Archives for October 2021

by Daniel Hathaway

CONCERTS TODAY:

The Noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature Bangor, Maine organist Kevin Birch at the 17th-century style gallery organ in works by Sweelinck, Weckmann, Bolt, and J.S. Bach.

And tonight at 7 in University Circle, the Cleveland Institute of Music will host the touring Sphinx Virtuosi and cello soloist Thomas Mena in a program highlighting Black and Latino composers. You’ll need a free seating pass for the concert in Kulas Hall.

On the West side of town, violinist Franceca dePasquale and pianist Scott Cuellar will join the Verona Quartet for a faculty recital in Warner Concert Hall at Oberlin at 7:30 pm (concertos by Lowell Lieberman and Ernest Chausson).

And at 8 pm in Berea, if the weather holds, BW Opera will present the second of four performances of Handel’s Alcina on the front patio of the Boesel Musical Arts Center (pictured). Some 50 reserved seats ($25) come with chairs. Free seating on the lawn if you bring your own chairs or blankets.

SAVE THE DATES:

Kent State University will hold a Celebration of Life for the late Richard D. Worthing, on Saturday, October 16 at 1:00 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall. Worthing, who died in 2020, taught music theory, analysis and orchestration, served as coordinator for the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, and Assistant Dean of the College of Fine and Professional Arts, and was named Dean Emeritus upon his retirement. Details here.

The Metropolitan Opera will simulcast its October 23 matinee performance of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, its season opener, and the first title by a Black composer to be staged by the company. Click here for a list of area theaters and to reserve tickets.

The 90th episode of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival to be held from April 8-10, 2022, will feature guest appearances by the period string band ACRONYM, the Diederot Quartet, and a performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. (More information to come in January). On Wednesday, October 27 at 8 pm, WCLV 104.9 will rebroadcast the 2021 Virtual Bach Festival Mass in B Minor Retrospective.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1872, Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Yorkshire, a village after which the British composer named one of the popular hymn tunes he wrote while serving as editor of The English Hymnal, published in 1906. (Listen to an arrangement made and played by Todd Wilson with the choir and instrumentalists of First-Pilgrim Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2014.)

The range of RVW’s work was vast. To suggest just two radically different compositions that reflect his lifelong interests, let’s choose Along the Field and A Vision of Aeroplanes.

The former represents his close association with English folksong, of which he collected numerous examples and made arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments. He so internalized that repertoire that he could write easily in the style, as in his settings of Edwardian poet A.E. Housman in Along the Field, simply but eloquently scored for solo voice and violin. Listen here to a performance of the cycle by soprano Marie Henriett Reinhold and violinist Dietrich Reinhold.

The other extreme finds Vaughan Williams exploring the full range of drama at his disposal as an early 20th century composer. Orchestrally, this expresses itself in his symphonies and in such works as Job, a Masque for Dancing, with its frightening musical depictions of Satan, but otherwise in his charmingly titled setting of the Vision of Ezekiel from the Hebrew scriptures for organ and chorus. The organ part is as fearsome for the keyboardist as the musical declamation is for the singers. Stay with it to the end in this performance by the University of Cambridge’s Clare College Choir.

And it was on this date in 1887 that Australian soprano Mrs. Helen Porter Armstrong made her sensational operatic debut in Brussels. We know her best by her stage name, Nellie Melba, as well as for two culinary items named in her honor, Melba Toast, and Peach Melba. Here’s a restored studio recording of the celebrated diva singing the finale of Act I of La traviata.

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 3:00 at the Maltz, the Case/University Circle Symphony Orchestra, led by Kathleen Horvath, plays an all-Czech program of music by Dvořák and Smetana. And at 8, BW Opera and director Scott Skiba present Handel’s Alcina in an outdoor production on the steps of the Boesel Musical Arts Center. Details and links in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day is the first one to be recognized by proclamation of a sitting U.S. president.

“For generations, Federal policies systematically sought to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures,” President Biden wrote on Friday. “Today, we recognize Indigenous peoples’ resilience and strength as well as the immeasurable positive impact that they have made on every aspect of American society.”

