by Daniel Hathaway
CHANTICLEER UPDATE:
San Francisco’s celebrated 12-voice male choir stops in Akron tonight on their first tour since the pandemic shut singing down for over a year. Read about how the ensemble coped with the situation in this interview with music director Tim Keeler.
Tuesday Musical, the sponsor for the 7:30 pm performance in E.J. Thomas Hall, has emailed these details to ticket holders and prospective attendees:
Seats in the orchestra level start at $19. For the best selection, order on-line now. If seats are still available, tickets will also be sold at the door.
After the concert, we’ll celebrate with a festive drinks-&-desserts reception for the entire audience!
Complimentary parking in the EJ Parking Deck and adjacent surface lots.
Are you a student? Receive a free ticket! Simply bring your student ID to the EJ Ticket Office that evening.
EJ Ticket Office opens at 6:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. Program begins at 7:30 p.m.
The singers of Chanticleer ask that everyone wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. Complimentary disposable masks will be available at the door.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
This is the week when the Cleveland International Piano Competition moves into a new phase with the arrival of eight pianists who will enter the Semifinal Round two-by-two, live and in person beginning on Thursday at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We’ll concentrate today on keyboard composers and performers who mark anniversaries on July 27.
French composer and harpsichordist Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre entered the Elysian Fields in Paris on this date in 1729. Born into a prominent family of musicians and artisans, she was educated by her father on an equal basis with her brothers, and became an early favorite of Louis XIV at Versailles. She composed in all contemporary forms, although not all of her works have survived.
Click here to watch Cleveland’s Burning River Baroque perform her cantata, Judith. Soprano Malina Rauschenfels and harpsichordist Paula Maust are joined by Sarah Lynn, baroque flute, and Glenna Curren, baroque cello, for a concert in Foxburg, PA in March, 2019.
For a sampling of her keyboard music, listen here to Elisabetta Guglielmin’s performances of several suites for the clavecin. Follow along with the score to see how one harpsichordist realizes the notation of the prélude non-mensuré, a popular way of encouraging a quasi-improvisatory performance.
Another death to report on July 27: Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi in Vienna. An odd feature of his legacy is that the “Red Priest” who authored more than 500 concertos wrote none that featured keyboard instruments. That hasn’t stopped others from arranging various concertos for performance by keyboardists, beginning with Johann Gottfried Walther, who repurposed several for organ solo. Click here to watch Bálint Karosi play Vivaldi’s RV 275 concerto in Walther’s arrangement (oddly attributed to a ‘Sigr. Meck’) on the organ of the Kreuzkirche in Suhl, Thuringia (Germany).
And the harpsichord duet of Tom Pixton and Edward Parmentier have recorded several Vivaldi concerto arrangements for Titanic Records. Listen here to their performances on instruments built by Pixton and Keith Hill.
Moving on to more recent, piano virtuoso-influenced times, July 27 marks the birth of Russian pianist Vladimir de Pachman in Odessa in 1848, and the death of Italian-German composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin in 1924 at the age of 58.
Pachman specialized in playing the works of Chopin, as well as for a long list of performing eccentricities. He was an early adopter of new recording technologies that emerged in the first decade of the 20th century. This RCA Victor Red Seal 12-inch recording from January 17, 1911 preserves his take on Liszt’s concert paraphrase of Verdi’s Rigoletto. And in posting his 1925 rendition of the “Minute” Waltz, YouTube contributor Beckmesser2 commented, “This recorded performance is probably the best documentation of what it was like to attend a Pachmann recital during the pianist’s final years.”
Pachman’s life, career, and eccentricities are documented in exquisite detail in this spreadsheet, compiled by Nigel Nettheim, which provides an interesting rabbit hole for piano addicts to explore.
We featured Busoni in the Diary on this date in 2020. Click here to listen to his recordings of several works captured in London in 1922. Known especially for his Romantic piano elaborations of works by Bach (click here to watch Antonio Pompa-Baldi play his arrangement of the great Chaconne in Mixon Hall at CIM in October of 2020), Busoni crowned his keyboard works with his immense Piano Concerto. Pianist Garrick Ohsson recorded it in the late 1980s with Christoph von Dohnányi, The Cleveland Orchestra and the men of the Orchestra Chorus. Thirty years later, Ohlsson revisited the piece with the Orchestra in February, 2019, and prefaced the performance with some of his thoughts.