by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: Cleveland Orchestra premieres Marsalis Trumpet Concerto, Tuesday Musical presents “An Evening with Itzhak Perlman,” and Oberlin College Choir & Musical Union come together in concert
•Interesting reads: news about arts entrepreneurship in the area, and new Donizetti songs discovered
•Almanac: remembering cellist Lynn Harrell
HAPPENING TODAY:
Three options, all at 7:30.
At Severance Music Center, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in the world premiere of Marsalis’ Trumpet Concerto, featuring Michael Sachs as soloist. The program also includes Eastman’s Symphony No. 2 and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Tickets are available here.
At E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical presents “An Evening with Itzhak Perlman,” in which that musical luminary will share “intimate anecdotes and multi-media images from his life and career” in addition to performing with longtime collaborator and friend Rohan De Silva. Get tickets here.
And at Oberlin’s Finney Chapel, Ben Johns will lead the Oberlin College Choir and Musical Union in works by Parry, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Zemlinsky, Janáček, and Ives. It’s free and will be livestreamed here.
INTERESTING READS:
“It’s a cliche that artists can’t make a living, but Cleveland creatives are ramping up efforts to help each other avoid that fate,” Collin Cunningham writes in The Land. The piece details how artists such as illustrator Jordan Wong “are developing workshops for creatives and networking to share intel about positive and negative local experiences, fair business practices, negotiating contracts, and maintaining creative control.” Click here to read the article, titled “Cleveland creatives boost arts entrepreneurship as city looks to pump up arts economy.”
And Ludwig Van reports that a collection of around 90 songs by Gaetano Donizetti have been discovered by British musicologist Roger Parker. “Over two years, Parker tracked down the songs in archives and collections worldwide, including an Austrian monastery, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and archives in Naples and Bergamo,” writes Michael Vincent. Read here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Births and deaths tend to balance out in the almanac, but today’s lineup is unusually grim, with five musicians who all passed away on this date in history.
Those figures would be Russian composer-pianist Alexander Scriabin (died in 1915 at the age of 43 from blood poisoning), French composer Olivier Messiaen (1992, age 83 after surgery), Russian cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (2007, age 80 after a long battle with intestinal cancer), American trumpeter Rolf Smedvig (2015, age 62, heart attack), and American cellist Lynn Harrell (2020, age 76, stroke). We’ll focus today on the most recent of those passings.
Lynn Harrell had both a triumphant and tragic youth. By the age of 18, he had studied with Lev Aronson, attended the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute, debuted at Carnegie Hall as part of a Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic, made it to the semifinals of the Second International Tchaikovsky Competition, joined The Cleveland Orchestra — and lost both of his parents, his father to cancer and his mother to a car crash. A couple of years after entering the cello section of The Cleveland Orchestra, he was principal cello at the age of 20.
After a successful recital at Lincoln Center with James Levine, Harrell decided to leave the Orchestra in 1971, setting off on a solo career. In 1975 he and pianist Murray Perahia won the first Avery Fisher Prizes, and during the ‘80s he won two Grammy Awards alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy for recordings of piano trios by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.
Beloved as a teacher, Harrell’s career as an educator began at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and continued at the Royal Academy of Music, Aspen Music Festival, Cleveland Institute of Music, Juilliard School, the USC Thornton School of Music, and the Rice University Shepherd School of Music.
“As I have been given, so it has always seemed to me, I was obliged to give to others,” he once said in the magazine Instrumentalist. “I have always felt that I owed others a huge musical debt and that I was to pay it through the next generation.”
Click here to listen to Harrell play Chopin’s Op. 3 Polonaise Brilliante in C alongside pianist Pauline Yang at Thayer Hall at the Colburn School in 2012, and here for the first movement of that Grammy-winning Tchaikovsky recording.
Finally, click here to watch one of several tributes to Harrell after his passing. In this case, Yo-Yo Ma, Gautier Capuçon, Amanda Forsyth, Zlatomir Fung, Alban Gerhardt, Mischa Maisky, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Johannes Moser, Daniel Müller-Schott, Christian Poltéra, Jan Vogler, and Alisa Weilerstein joined together digitally to play Julius Klengel’s Hymnus für 12 Celli.