Archives for November 2021

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

At noon, both in-person and live-streamed, enjoy a Trinity Brownbag “Organ and Brass Extravaganza” featuring organists Todd Wilson and Nicole Keller, and members of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra. Starting fifteen minutes later, over at Trinity Lutheran, organist Robert Myers gives “Praise and thanksgiving.” And at 7:30, CWRU Historical Performance faculty and friends, including cornettist Bruce Dickey, perform “Across the Alps.”

Details in our Concert Listings.

TWO ANGLES ON BIG CROWDS:

There is still plenty of uncertainty for cultural institutions at this point in the pandemic, including the willingness of audiences to return to in-person experiences. That question is magnified in San Francisco. “Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown,” writes Adam Nagourney in The New York Times.

A more light-hearted question regarding large gatherings: did a group of El Sistema  musicians — fingers crossed that it was more than 8,097 of them — break the world record for largest orchestra this past weekend? The Washington Post shares Regina Garcia Cano’s story for the Associated Press.

TODAY’S ALMANAC — LINCOLN IN GETTYSBURG:

According to some sources, Abraham Lincoln began his first draft of the Gettysburg Address on this date in 1863. He would go on to deliver that famous speech (“Four score and seven years ago…”) two days later during the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Of course, months earlier the city and its surroundings had been the site of the Battle of Gettysburg — a conflict horrific in its casualties but ultimately pivotal in the Union Army’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Moving forward to the 20th century, two pieces of music referencing that president or that speech had their premieres on this date. We begin with Daniel Gregory Mason’s Lincoln Symphony, which was first heard at Carnegie Hall on November 17, 1937 in the hands of John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic.

In the opinion of Olin Downes, who reviewed the premiere for The New York Times, the more heavily programmatic movements were less successful, not to mention that “accents of other composers” such as Brahms, Franck, and Elgar made it feel not entirely fresh. However, he went on, a convincing and eloquent originality could be seen in the last movement, “where the suggestion is of mood rather than events or external characteristics…”

Listen to the symphony here (cued up to the finale) from Barbirolli and New York in a recording taken from airchecks, only intended for documentation.

The other premiere belongs to David Diamond (above), whose work This Sacred Ground — commemorating the centennial of the Gettysburg Address, and the first large-scale setting of the speech — was first performed on this date in 1963 by the Buffalo Schola Cantorum, the Fredonia Choir, the St. Paul’s Cathedral Boy Choir, bass-baritone George Hoffmann, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and conductor Lukas Foss.

Again The New York Times documented the premiere. Raymond Ericson described the work as “dignified and effective — a noncontroversial, useful piece for patriotic concerts.”

Perhaps its text setting deserves a special plaudit. In program notes for a recording by the Seattle Symphony, Steven Lowe writes, “It is always a challenge for a composer to set prose, rather than the customary poetry, in a song cycle, and Diamond’s imaginative setting balances the rhythmic freedom of recitative with the structured cadence of an aria.”

Click here to listen to that recording from Seattle. The orchestra is led by Gerard Schwarz, and is joined by the Seattle Symphony Chorale, the Seattle Girls’ Choir, the Northwest Boychoir, and baritone Erich Parce.

Back to Gettysburg and the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, it’s interesting to note that Lincoln’s address was not at all slated to be the main feature of the event.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S CONCERT AGENDA:

The Tuesday noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature organist William Rehwinkel in music by Jeanne Demessieux, Jehan Alain, and himself.

Tonight’s Tuesday Musical program at 7:30 pm in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the annual Margaret Baxtresser Concert, features identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton (pictured), performing Copland’s Simple Gifts, Bernstein’s Candide for Four Hands, Paul Schoenfield’s Five Days in the life of a Manic Depressive, and John Adams’ Roll Over Beethoven.

Details in our Concert Listings.

IN THE NEWS:

In a Cleveland.com article published on Monday, Cleveland Orchestra President and CEO André Gremillet commented on the cancellation of its November 13 and 14 performances due to a suspected COVID case in the wind section. Read the article here.

