by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: McGaffin Carillon holiday concert at lunch, The Cleveland Orchestra does Elf, and Les Délices with soprano Amanda Powell (pictured) in “Noel, Noel”
•Announcements: applying for fellowships and grants from Cleveland Arts Prize and National Endowment for the Arts
•Interesting read: an interview with one of the climate activists who protested from the audience during Tannhäuser at the Met last month
•Almanac: Cleveland native H. Leslie Adams turns 91
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12:15 pm, David Osburn will give an “Around the world carillon concert for Christmas” from McGaffin Tower. It’s free. Click here for the program and to access the live stream.
At 7:30 pm at Severance, conductor Brett Mitchell and The Cleveland Orchestra will put on a screening of Elf, with live music from the Orchestra of course. Tickets are available here.
And at that same time at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Akron, Les Délices and guest soprano Amanda Powell will perform Noel, Noel, “a musical journey from darkness to light and from hope to joy featuring favorite carols and festive baroque music by Praetorius, Merula, Buxtehude, and others.” Performances continue tomorrow in Rocky River and on Friday in Cleveland Heights. Read a preview article by Mike Telin here, and get tickets here.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Applications are open until January 8 for the Cleveland Arts Prize’s Verge Fellowships, which will award unrestricted stipends of $2,000 to five artists within introductory levels of their artistry. Learn more here.
And the National Endowment for the Arts is now accepting applications for its Grants for Arts Projects program, providing support for opportunities that engage the public through the arts and arts education, integrate the arts with strategies promoting the health and well-being of people and communities, and improve the overall capacity and capabilities within the arts sector. The deadline to apply for this round of funding is February 15. Find out more here.
INTERESTING READ:
Late last month, climate protests broke out from members of the audience during a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera. (Read a New York Times review of the evening here.) Now, Van Magazine has published an interview with one of the protesters — John Mark Rozendaal, a musician and Extinction Rebellion activist. Click here to read “We Disrupt What We Love.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Composer H. Leslie Adams, a Cleveland native, Oberlin Conservatory graduate, and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cleveland Arts Prize, turns 91 today.
As he told Mike Telin in an interview for ClevelandClassical.com from June 2015 — just before receiving that special distinction from CAP — Adams felt pleased and honored, but also surprised.
“It sounds a little final,” he said, laughing. “Of course a composer never retires, so I look at it as a lifetime up until this point, and that’s OK with me.”
That interview provides a window into Adams’ upbringing, his path to composition, his extensive vocal training, and his position as music director of Grace Presbyterian Church in Lakewood. “I love it and it’s very healthy for me. It balances my creative work, which is very isolated, with engaging socially.”
One important moment in his composition career was leaving a position on the faculty of the University of Kansas in order to return to Cleveland and write his opera Blake. “It was a little scary, but I was determined to compose this opera,” he said. With a text by Daniel Mayers, it tells the story of a slave who, on the eve of the Civil War, resolves to lead his people out of bondage and to a life of dignity.
Click here to listen to four excerpts from Blake: an orchestral prelude, the arias “My New Found Friends” and “Miranda’s Lullaby,” and the duet “I Hear Your Voice So Clearly.”
Among the large-scale works on the instrumental side of Adams’ oeuvre is the Twenty-Six Etudes for Solo Piano. Click here for a YouTube playlist containing live recordings of each etude, as performed by Maria Thompson Corley and Thomas Otten in 2014, and read Daniel Hathaway’s review of that footage here.
We’ll close this article with a quote from Adams describing his past, present, and future: “I take pride and pleasure in what I have done, and I work hard at getting it just right. I am true to my core values, and that gives me a great deal of satisfaction, but I still have a lot of music to compose, and a lot of different life experiences to have.”