by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
This evening at 7:30, The Cleveland Orchestra begins a three-performance cycle featuring Mahler’s Fourth Symphony conducted by Daniel Harding, with soprano Lauren Snouffer and including the US premiere of Betsy Jolas’s Ces belles années, repeated on Friday at 7:30 and Saturday at 8.
Another three-performance run that begins this evening pairs Cleveland’s No Exit with the St. Paul-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist for the second installment of No Exit’s Year of Surreality: The Unconscious. The 7 pm free program at CSU’s Drinko Hall includes films by composer/filmmakers James Praznik, Luke Haaksma, and Timothy Beyer, and multimedia works by Philip Blackburn, Joe Horton, and Kathy McTavish. Repeated at 7 on Friday at Waterloo Arts and Saturday at 7 at SPACES Gallery.
And tonight at 7:30, pianist Jeremy Denk (pictured above) brings a slate of female composers — Clara Schumann, Tania León, Cécile Chaminade, Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Louise Farrenc, and Phyllis Chen — plus works by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms to his Oberlin Artist Recital series recital in Finney Chapel. Read a preview article here.
For details of this and other events, visit our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
It always makes the news when a lost or previously unknown piece of Baroque music turns up, but what if music in that popular style is still being written and premiered? It is, by Nuova Pratica, “a group of up-and-coming performer-composers who aim to re-open the book on Baroque composition, and want you to know that the language of the past is very much alive. Formed in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, the ensemble’s musicians write, record, and perform their own Baroque-inspired music. Rejecting the idea that what they do is mere pastiche, they don’t seek to imitate or emulate. They just want to write music they enjoy, informed by the styles and sounds they love the most.”
Read “21st century baroque: Nuova Pratica re-opens the Book on Baroque Composition” in Early Music America here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
From the passage of the first German beer purity law (1487 — it had to be just water, malt, and hops), to the only known instance of someone being struck by a meteorite (1954 — it left Ann Hodges with a big bruise, some legal complications, and a bit of celebrity), this date in history certainly has its oddness.
It also brings celebrity. Big names in all sorts of fields have come and gone on November 30: James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Evel Knievel, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Jonathan Swift, Dick Clark, George H.W. Bush.
There’s not quite as much star power on the classical music side, but here’s one important figure to note: English composer and organist Thomas Weelkes, who died on November 30, 1623.
One of the greatest madrigalists and church music composers of the Elizabethan period, Weelkes was also one of its most colorful personalities. Listen here to his Hark, all ye lovely saints above, in a performance by the Sidonia-Ensemble, and here to his Gloria in excelsis Deo as sung by King’s College Choir in 2000. For insights into the craft of the English madrigalists, watch Texting With Madrigals, an Early Music America lecture by retired Oberlin English professor (and ClevelandClassical.com board member) Nicholas Jones.
by Daniel Hathaway:
For those who recoiled a bit last Friday morning at the all-too-early appearance of Christmas and Holiday music on the airwaves and internet, we’ll seek out alternatives during these last weeks of 2023 and note the anniversaries of some works that received their premieres on these dates in classical music history.
On November 30, 1913 (with some wiggle room due to the conversion of Russian calendar dates), Sergei Rachmaninov conducted the first performance of his choral symphonic poem, The Bells, in St. Petersburg.
The composer, who had been seeking out a likely text to set to follow his cantata, Spring, was on holiday in Rome in 1907 when he received an anonymous letter suggesting Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells, in a translation by the Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont.
The original poem, read here by Basil Rathbone with an underlay of Mahler, is highly onomatopoetic, something that doesn’t translate well. But Rachmaninoff took to it enthusiastically, regarding the finished work — along with his All-Night Vigil — as one of his two favorite compositions. Click here to listen to a 2015 live performance in TivoliVredenburg Utrecht, by the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus led by James Gaffigan, former assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra.
- Allegro ma non tanto: The Silver Sleigh Bells
- Lento: The Mellow Wedding Bells
- Presto: The Loud Alarm Bells
- Lento lugubre: The Mournful Iron Bells