INTERESTING READS:

Today’s Harvard Gazette features an interview with jazz legend Wayne Shorter ,and bassist, vocalist, and Harvard faculty professor Esperanza Spalding about their new opera, Iphigenia.

The work, “a project Shorter began thinking about in the 1950s, is a bold reimagining of the classical figure, daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. Spalding wrote the libretto for the show and is performing in it. The renowned architect Frank Gehry, who has studied and taught at Harvard, designed the sets. Eight years in the making, the opera made its worldwide debut Nov. 12 in Boston.” Read the interview here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1895, German-born American composer, violist, and educator Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau. His music having been condemned by the Nazis in 1936, Hindemith spent some time in Turkey during that decade, setting up a national music school, then making tours of the U.S. as a solo violist and performer on the viola d’amore.

He ended up teaching at Yale, where he formed the Yale Collegium Musicum, and also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later collected in the book A Composer’s World.

One of Hindemith’s most popular works, the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, was recorded twice by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here to the 1947 performance, and here to a studio recording made in 1964. Discuss!

On November 16, 1904, in his first American tour concert, English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted his choral trilogy Hiawatha in Washington, DC. The composer, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, had already debuted the first of his three cantatas on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Song of Hiawatha in 1898 at the age of 22.

Coleridge-Taylor’s music was championed in England by Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during his American tour in 1904.

Click here to watch the documentary Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912.

And on November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music. Thirty-four years later, on November 16, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the ensemble in that hall for the premiere of William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Click here for a recent performance at Bard College led by Leon Botstein.

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TONIGHT:

At 7:30 pm, pianist Arsentiy Kharitonov plays music by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Johann Strauss, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff on the Rocky River Chamber Music Society series at Lakewood Congregational Church. It’s free. Read our interview with Kharitonov here.

IN THE NEWS:

In The Washington Post, Shannon J. Effinger interviews flutist-vocalist Melanie Charles to talk about her unorthodox path to jazz, and her recent release Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women. The album, her debut for Verve Records, includes reimagined versions of music by such figures as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, and Marlena Shaw. Another influence at play: the killing of Breonna Taylor.

“It’s not a secret that right now, people are waking up to the importance of the value of Black women across industries,” Charles tells Effinger. Read the article here, and listen on Spotify.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

“Brevig Mission is a tiny ocean-side settlement in Alaska which, in 1918, had 80 adult inhabitants. During the five-day period starting November 15, 1918, 72 of them were killed by the influenza pandemic then raging across the world.”

Thus begins an article by Ray Setterfield in On This Day about the 1918 pandemic.

72 out of 80 — that’s 90% of the town’s population. Horrifying. But there’s another reason why Setterfield highlights the settlement of Brevig Mission: its permafrost conditions meant that victims were not just buried but actually preserved, allowing scientists to study the virus decades later, determining its avian origins.

The article covers several aspects of that pandemic, from its multiple waves, to all the remedies that were promoted, to the restrictions on reporting its true impact, as several nations worried about lowering morale amidst World War I.

But the ending of the article — which was published on March 21, 2020 — hits the hardest of all.

“The question remains as to whether a devastating pandemic on the scale of 1918 could occur in modern times,” Setterfield writes. “Many experts think so.”

Then there’s the quote from Indiana University professor of medicine Richard Gunderman from a then-recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine: “As a society, we can only hope that we have learned the great pandemic’s lessons sufficiently well to quell the current Covid-19 challenge.”

…challenge.

Moving to musical anniversaries, on another day we might highlight figures such as German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (died on this date in 1787), Argentine-born conductor Daniel Barenboim (who turns 79), and Hungarian-American conductor Fritz Reiner (died on this date in 1963).

Instead, I felt drawn to November 15, 1918 in particular, which saw the passing of Belgian composer Georges Antoine at 26. Of course, there were two tragedies of that time period, both easily able to take down a healthy young adult.