Let’s reflect on two recent and local musical events to honor Indigenous culture of the Americas.

We begin this past summer with Mexican guitarist, composer, and singer Anastasia Sonaranda (above, middle), who was one of three guest artists involved in the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s Creative Fusion virtual series.

Through her residency, Sonaranda sought to illustrate the diversity of styles in Mexican music. The waltzlike “son istmeño” style, developed in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (which mostly lies in the Mexican states of Veracruz and Oaxaca), was aptly represented by La Llorona, a popular folk song that originated in that same region.

A key element of the arrangement by Sonaranda and Rodrigo Lara Alonso (educator and Latinx Community Liaison for the Guitar Society) is a text that was written for the occasion by Irma Pineda Santiago (above, left), a Oaxacan-born poet who is also a 2020-22 United Nations representative to Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The poem, Gunaa runna, is written in the Indigenous language of Isthmus Zapotec or Diidxazá. The Zapotec group of around 50 languages is spoken by 490,000 people, according to the 2020 census, the majority of them in Oaxaca, with the Isthmus area being among the most proud in maintaining that tongue.

Given that the poem reflects on the figure of La Llorona (literally “the weeping woman”), it’s helpful to know the basics of the folklore in advance: a woman has drowned her children, then herself — for various reasons depending on the particular variation of the story — and now roams as a ghost mourning them.

Now, watch the video, which begins with Santiago in recitation — songlike in itself given the tonal aspect of the Zapotec languages — before introducing the musical soloists: on guitar Sonaranda, and on voice Martha Toledo Mar (above, right), herself a Zapotec singer-songwriter from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

You’ll also hear over 100 guest musicians: students from CCGS Education and from the Orquesta Juvenil de Guitarras de la Ciudad de México, as well as amateur and professional guitarists from Cleveland and Mexico.

Moving north, let’s end by revisiting Les Délices’ September 2020 SalonEra episode “Recovering Roots.” The program shone a spotlight on baritone Jonathon Adams, whose ancestry can be traced back to two groups of Indigenous people primarily from what is now Canada: the Métis (themselves a mix of Indigenous and European — mostly French — descent) and the Cree.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Live music is back in a big way this weekend, beginning with Oberlin’s Opening Festival, “Music, Sports, and the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece,” the third annual cycle of themed kickoff concerts shepherded by violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson (pictured) with input from his faculty colleagues. Read an article by Erich Burnett here, and either join the four-concert festival in person or watch online Saturday and Sunday at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm. In between, the theme is developed in symposia at 4 pm each day as well as in a listening party on Saturday at 10 pm when Conservatory students and Oberlin Athletics varsity team captains share their favorite music playlists from Warner Concert Hall.

Also on Saturday evening, the Stow Symphony plays its fall concert in Tallmadge.

Also on Sunday, the Chagrin Studio Orchestra continues its run of Carousel performances at 2, At 3, you have your choice of the CIM Orchestra at Severance Music Center under new conductor Carlos Kalmar, Cleveland Composers Guild at First Baptist, the CWRU Symphonic Winds at the Maltz PAC, MusiCLE’s Porchester Concert at the Cozad-Bates House, or the Akropolis Reed Quintet from the University of Michigan in Guzzetta Hall at Akron U.

But there’s more: on Sunday at 4, the Cavani Quartet continues its Beyond Beethoven cycle at the Music Settlement, and organist-composer Mark Thewes performs at First Church in Painesville. At 7:30, the Canton Symphony breaks its long silence with a concert of music by Ibert, Stravinsky, Haydn, and Margarer Brouwer’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn.

See our Concert Listings for details and links to live streams.

INTERESTING READS:

In last weekend’s Diary, we linked to a Van Magazine article about a recent attempt to complete Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony using AI. A followup review by Jan Swafford considers the success of the undertaking.

