by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Chamber music at the Aronson Festival, and three opening nights in opera and contemporary music
•Berta Rojas’ guitar is recovered, and the Guitar Society schedules a Community Celebration
•Almanac: Carl Nielsen and the personalities of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet
HAPPENING TODAY:
This evening is a wonderfully busy one.
You can hear a chamber recital featuring violinist Cho-Liang Lin in collaboration with members of The Cleveland Orchestra and members of the faculty of the Aronson Cello Festival. The 7:00 program at CIM’s Mixon Hall includes music by Prokofiev, Brahms, and Grażyna Bacewicz. (Plus, the Festival is hosting a series of talks and master classes throughout the day — see the schedule here.)
You can head to the opera — with two options in that category, both at 7:30, and both on their opening night. One is Cleveland Opera Theater’s world-premiere production of Griffin Candey’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, at Kleist Center for Art & Drama in Berea, with a libretto by Caridad Svich based on the play by Federico García Lorca. The other is Cathy Lesser Mansfield’s Holocaust Opera: The Sparks Fly Upward, to receive its Cleveland premiere at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. (Read a preview article here.)
Finally, it’s also opening night for the Re:Sound Festival of New and Experimental Music, which begins at 7:30 at the Bop Stop. The concert is a double-bill featuring the Warp Trio and the Robin Blake Sound Experiment — to be followed by a “Drone Improv afterparty” at Terrestrial Brewery. (Read a Festival overview here.)
Tickets and other details can be found in our Concert Listings.
(Above, clockwise from top-left: Lin, Candey, Svich, Blake, Warp Trio, Mansfield.)
NEWS BRIEFS:
You may remember that in early April, when Berta Rojas came to town to perform on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series, her prized guitar was stolen in Ohio City the day before the recital. Well, the instrument was finally recovered and returned to her late last month.
“The nightmare is over,” Rojas wrote on Facebook. “Last night, when we finished presenting my album Legacy to the press, I found on my phone pictures of my guitar that had been recovered by the folks at the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society and…La Rojita is in the same condition as when she was robbed…I have no words to express the excitement of knowing that La Rojita did not want to be absent from the release of the album she recorded and that she returns home soon, to continue living adventures together.”
In other news from the Guitar Society, they’ve added a free community celebration to the calendar on June 19 from 2:30-5:00 to celebrate Juneteenth and Father’s Day. Performers include Thomas Flippin, Hermelindo Ruiz, the vocal quartet Elegie, and Olu Manns, a performer and maker of West African drums. There will also be food service, family activities, and community resources, with part of the event taking place at Dunham Tavern, the other part nearby on the front lawn of MidTown Tech Hive. Details here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
In an interview with bassoonist Barrick Stees in 2021, he shared the opinion that woodwind quintets have really come into their own in the 20th and 21st centuries, as composers such as Ligeti and Barber “featured the personalities of the different instruments, as opposed to making them subjugate those personalities to form a homogenous sound.”
Another composer to toss into that group is Carl Nielsen (left), born on this date in 1865, whose well-known Quintet was influenced by the individual members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet (below). Having overheard the group rehearsing one evening, Nielsen noted how each player’s personality came through in their playing, and decided to portray them in music, particularly in a variations movement.
Variation 5, a duet between clarinet and bassoon, is especially colorful in depicting the hot temper of clarinetist Aage Oxenvad. According to an article by the group’s oboist, Sven Christian Felumb, Nielsen’s instructions here were to “play like a married couple who are arguing…”
Now picture that argument as the kind that goes on and on…and on…about something ridiculously petty. Here in Variation 5, where the bassoon grows quiet at the end, we can imagine that the original Copenhagen player, Knud Lassen, is the person who thankfully just decides to let things go, sparing everyone else in the room. Indeed, Felumb describes Lassen in that article as easygoing and sophisticated — qualities that come across in the bassoon melody that opens the first movement.
Variation 5 is queued up here in a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet.
When Nielsen passed in 1931, his popularity had not yet reached the international heights at which it lies today. On his 60th birthday in 1925, even as he was celebrated in Scandinavia, he wrote:
If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end … What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Maybe it would have been comforting to Nielsen to know that the Copenhagen Quintet gathered at his funeral, paying tribute to him with a performance of the beautiful chorale from the last movement of the Wind Quintet.
Read more about that work and that ensemble in Chapter IV of a doctoral dissertation by Marcia L. Spence.