by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday at 2 pm, the Cleveland Trombone Seminar brings a week of activities at CSU to a conclusion with chamber music & works for low brass choir conducted by Mark Lusk. At 7 pm, ENCORE Chamber Music presents the Verona String Quartet at Akron-Summit County Library in Akron. And at 7:30, the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival presents Lorenzo Micheli, one-half of Solo Duo in Mixon Hall at CIM. At the same hour, Ohio Light Opera opens its 45th season with the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls at the College of Wooster (pictured: OLO’s previous production.)
On Sunday, the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival presents solo recitals by Hao Yang at 1 pm, and Petra Polácková at 4 pm, and ends its 24th season with the final round and prize ceremony of the James Stroud Youth Competition at 6:30, all in Mixon Hall at CIM.
Also on Sunday, at 2 pm, Choral Arts Cleveland and Opus 216 perform Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem at Divinity Lutheran Church in Parma Hts., at 3 pm, ENCORE Chamber Music collaborates with the Cleveland Humanities Festival for works by Lili Boulanger, Kaija Saariaho, Ralph Vaughan Williams & Felix Mendelssohn in Harkness Chapel at CWRU, and at 4 pm, The Cleveland Opera repeats its program “Music for Orchestra… with a touch of voice” at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus.
For details, visit our Concert Listings page.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Youngstown Symphony Society has announced the appointment of Sergey Bogza as its next music director. Bogza will continue as Music Director of Florida’s Panama City Symphony.
“Off the podium, Bogza is an endurance athlete who regularly competes in ultra-marathons and long-distance bike rides, training with his two Belgian Malinois dogs, Samson and Stella. When Bogza is not on the podium or the race course, he is found in the kitchen mastering the culinary art of Slavic cuisine.”
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
June 8:
Notable births on June 8 in music history include German composer Robert Schumann in Zwickau (1810), Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff in Prague (1894), and Polish-American pianist Emanuel Ax (1949).
Obsequies followed the demise of American composer Frederick Shepherd Converse (1940, in Westwood, Massachusetts) and English composer Gordon Jacob (1984, in Saffron Walden).
One of Schumann’s extended works, Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, remains relatively unknown. It’s a magnificently flawed creation, over which the composer obsessed for a decade and wrote in pieces from back to front, beginning with the finale, “Chorus Mysticus,” in 1844 and concluding with the Overture in 1853.
Widely regarded as Schumann’s magnum opus, the Scenes have been performed here and there since they were exhumed in the 1970s. I had the good fortune of singing in one of the earlier revivals — Boston Symphony performances with the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and New England Conservatory Chorus in 1966 led by Erich Leinsdorf with an all-star cast of soloists that included Hermann Prey, Beverly Sills, Charles Bressler, Thomas Paul, Veronica Tyler, Tatiana Troyanos, Florence Kopleff, and Batyah Godfrey. You can listen to a live recording here.
As a composer, Schulhoff was fortunate to have lived through the anything-goes years between the World Wars, which allowed him to dabble in a range of musical styles. As a Jew who espoused Communist sentiments, he was unlucky to have been active during the Nazi regime. He died of tuberculosis in the Wultzburg concentration camp on August 18, 1942.
Enjoy Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello, played here by Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson, and his Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin, performed here by Alexi Kenney at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York in 2016. And ChamberFest Cleveland gave its patrons a taste of Schulhoff’s Dada-inspired works with Marjorie Maltais’ performance of his Sonata Erotica in June of 2016.
One of 20th century England’s most prolific composers and resourceful arrangers, Gordon Jacob became well-known for works like his William Byrd Suite, arrangements of Elizabethan-era pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. That inspired Gerard Hoffnung’s challenge to Jacob to write variations on a Scottish folk song for a bizarre collection of instruments to be performed at one of the Hoffnung Musical Festival concerts in London in November, 1966. Listen here to the composer leading his Variations on Annie Laurie with an ensemble that includes heckelphone, contrabassoon, serpent, harmonium, hurdy gurdy, bass tuba, and a pair of piccolos.
June 9 — by Jarrett Hoffman
In a 2021 conversation on this site with bassoonist Barrick Stees, he shared the opinion that woodwind quintets have really come into their own in the 20th and 21st centuries, as composers such as Ligeti and Barber “featured the personalities of the different instruments, as opposed to making them subjugate those personalities to form a homogenous sound.”
Another composer to toss into that group is Carl Nielsen, born on this date in 1865, whose well-known quintet was influenced by the individual members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Having overheard the group rehearsing one evening, Nielsen noted how each player’s personality came through in their playing, and decided to picture them in music, particularly in a variations movement.
Variation 5, a duet between clarinet and bassoon, is especially colorful with its depiction of clarinetist Aage Oxenvad’s hot temper. According to an article by the group’s oboist, Sven Christian Felumb, Nielsen’s instructions here were to “play like a married couple who are arguing…” Perhaps it makes sense that bassoon (Knud Lassen) gets quiet at the end, because Felumb describes Lassen as easygoing and sophisticated — something that perhaps you can hear in the bassoon melody that opens the first movement.
Listen to Variation 5 (and the whole piece) here in a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet.
When Nielsen passed in 1931, his popularity had not yet reached the international heights at which it lies today. On his 60th birthday in 1925, even as he was celebrated in Scandinavia, he wrote:
If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end … What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
It’s poignant to imagine the scene of his funeral, where the Copenhagen Quintet gathered to pay tribute in the form of the chorale from the last movement of the Wind Quintet.
Read more about that work and the Copenhagen Quintet in Chapter IV of a doctoral dissertation by Marcia L. Spence.
