by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Repeating and one-off events including the world premiere of a new opera
. International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Gideon Klein
. Bits & pieces from classical music history
THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:
Keep an ear out for repeating events this weekend: you have three opportunities each to catch the debuts of Oberlin Winter Term Opera’s Alice Tierney and Trobár Medieval’s program, “Daughters of Light.”
CityMusic Cleveland’s Baroque Ensemble features “Music in the Time of Goya” on Friday, and Saturday’s lineup includes Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and the Musical Theater Project’s tribute to Johnny Mercer and his collaborators, and Cuban and Spanish music by René Izquierdo on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International Series.
On Sunday, the Cleveland Cello Society will display the talents of its scholarship winners at the Music Settlement, and Cleveland Composers Guild will host a Vocal Music Extravaganza at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church featuring works by its members.
Also on Sunday, the Suburban Symphony and Youngstown Symphony will give afternoon concerts led by Alberto Bade and Domenico Boyagian, and Youngstown State University’s Donald Pipino Concert series will host the Diderot String Quartet (pictured above), formed at Oberlin and the Juilliard School, performing Viennese classical works on period instruments.
And speaking of Oberlin, Conservatory piano professor Peter Takács will continue his traversal of Beethoven’s violin sonatas in Kulas Recital Hall on Sunday afternoon, partnering with Michelle Abraham Kantor and Francesca DePasquale (available also via a live stream.)
Details in the Concert Listings.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Given that January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day — chosen for the date in 1945 when the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps — we’ll focus on Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein, who died on that date in 1945 at age 25.
Beginning in Klein’s late teens, anti-Semitism stood firmly in the way of furthering his education and his career. After the Nazi occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia, institutions of higher learning were closed, and Klein was forced to discontinue his studies in philosophy and musicology at Charles University — fortunately he had already completed his studies in piano at the Prague Conservatory. Offered a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, that was also out of the question due to Nazi laws on emigration. And when Jewish musicians could no longer publicly perform — or have their works performed — he took on the alias of Karel Vranek, or played in private homes.
In 1941 he was deported to Terezín, where he became an important part of the camp’s cultural life — which at first operated in secret, and later under the sanctioning of the Nazis for the purposes of propaganda at this “model ghetto.” As a pianist, he performed works of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Suk, Janáček, Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Bach at Terezín, often in programs repeated up to eleven times due to popular demand.
Among several pieces that Klein composed while detained there is the 1944 String Trio. As Lucy Miller Murray writes in Chamber Music: An Intensive Guide for Listeners, you can hear in that work “not only the circumstances under which it was written, but also Klein’s musical gifts that reflected his Czech origins and his admiration of the adventurous Second Viennese School led by Arnold Schoenberg.”
Click here to watch a 2015 performance by students of the Colburn School. The lengthy second-movement Lento, a set of variations on the Moravian folk song The Kneždub Tower, begins at 2:45, and is known to be particularly striking.
In October of 1944, nine days after completing the Trio, Klein was moved to Auschwitz, then to the coal-mining labor camp Fürstengrube, where he died under unclear circumstances. A girlfriend of his at Terezín, Irma Semtzka, had been entrusted with the scores he had written there. After she survived the war, she delivered the manuscripts to the composer’s sister Eliska Kleinova — a survivor of Auschwitz herself — who in 1946 went on to arrange the first complete concert of the music of her brother, Gideon Klein.
You can read more about music under the Nazi regime here from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
by Daniel Hathaway
Other events to note in classical music history:
- the birth on January 27, 1756 of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart in Salzburg, Austria (he liked to use a form of one of his middle names: Amadé).
- On January 28, 1742, Jonathan Swift, the Dean of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, objected to members of the Cathedral choir participating in performances of Handel’s works while the composer was in town for the debut of Messiah.
- And on January 28, 1996, Venice’s 1792 opera house La Fenice was destroyed by fire for the second time (like its namesake the Phoenix, it rose yet again from the ashes).
And a tragic event visited New York’s Metropolitan Opera house on January 29, 1988, when American opera singer Bantcho Bantchevsky leapt to his death from a balcony during a performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. Read the New York Times story here. An excerpt:
There have been deaths from heart attacks, strokes and other natural causes during performances of the Metropolitan Opera in the past, said Johanna Fiedler, a spokeswoman for the opera. But she said she could recall no incident in which a person died in a plunge from the balcony at the Met, though she said a similar incident occurred some years ago at the State Theater in Lincoln Center.
In addition to deaths, the logs of the house manager at the Met record a range of episodes, from fist fights and umbrella duels among opera-impassioned patrons to a car crash through the front door, a narcotics arrest and the onset of prenatal labor.
On July 24, 1980, the naked body of a 30-year-old opera violinist, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, was found at the bottom of a three-story air shaft at the opera house. A stage hand, Craig S. Crimmins, was later arrested, tried and convicted of killing her in an attempted rape, and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.