Having developed a damp-related fever from his time in the trenches of World War I during the cold winter of 1914-15, Antoine was hospitalized and ultimately discharged from the Belgian army. But he rejoined in 1918 amidst the push from Allied forces to win the war, and the condition returned.

A telegram to his mother read as follows:

“…[He] became aware of his situation but as he had already suffered so much during the war he did not believe in the seriousness of his illness. In the evening, about seven o’clock, he died quietly, without agony, speaking of his next return to Liège, his mother and the Prix de Rome…”

Head to YouTube to listen to his Piano Quartet in d, written in 1915-1916 during his time in Saint-Malo, France away from the conflict, or to Spotify to hear his A-flat-major Violin Sonata, begun in 1913 and also finished in 1915.

by Daniel Hathaway

EVENTS THIS WEEKEND:

The calendar is loaded, and if you can make it to all of these performances, you possess special powers of teleportation (and we’d like to talk to you…).

On Saturday, Oberlin Jazz Ensemble plays Finney Chapel at 7:30 pm, the Akron Symphony begins its season with music by Dvořák, Perry, Ellington, Price, and Beethoven at 8 in E.J. Thomas Hall, and at the same hour, the next concert in Apollo’s Fire’s Violin Fantasy set takes the Baroque Orchestra to St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights, while The Cleveland Orchestra repeats its Messiaen, Ravel, and Mussorgsky program under Thierry Fischer with Tom Borrow at the Steinway, and Oberlin Opera gives the third of four performances of Handel’s Acis & Galatea in Hall Auditorium (you’ll love what Johnathan Field has done with the Cyclops!)

Sunday’s agenda continues the runs of programs by Apollo’s Fire, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Oberlin Opera, and adds Christa Rakich’s Organ Rededication (2 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist), a Cleveland Winds concert (3 pm at CSU), the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra (3 pm at the Maltz, PAC), classical guitarist René Izquierdo (3 pm at the Butler Institute in Youngstown), Prism Percussion (4 pm at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron), and duo-pianists Antonio Pompa-Baldi & Emanuela Friscioni (pictured, 5 pm on the Music From the Western Reserve series at Christ Church, Hudson).

That busy day continues into Sunday evening with Local 4 Music Fund’s Nine Lives Project (7 pm at Tri-C Metro Auditorium), as well as with the 7 pm premiere of Quinn Mason’s Irish Dance Suite by Gerhardt Zimmerman and the Canton Symphony.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

On November 10, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture announced the awarding of grants totalling $11,613,452 to 249 Cuyahoga County nonprofit organizations in 2022 through its General Operating Support, including for the first time Cleveland Ballet, Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, Collective Arts Network and Doan Brook Watershed Partnership. Read more here.

Project Support grants ranging from $800 to $18.333 went to 169 organizations for a total of $1,198,438.

CAC’s new Cultural Heritage grant program provides flexible funding for organizations that primarily represent culturally-specific populations. Eleven such organizations will share $215,014 during this funding cycle.

INTERESTING READS:

More than a few sparks were flying back and forth between music critics and presenters this week on the subject of diversity in programming. The New York Times ran a response by artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel to Javier C. Hernández’ assessment of the Chamber Music from Lincoln Center season, and Bay Area critic Joshua Kosman followed up with an interview with the pianist and cellist in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read Wu Han and Finckel here, and Kosman here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini wrote his last act in Paris on November 13, 1868, having retired early after composing 34 operas between 1810 and 1823. He spent much of the next 40 years dining off his fame — and judging from his increasing corpulence, off such creations as Tournedos Rossini. One of his few late career works is the Petite messe solennelle for choir, piano and harmonium — neither small nor solemn, despite the title. Click here to watch a performance by the Czech Philharmonic Choir led by Paolo Gatto and featuring soprano Patricia Janečková.

And on November 13 (or was it the 14th?), 1943, NY Philharmonic assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein got his big break when guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill and Bernstein filled in on a few hours notice.

In 1989, Bernstein recalled his debut: [Read more…]