By Daniel Hathaway
CONCERTS THIS WEEKEND:
If the current trends continue, we’ll be posting an increasing number of in-person events in the Concert Listings. There are two on Sunday: CityMusic Cleveland at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus at 3:00 pm, and French chamber music on the Sacred Heart Concert Series in Oberlin (pictured) at 5:00 pm.
Online only events on Saturday include NPR’s Amplify with Lara Downes, Oberlin Conservatory Large Ensembles, and the JACK Quartet with Shai Wosner.
On Sunday, there’s the New World Symphony with Matthias Pintscher and pianist Inon Bartanan, the CIM New Music Ensemble, Kent’s Black Squirrel Winds on Hudson’s Music from the Western Reserve series, violinist Jennifer Koh, and Chanticleer.
See our Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
There are only birthdates to honor this weekend. For April 10, that includes French jazz pianist and composer Claude Bolling (1930, in Cannes), and Uzbek pianist Yefim Bronfman (1958 in Tashkent).
For April 11, it’s a longer list: French composer Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682 in Avignon), Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (in 1866 in Empoli, near Florence), American composer, conductor, organist, and music critic Harvey B. Gaul (1881, in New York), Czech conductor Karel Ancerl (1908 in Tucapy), and Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916 in Buenos Aires).
We’ll concentrate on Ginastera, the most prominent composer on the list, who like many Porteños (denizens of Buenos Aires) was of mixed Spanish and Italian ancestry — his father was Catalan, his mother Italian. He spent most of his career in Argentina, with brief sojourns in the U.S. (the first in 1945-47 to study with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood) before moving to Europe in 1970. (Photo: Ginastera with his wife, Argentine cellist Aurora Natola, and Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.)
Ginastera’s compositions incorporated varying elements of traditional Argentine music in the course of his career, though those influences became more abstract over the decades.
Cleveland Orchestra principal cello Mark Kosower recorded the First Cello Concerto with his former orchestra, Germany’s Bamberg Symphony (follow along with the score), and played the Second Concerto with Cleveland in October of 2018 (here’s a brief excerpt from a Severance Hall rehearsal with guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno).
In other Cleveland Orchestra performances, George Szell led Pampeana No. 3 in a live concert in November, 1956, and Louis Lane conducted the Variaciones Concertantes in a live radio broadcast in 1969.
More recently, Oberlin Harp Professor Yolanda Kondonassis recorded the Ginastera Harp Concerto on the Oberlin Music CD Ginastera: One Hundred. Her performance of the work with Raphael Jiménez and the Oberlin Orchestra was also featured in the inaugural edition of Oberlin Stage Left, where she talks about the piece with Conservatory Dean William Quillen.