by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Local 4 Music Fund presents the second of four free She Scores concerts featuring music by underrepresented composers. Tonight’s program includes works by Chloe Arnold, Erin Busch, Gala Flagello, Karen Griebling, Alexis Lamb, Annick Odom, Rachelle Ryan, and Elizabeth Start. Emily Laurance will give a pre-concert lecture at 6 pm.
And tonight at 7:30, Mourning [A] BLKstar and Kaboom Studio Orchestra will present a joint concert at Baldwin Wallace University’s Kleist Center in Berea.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Associated Press notes that the late Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence will receive its US premiere by San Francisco Opera on June 1. Its characters “are living ghosts, traumatized survivors of a school shooting that occurred 10 years earlier, but the memory of which intrudes like an unwelcome guest on a wedding celebration taking place in the present.
“Acknowledging the sensitive nature of the topic, the SFO has put together a series of panel discussions and community outreach events focusing on such subjects as gun violence and depicting trauma on stage, screen and in music.” Read the article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
May 31,1656 marked the birth of French composer and violist da gamba Marin Marais in Paris. In 1999 Gérard Depardieu starred as Marais in Tous les Matins du Monde, bow-syncing to the playing of Jordi Savall in opulent scenes from the court of Louis XV shot in the Golden Gallery of the Bank of France. Savall, who has been a distinguished visitor to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s performing arts series, plays himself in a video of Marais’ Suite d’un goût étranger with Hyperion XXI — watch here.
On this date in 1809, Austrian composer Joseph Haydn died in Vienna, leading to the curious story of the theft of the composer’s head. The now-defunct Lyric Opera Cleveland commissioned a one-act comic opera from Larry Baker on the subject in 1987, described thusly by Plain Dealer critic Robert Finn: “There are intricate ensembles, elaborate musical parodies (including a page or two of ‘Salome’ for connoisseurs of severed-head music) and bursts of lyricism.”
The composer himself added, according to Wilma Salisbury’s Cleveland Arts Prize bio of Baker, that “the work is ‘absurd’ rather than ‘creepy or spooky’ and involves ‘no blood and gore whatsoever.’ Maybe worth a revival.
And English countertenor Alfred Deller was born on May 31, 1912 in Margate. Deller, who created the role of Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, teamed up with Gustav Leonhardt in 1954 for a pioneering recording of Bach Cantatas with the Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble. Hear Deller and Leonhardt in five Purcell songs recorded live in Hilversum in 1952 (note: photos of the harpsichordist probably aren’t of Leonhardt!) Deller performed with his trio at the Cleveland Museum of Art in September, 1955.
