by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today’s schedule: etudes for solo piano, an early-music send-off to Carnegie Hall, works for organ and viola by Black composers, and jazz voice & trumpet
•Today’s reading: Amherst Early Music and Oberlin BPI compared and contrasted, the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, and a heckler at the Met
•Today’s (meta) almanac: a look back at the early days of our Diary
by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S EVENTS:
Tonight at 7:30 pm, harpist Parker Ramsay will play Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria with Thirty Variations, popularly known as the Goldberg Variations, in a Bach’s Birthday Bash at Trinity Cathedral.
IN THE NEWS:
Applications are now open for singer-pianist team auditions for the 2022 edition of the Cleveland Art Song Festival, to be held at the Cleveland Institute of Music from May 23-28. In addition to masterclasses and a final concert, the event (which has been on hiatus thanks to the pandemic) features performances with the festival guest artists: soprano Tamara Wilson and tenor David Portillo, and pianists Warren Jones and Craig Terry. Read more here. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Although it is often said that you cannot put new wine in old bottles — or wineskins, on Friday, March 25 at 7:30 pm in Kulas Music Hall at Baldwin Wallace University, the Cleveland Composers Guild will show that it can be done.
“New Wine in Old Bottles” features recently composed works by Guild members — new wine — performed by Burning River Baroque’s Malina Rauschenfels (Baroque cello,viola da gamba, and voice), Paula Maust (harpsichord), and guest David Ellis (Baroque cello, viola da gamba, and bass gamba) — old bottles.
“I don’t think the Composers Guild has ever collaborated with an early music group,” Guild president Margi Griebling-Haigh said during a recent telephone conversation. “We were just brainstorming, as we do in Guild meetings, about what projects we would like to pursue in the future. This idea came up and everyone thought it was interesting. So we thought ‘Let’s branch out and see what it’s like to write for gamba and harpsichord.’” [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
A mainstay of the opera repertoire, The Marriage of Figaro is the first of Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The plot is filled with mistaken identity, surprise paternity, and intrigue, as the servants Figaro and Susanna triumph in marriage while comically thwarting the attempts of the philandering Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna.
On Thursday, March 24 at 7:30 pm at Gamble Auditorium, Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater will launch Mozart’s comic opera in a production directed by Scott Skiba, with Dean Buck conducting the BW Orchestra. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Performances run through Sunday, March 27. Tickets are available online. The performances will also be live streamed.
Based on a Pierre Beaumarchais play, Figaro is a social commentary about the lower versus the upper class — servants outsmarting the aristocracy. And it is the combination of comedy and great music that makes the opera a masterpiece. “I think it’s one of the greatest pieces in all of theater, whether it’s opera or musicals,” Scott Skiba said during a recent telephone conversation. “The Beaumarchais plays are brilliant and the Mozart/DaPonte collaboration is equally brilliant.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:
The big thing to mention is the official arrival of spring. For Cleveland, the Vernal Equinox arrives on Sunday at 11:32 am.
In his 1987 New York Times essay “Welcoming the Sun,” MacDonald Harris wrote about the importance of observing the day when the sun appears again, assuaging our fears that it just might not make it this time around. Gotta do something to celebrate!
Indoors events on Saturday include the Weilerstein Duo at Oberlin, CityMusic Cleveland at St. Stanislaus, and Apollo’s Fire at CIM.
On Sunday, organist and harpsichordist Christa Rakich takes on J.S. Bach’s Art of Fugue (complete) at the Church of the Covenant, Cleveland Chamber Collective performs “Music for America” in Ohio City, and Apollo’s Fire takes its “Virtuoso Bach and Vivaldi” program to Rocky River. (And a head’s up for Monday, when harpist Parker Ramsay will play Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Trinity Cathedral.
Check our Concert Listings for details. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Domenico Cimarosa’s ll matrimonio segreto (“The Secret Marriage”) was a hit with the public from its premiere at the Imperial Hofburg Theatre in Vienna in 1792. And still today the opera has not lost any of its audience appeal.
On Thursday, March 24 at 8:00 pm at Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater will present Cimarosa’s two-act comic opera in a production directed by Jonathon Field, with Christopher Larkin conducting the Oberlin Orchestra. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Performances run through Sunday. Tickets are available online.
Larkin has been a regular in the Hall Auditorium pit since 2007 when Field staged Mark Adamo’s Little Women, an opera for which he conducted the premiere in Houston.
On a recent sunny morning at a popular Oberlin coffee shop, I sat down with Jonathon Field and Christopher Larkin to talk about the opera and the production. This conversation was one of those where you simply turned on the recorder and the two longtime collaborators took it from there.
by Jarrett Hoffman
Three members of Philadelphia-based chamber choir The Crossing visited the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2017 to perform David Lang’s Lifespan, a piece that could be crudely described as people blowing and whistling at a rock.
“It sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but it’s a really great piece,” Donald Nally, who heads up The Crossing, said during a recent telephone conversation. Lifespan had caught the eye of CMA director of performing arts Tom Welsh, who then wanted to continue the relationship by bringing the entire choir to Cleveland.
It was a tragic event the following year — the passing of a beloved figure in the local music community, Robert G. Schneider, from complications following a car accident — that gave rise to an idea about what the museum and the ensemble could do together, in Schneider’s memory, around his two great passions of choir and organ.
On Friday, March 25 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium, The Crossing and organist Scott Dettra will give the premiere of Stacy Garrop’s In a House Besieged, commissioned by Welsh and CMA. The program also includes Lansing McLoskey’s The Memory of Rain and Arvo Pärt’s Salve Regina. Tickets are available here.
by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S EVENTS:
Beginning today and running through the weekend, the 50th annual Lakeland Jazz Festival takes over the campus of Lakeland Community College. Click here for the complete schedule.
Friday’s agenda offers chamber music by CityMusic Cleveland in Lakewood, and the Euclid Quartet in Canton, orchestral music by Apollo’s Fire featuring violinist Francisco Fullana (pictured, preview here) in Shaker Heights, the Oberlin Orchestra at home with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Cleveland Pops at Severance.
Plus a screening of CIM Opera Theater’s Dido and Aeneas project in Mixon Hall.
Check our Concert Listings for details. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Les Délices releases “Gods & Heroes” on digital
•Two pioneering women: French Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (pictured) and Ukrainian writer and activist Lesya Ukrainka — whom you can visit in the Cultural Gardens
•The composers who will be featured in the She Scores concert series this June from the Local 4 Music Fund
by Mike Telin
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria with Thirty Variations — nicknamed (not by the composer) after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, the harpsichordist who was retained to play them on command for an insomniac patron — have been adapted by performers for many other instruments, most notably for the piano and most famously by Glenn Gould.
Joining a long list of arrangers, Parker Ramsay has transcribed the Variations for the modern pedal harp, an instrument for which he holds a master’s degree from Juilliard, in addition to a degree in history from Cambridge University, plus a master’s in historical performance (organ and harpsichord) and an artist diploma (organ) from Oberlin.
Ramsay returned to his undergraduate haunts to record the Goldbergs in Henry VI’s wonderful chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was the first American to serve as organ scholar. Bach: Goldberg Variations was released in September of 2020 on King’s own label.
On Monday, March 21 at 7:30 pm, Parker Ramsay will perform his arrangement of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations in a Bach Birthday Concert to benefit Music and Art at Trinity Cathedral. Click here for more information. [Read more…]