In the end, what were the creators of the AI Tenth Symphony actually trying to do? Did they want to create a piece that would be added to the Beethoven repertoire, played by orchestras everywhere? I hope that they weren’t attempting something that futile. Were they more modestly trying, like the creators of Watson and Deep Blue, to demonstrate the potential of computers to think faster and more pointedly than humans in mimicking human endeavors? If so, I’ll concede that they more or less succeeded: After an impressive feat of programming by its human proprietors, AI produced something that sounds unquestionably like a piece of music, only a gangly and forgettable one.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Earlier this week, the Michigan Daily reported that University of Michigan composition professor Bright Sheng had been removed from teaching an undergraduate class following the screening in a composition seminar of the 1965 version of Shakespeare’s Othello where actor Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface. Read the article here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Meet, if you haven’t already, two composers with Cleveland connections who were born on October 9 in 1869 and 1922 respectively.

Hearing a performance of Tannhäuser at the age of 18 inspired Cleveland-born Henry Lawrence Freeman to compose opera, and by his death in 1954, he had written scores for at least 23 titles, 21 of which are preserved in manuscript at Columbia University. He also founded two opera companies — one at the age of 22 in Denver that bore his name, and the Negro Grand Opera in 1920 in New York. The Martyr — the first opera to be produced by an all-black company, was staged in Chicago in 1893 and in Cleveland in 1894. [Read more…]

by Mike Telin

HAPPENING TODAY:

Available beginning today: Les Délices: Song of Orpheus, Hannah De Priest, soprano, Jonathan Woody, baritone, Shelby Yamin, violin, Debra Nagy, oboe, Rebecca Reed, gamba & cello & Mark Edwards, harpsichord. Woody and De Priest recount the story of Orpheus’ descent to the underworld, his charming of Hades, and his attempt to bring Eurydice back to the land of the living in rarely-heard cantatas by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Philippe Courbois. By Much Love Betray’d, a new instrumental work by Woody, reimagines the powerful magic of Orpheus’ lyre. Online only, available for 30 days after premiere. Click here for tickets, here for an interview with Woody, and here for an advance review.

At 7:00 pm, Birch Browning leads the CSU Symphonic Wind Ensemble in concert in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, 2100 Euclid Ave. Free.

At 7:30 pm David Ellis leads the Case Camerata Chamber Orchestra in J.S. Bach’s Contrapuncti 1, 3, 5 & 11 (Art of Fugue) & Grieg’s Holberg Suite. Maltz Performing Arts Center, 1855 Ansel Road in University Circle, Cleveland. Tickets available online.

TODAY’S ALMANAC: 

Today we celebrate cellist, cultural ambassador, and humanitarian Yo-Yo Ma (pictured above), born on this date in 1955 in Paris. Since his days as a child prodigy, Ma has carved out a remarkably diverse career — one need to look no further than his expansive discography to understand why he is a household name around the world.

Ma is a person who enjoys building relationships and finding common ground with everyone he meets. Perhaps his best-known example of using music to find that common ground is The Silk Road Project, a collaborative enterprise to promote artistic exchanges between cultures, named after the 4,000-some miles of ancient trade routes that for two millennia linked parts of Asia with Europe and encouraged the trading of art, knowledge, philosophy and religion — as well as silk and other commercial goods.

Without a doubt, Ma is committed to bringing people together through music. In a 2013 interview with this publication, Ma said, “I do believe totally in what I’m trying to do, and I feel incredibly grateful — especially during these hard economic times. The world is changing so quickly and there are people left out. But we want to make sure that while things are changing, we have a sense of where we are going that we can all mutually work towards.”

He went on to say that culture and the arts are effective because as artists you are always working toward something bigger than yourself. “It’s not just about interest groups but rather that we have common interests. And sometimes the common interests get lost when we’re only saying ‘wait, you’ve got to look at me.’”

The cellist is also a firm believer in the power of education. In a 2013 interview prior to Silk Road’s appearance in Akron, Galician bagpipes player Christina Pato pointed out that the importance of education is very strong and the ensemble is constantly scheduling educational activities. “Watching Yo-Yo work has been an inspiration to all of us. He is constantly there worrying about everything,” Pato says. “Even in the middle of a long tour, he arrives at schools at 9 am to make things happen. He works with all the children and brings joy and happiness. It’s great to have a mentor like him.” [Read more…]