys — in 1983, Brahms’ Clarinet Sonatas with pianist Richard Goode (listen to the first movement of No. 2 here), and in 1996, the Clarinet Trios of Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart with pianist Emanuel Ax and cellist Yo-Yo Ma (first movement of the Brahms here).

And for something jazzy, check out Chick Corea’s Marika Groove, written in 2012 for Stolzman and virtuoso marimbist Mika Yoshida (now his wife, Mika Stoltzman). In this live recording, they’re joined by drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Eddie Gomez, percussionist Duke Gadd, and guitarist John Tropea.

by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:

On Saturday, Ohio Light Opera presents a cabaret of songs from musicals the company has produced since 1979 (outdoors in Wooster’s Public Square), Cleveland International Piano Competition releases the Round 1, Session 3 videos of performances by Vitaly Starikov (25, Russia), Anastasiya Magamedova (23, United States/Tajikistan), Ziyu Liu (22, China), Daria Parkhomenko (29, Russia), and Rafael Skorka (32, Israel), and Apollo’s Fire features violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in showpieces by Telemann and J.S. Bach in Avon Lake.

On Sunday, Cleveland International Piano Competition contestants Bowen Li (24, China), Roman Lopatynskyi (27, Ukraine), Martín García García (24, Spain), Svetlana Andreeva (32, Russia), and Byeol Kim (31, South Korea) perform via video in Round 1, Session 4, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute wraps up its concert series in Gates Mills with a program sparked by young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, The Cleveland Orchestra welcomes guests — conductor Dame Jane Glover and pianist Conrad Tao (pictured) — in its second Blossom weekend, and two orchestras perform al fresco: the Suburban Symphony in Shaker Heights, and the Akron Symphony at Hale Farm.

Details in our Concert Listings.

Just a reminder that we’ll be posting mini-reviews of the piano competition rounds soon after each session in the special CIPC section of our front page, and that once the individual round videos have debuted, they’ll remain available for viewing on the PianoCleveland website.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

On this weekend’s list of commemorations: conductor Herbert Blomstedt (born on July 11, 1927), who will conduct Beethoven at Blossom on August 1, Jerry Herman (born on July 10, 1933), composer of such Broadway hits as Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles, pianist Ferdinand Joseph Morton (a.k.a. Jelly Roll), who claimed to have invented jazz, a boast about which Gunther Schuller wrote there is “no proof to the contrary,” and Arthur Fiedler, longtime Boston Pops conductor (who died at the age of 84 on June 10, 1979). Here is some rare footage of the Boston Pops July 4, 1976 concert at the Esplanade that drew more than 600,000 people. [Read more…]