by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. A packed calendar and some tough choices
. The Almanac remembers the death of Leo Ornstein, the births of Dame Myra Hess, and Maryanne Amacher, and the demise of Howard Hanson and Marie-Claire Alain
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Many events to mention, tough choices to make.
On Friday, a Cleveland Orchestra matinee and an evening performance by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, the Music Settlement celebrates Black composers & artists, Cleveland Chamber Collective presents “After the Storm,” Les Délices features Sherezade Panthaki in “Enchanted Island,” Oberlin Orchestra teams up with a Jazz Division trio.
Saturday sees the Akron Symphony celebrating Syrian refugees of the Sirkhane Social Circus School, CityMusic Cleveland featuring Dan Gilbert and the clarinet, the Verona Quartet with Wu Man, pipa at Oberlin, & repeats of Friday’s Les Délices and Cleveland Orchestra programs.
On Sunday, organ students from CIM display their talents at the Cleveland Museum of Art, pianist Mitsuko Uchida (pictured) plays a solo recital at Severance, Heights Arts presents a close encounter with the Omni Quartet at Dunham Tavern Museum, Les Délices wraps up its run of “Enchanted Island,” Oberlin Baroque Orchestra plays sonatas and concertos under Edwin Huizinga & Rebecca Landell, & Music from the Western Reserve hosts violinist Minchae Kim.
See our Concert Listings for details.
ALMANAC FOR FEBRUARY 24-26:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Composer and pianist Leo Ornstein, a leading member of the avant-garde during the first half of the 20th century who was once one of the most recognizable names in American classical music, died on February 24, 2002 in Green Bay, WI at the age of 106 — or perhaps 108, or 109.
Born sometime between 1892 and 1895 in Kremenchuk, Poltava, in what was then Imperial Russia and what is now central Ukraine, he spent the final 96 years of his life in the U.S. after his family’s immigration in 1906.
Anne Midgette’s obituary of Ornstein for The New York Times is full of colorful details. Describing his divisive compositional style (radical at the time for his use of tone clusters and polyrhythms), she quotes one critic from 1918 who called Ornstein “the only true-blue, genuine Futurist composer alive,” then another who noted the “insufferable hideousness” of his music — or rather his “so-called music.”
Packing concert halls with his performances of works by such composers as Schoenberg, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Kodály, and Ravel — as well as his own compositions — Ornstein retired from his performing career in 1933. And after the premiere of his Nocturne and Dance of Fate in 1937 by the St. Louis Symphony, he all but vanished from the scene. (Listen to that piece in a recording by Jorge Mester and the Louisville Symphony here.)
“What of Leo Ornstein, bright particular star of American composition a quarter of a century ago?” Midgette quotes the Times’ Olin Downes in 1945. Downes asked three up-and-coming composers about the name Ornstein. The result? “Two of them did not know his name. Twenty-five years ago his name was on the lips of every informed concertgoer.”
A revival of his work took place in the 1970s, and as Ornstein himself told the Times’ Harold Schonberg, “Fame never had much meaning or appeal to me…If my music has any value, it will be picked up and played. If it has no value, it deserves its neglect.”
The final work Ornstein composed was his Eighth Piano Sonata, in 1990 at age 94 — or maybe 96, or 97. Listen here to a recording by Marc-André Hamelin.
By Mike Telin
On February 25, 1890, English pianist Dame Myra Hess was born in South Hampstead, London. She made her professional debut in 1907 playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham. Hess toured extensively throughout Britain, the Netherlands, and France and made her U.S. debut in New York City in 1922.
The pianist may be most remembered for her performances during The Blitz in World War II. During that time Hess organized nearly 2,000 lunchtime concerts in Trafalgar Square’s National Gallery. The concerts were held every Monday and Friday for six-and-a-half years, and every performer was paid five guineas for their services. In 1941 King George VI made Hess a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In addition to an active performing career, Hess was a dedicated teacher. One of her students was Clive Lythgoe, the long-time Dean of Faculty at Cleveland’s Music School Settlement.
Hess’s legacy lives on at the Chicago Cultural Center with its Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts. The free lunchtime series is produced by Chicago’s International Music Foundation and broadcast live on WFMT and streamed on WFMT.com.
Click here to listen to an interview with Hess, and here for her performance of Chopin’s Waltz No. 1 in E flat Op. 18.
We also celebrate the birth of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher, who entered this world in 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania. Amacher is best known for her work in the phenomenon known as auditory distortion products.
Amacher attended the University of Pennsylvania where one of her teachers was Karlheinz Stockhausen. She continued her composition studies in Salzburg, Austria, and Dartington, England, and graduate work in computer studies and acoustics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During a fellowship at Harvard and MIT, Amacher was recruited by John Cage to collaborate on several projects including a soundtrack for his 1975 multimedia piece Lecture in the Weather. The recipient of major commissions around the globe, in 2005 she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica in the “Digital Musics” category for her project TEO! A sonic sculpture. Click here to listen to Living Sound, for “Sound-joined Rooms” series (1980)
By Daniel Hathaway
Howard Hanson, American conductor, composer, and longtime director of the Eastman School of Music, died on this date in 1981 in Rochester, NY.
An unrepentant Romantic, Hanson left a legacy of expressive works that deserve more performances than they receive these days. His Second Symphony, subtitled “Romantic” sets the tone here in a performance by the Peabody Symphony led by Joseph Young.
Flutist Erika Boysen illustrates a performance of his Serenade for flute, harp, and strings with American artwork here, and organist Thomas Sheehan is featured in his Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Harp in a concert from Harvard’s Memorial Church led by University Organist Edward Elwyn Jones.
And here’s a performance of Hanson’s mystical Cherubic Hymn led by the composer.
On February 26 of 2013, French organist Marie-Claire Alain made her sortie at the age of 86 in the Paris suburb of Le Pecq. She succeeded her father as organist of the church of Sain-Germain-en-Laye, playing there for 40 years.
Among her 260 recordings are three complete cycles of the works of J.S. Bach. Watch a brief documentary here, and hear her perform his Fantasia in G (aka Pièce d’Orgue) here. And be a fly on the wall as she gives a lesson to a Czech organ student in 2006.
