by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
FEATURED SOLOISTS: Garrick Ohlsson in Mozart’s last piano concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra (Sat. at 8 & Sun. at 3 at Severance Music Center), violinist Laura Hamilton with CityMusic Cleveland (Sat. at 7:30 at St. Stanislaus & Sunday at 4 at St. Noel), harpist Yolanda Kondonassis and soprano Amanda Powell with BlueWater Chamber Orchestra (Sat. at 8, Church of the Covenant) & pianist Eric Charnofsky with Heights Chamber Orchestra (Sunday at 3 at the Maltz).
OPERA: Oberlin Opera Theater (pictured) stages Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, the first opera ever from 1605 (Sat. at 8 & Sun. at 2, in Hall Auditorium).
PIANO RECITALS: No Exit presents pianist Shuai Wang in PianoDada (Sat. at 7, at Heights Arts) and Donna Lee performs on the Kent Keyboard Series (Sun. at 5 in Ludwig Recital Hall).
OTHER ENSEMBLES: Choral Arts Cleveland celebrates over 400 years of choral music (Sat. at 7 at Disciples), Oberlin Jazz Ensemble (Sat. at 8 in Finney Chapel).
EXPERIMENTAL: CUSP presents Jessica Ackerley & Jeremy Bible (Sat. at 8 at Convivium 33 Gallery).
For details, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Alan Choo increases the reward for the return of his stolen violin and writes about “the mysterious power of music” in a Facebook post.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
MARCH 16:
This date in 1888 saw the first performance of the revised version of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, “Romantic,” by the New York Philharmonic Society conducted by Anton Seidl. Franz Welser-Möst (photo: Yevhen Gulenko) conducts the piece this weekend at Severance Music Center. Read our Plain Dealer review here.
There’s quite a mixed list of arrivals and departures to acknowledge on this 16th day of March. Italian composer Giovanni Pergolesi (who died in 1736 in Pozzuoli of tuberculosis at the age of 26), American composer and conductor Edwin London (born in Philadelphia in 1929), English conductor Sir Roger Norrington (born in 1934 in Oxford), American composer David Del Tredici (born in 1937 in Cloverdale, California), Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (who died in Los Angeles in 1968), and American composer Roger Sessions (who died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1985 at the age of 88).
MARCH 17 — by Jarrett Hoffman
Today marks the 359th birthday of French Baroque composer, harpsichordist, and vocalist Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, who began her career as a child prodigy, and ended it as one of the most respected musicians of her time in all of France.
Born into a musical family, de La Guerre performed for Louis XIV at the age of five, went on to become a court musician in her teens, and drew notice as a composer beginning with her first published collection: the 1687 Pièces de clavessin, a rare example of harpsichord music in France at that time.
Her first and only opera, Céphale et Procris, is known for its artful combination of French and Italian styles, its impressive musical interludes, and unfortunately a convoluted libretto which may have been its downfall: after the premiere in 1694, it ran for only a handful of performances. Still, it put her in the history books as the first French woman known to have written an opera.
De La Guerre broke new ground in further areas of composition. Her 1695 set of trio sonatas represented an early example of French experimentation in the Italian genre of the sonata. And her 1707 Sonates pour le violon et pour le clavecin were some of the first accompanied harpsichord works. As the icing on the cake — and isn’t that really the best part of eating cake? — the end of her career was devoted to a series of inventive cantatas.
Listen to her opera Céphale et Procris here in a 2008 recording by the Ensemble Musica Fiorita under the direction of Daniela Dolci. And take in her Sonata No.2 in D here in a 2020 concert by violinist Ingrid Matthews and harpsichordist Byron Schenkman.
WOMEN’S HISTORY IN UKRAINE & NE OHIO
Speaking of pioneering women of history — and tying into current events — the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation marked International Women’s Day two years ago this month with a Facebook tribute to Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913), one of the leading figures in Ukrainian literature and a noted activist in the movements of feminism and Ukrainian nationalism.
Among the many monuments in her name — particularly in her home country and in other former Soviet Republics — is one in Cleveland, where her statue is a centerpiece of the Ukrainian Garden. (pictured: the unveiling of the statue in 1961, photo courtesy of the Cleveland State Library Special Collections.) Read more about this remarkable figure in an article from UNESCO.
