by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday, Cleveland Chamber Choir (pictured, in “Choral Splendor: Old & New, ” 7pm at First Lutheran, Lorain), Contemporary Youth Orchestra (7pm at Tri-C Metro), Akron Symphony (Bruckner’s 4th at 7:30 in E.J. Thomas), Cleveland Philharmonic (with pianist Louis Wang, 7:30 at CSU), Oberlin Baroque Ensemble (7:30 in Fairchild Chapel) & The Cleveland Orchestra (Susanna Mälkki conducting, with pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, 8 pm at Severance).
On Sunday, CIM Opera Theater (Fledermaus at 3pm in Kulas Hall), Cleveland Philharmonic (a repeat of Saturday’s program at 3pm at Westlake PAC), No Exit presents Aether Eos (violinist/composer/visual artist Leah Asher and pianist/composer Christopher Goddard at 3 at Heights Arts), Cleveland Chamber Choir (a repeat of Saturday’s program at 4 at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts.), Lakeland Civic Orchestra (4pm at Lakeland Community College), organist David Hurd (4:30 pm in Finney Chapel, Oberlin) & an Oberlin Faculty and Guest Recital (Ross Karre, percussion, the Eris Quartet, and Emily Cornelius, violin, 7:30 pm in Stull Recital Hall).
Click here to visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page for more information.
NEWS BRIEFS:
On Thursday on his website, Slipped Disk, British classical musical journalist Norman Lebrecht was the first of several sources to report the latest development from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Read “Cleveland Declares No Confidence in Chiefs” here.”
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
March 2 — Wish a happy birthday to Smetana today — no, not the type of sour cream from Central and Eastern Europe, but the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, who is often considered the father of Czech music, and who was born on this date in 1824 in Litomyšl. One of his best-known works is The Bartered Bride, which exemplifies his ambition to create a quintessentially Czech form of opera. Listen to the famous Overture here in a recording by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra.
And German-American composer Kurt Weill, best known for his stage works and in particular his collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, was born on this date in 1900 in Dessau. You may be familiar with the famous ballad “Mack the Knife” from Weill’s & Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, but how many versions have you heard?
Here are a few starkly different ones: Lotte Lenya sings “Mack” in the original German (she also sang in the original production and was married to Weill), saxophonist Sidney Bechet transforms the tune into a virtuosic display for jazz band, Bobby Darin smooths it out all nice and cool, and in a version for wind quintet, the Amsterdam Quintet spins it into a lyrical, almost pastoral scene — not exactly a portrayal of a serial killer, but something quite pleasing to the ear nonetheless.
March 3 — Composer and pianist Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago on this date in 1913. On the performing side of her career, she made history as the first Black musician to solo with the Chicago Symphony when she performed John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra on June 15, 1933.
That historic concert under the baton of then-music director Frederick Stock also included Florence Price’s Symphony in e, the first composition by a Black woman to be performed by a major orchestra. That programming came about after Price won first prize in the 1932 Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her symphony, while Bonds took first in the song category for Sea Ghost.
Bonds and Price, 26 years the elder, shared friendship and support throughout their lives. That began with Price teaching piano and composition to Bonds when the latter was in high school. From there, as pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege told Laura Emerick for the Chicago Symphony’s Sounds & Stories,
When Price faced financial straits, Bonds’ mother, Estella, welcomed her into their home. When Price had deadlines to meet for music contests, the Bonds were there, helping her to meet those deadlines. And with Margaret Bonds being a chief interpreter of Price’s piano works, these works became a vehicle for Bonds’ talent. Their friendship was truly about uplifting one another.
But perhaps the most famous partnership in Bonds’ career was with Langston Hughes. She discovered his poetry in 1929 while studying piano and composition at Northwestern University, where she was one of the few Black students, and was not allowed to live on campus. She described that discovery to James Hatch in an interview in 1971:
I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place…. I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he tells how great the black man is. And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have — here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school — and I know that poem helped save me.
Bonds eventually met Hughes in person in 1936 at the home of an artist who was a mutual friend. An exhibition from the Georgetown University Library describes how their relationship progressed:
Shortly thereafter, Hughes attended one of the Sunday afternoon musicales hosted by Bonds’s mother, Estella. “My family rolled out the red carpet,” claimed Bonds. And from that day forward, “we were like brother and sister, like blood relatives.”
Bonds went on to set many texts by Hughes. As opera singer and scholar Louise Toppin told NPR on the centennial of Bonds’ birth, Bonds “loved the way he told the story of African-Americans and Harlem during this time…” Among the highlights of those settings, she wrote music for his play Shakespeare in Harlem, used his words in her cantata Ballad of the Brown King, and composed the song cycle Three Dream Portraits.
The cantata received its world-premiere recording in 2019, which you can hear in a playlist on YouTube as performed by The Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra under conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather. And the song cycle was recently recorded by baritone Will Liverman and pianist Paul Sánchez on the album Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers — listen to movements one, two, and three on YouTube, and purchase or stream the album here.
Whether through those close relationships with Price and Hughes, or through community leadership, a central part of Bonds’ legacy is supporting other Black artists. In 1956, she organized the Margaret Bonds Chamber Music Society (a group of Black musicians dedicated in large part to performing music by Black composers), and in the ‘60s helped establish the Harlem Cultural Community Center, among other projects.
Finally, Bonds is also known for her popular arrangements of spirituals, such as He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands — created for soprano Leontyne Price in 1963. Hear Price sing it here.
