by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday afternoon, the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute will culminate in a marathon participant chamber music concert (1:30-5 pm in the Conservatory’s Kulas Recital Hall & Orchestra Room), the Cleveland Clinic Concert Band will anticipate Independence Day with American classics (2 pm, Eastman Reading Garden, downtown Cleveland Public Library), and Ohio Light Opera stages Me and My Girl (2 pm in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.)
Events on Saturday evening include a screening of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark with John Williams’ live score played by Sarah Hicks & The Cleveland Orchestra (7 pm at Blossom), ChamberFest’s Closing Night (7:30 at the Maltz, pictured), Ohio Light Opera’s The Sound of Music (7:30 in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster), and the Stow Symphony (7:30 in Tallmadge Bible Church).
Sunday’s agenda, a bit lighter, includes Ohio Light Opera’s Guys and Dolls (2 pm), a summer carillon concert by Davis Osburn (6 pm, St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts.,) and a repeat of Saturday’s Cleveland Orchestra at the Movies (7pm at Blossom).
For details, visit the Concert Listings page.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Piano Cleveland writes, “In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cleveland International Piano Competition (CIPC), Piano Cleveland has placed six golden pianos in prominent — and sometimes unexpected — locations throughout the city. The golden pianos are part of the “50 Days of CIPC,” a lead-up to the competition’s signature Final Concerto Round with The Cleveland Orchestra. This initiative, generously sponsored by KeyBank, will feature weekly pop-up concerts at each of the piano locations.” Click here for more information.
YSU students to perform in Edinburgh. Fourteen Youngstown State University Theatre students will make their international debut this summer performing as the Steel Penguin Ensemble in the Off-Broadway musical Here There Be Dragons on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A special, free open rehearsal will take place on Sunday, July 7 at 2:30 in Bliss Hall’s Spotlight Theater on the YSU campus.Seating is limited.
INTERESTING READ:
Los Angeles Times critic Mark Sved attended and reviewed concerts by the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and the Kronos Quartet. “Symphony, opera and Kronos were all marvelous…Yet everywhere I went there was an inescapable feeling of doom, of disquieting calm before the storm. Lovely days now, but summer forebodes fires. Apparent urban bliss camouflages San Francisco’s seemingly insoluble urban ills.” Read Big changes afoot at 3 great San Francisco classical music institutions here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
JUNE 29:
Composer Hale Smith was born in Cleveland on this date in 1929. A precocious musician whose talents were recognized early on by Duke Ellington, after service in the U.S. Army, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1950 and 1952. Smith went on to enjoy a widely varied career in New York, where he moved easily between classical styles (including serial music), and jazz. He died in New York in 2009 at the age of 84.
As Dennis Dooley wrote when Smith won the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music in 1973,
His prolific output includes everything from TV advertising jingles to incidental music for stage productions of Lysistrata and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. His “Castle House Rag” was used in the documentary The Making of Citizen Kane. Smith has, nevertheless, always found time to lend his prodigious energies to such important undertakings as the Detroit Symphony’s annual Symposium on Black American Composers. He gladly served as an advisor to the Chicago-based Center for Black Music Research, but “bristled at the designation [Black composer],” The New York Times noted in its lengthy obituary, “He wanted his work, and that of his black peers, to appear on programs with that of Beethoven, Mozart and Copland” and to be judged simply as music.
A list of Hale Smith’s works (click the link to “Hale’s Music”) suggests that Cleveland should rediscover one of its hometown composers. Sample some of his music here,.
Among the better-served composers born on this date are Leroy Anderson (1908, beloved Boston creator of light classical music), Frank Loesser (1910, Broadway tunesmith, whose Guys and Dolls is currently in production by Wooster’s Ohio Light Opera), and Bernard Herrmann (1911, popularly known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, but a fine composer in his own right).
On June 29, 1934, radio station W2XR, a “noncommercial high fidelity experiment,” began broadcasting in New York City, soon to become WQXR when it was granted a commercial license in 1936. Always at the forefront of experimental broadcasting, in 1952, the station devised a way to broadcast in stereo, using two microphones placed six feet apart. Listeners could enjoy the stereo effect by similarly positioning two radios, one tuned to the station’s AM feed, the other to its FM feed.
And on this date in 1941, Polish piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski died in New York at the age of 80. Also a diplomat and statesman, the pianist had served as the newly independent Poland’s prime minister and foreign minister in 1919 when he participated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.
Paderewski’s dual career led to a curious situation after his demise in a New York hotel room while on a concert tour. Because of his diplomatic service and the exigencies of the Second World War, President Roosevelt granted permission for his body to be temporarily laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. But there it stayed in the vault of the U.S.S. Maine Mast Memorial until the fall of communism in 1992 when his remains were transferred to Warsaw Cathedral. Except for his heart, which is preserved in a bronze sculpture in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Read about that strange saga in detail here.
JUNE 30:
by Jarrett Hoffman
On June 30, 1958, Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen — Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra — was born in Helsinki. Salonen considered himself primarily as a composer (he took up conducting, he said, to guarantee that his works would be performed), but his fate was sealed when he stepped in at the last minute for Michael Tilson Thomas for Mahler’s Third Symphony in London.
Salonen has recently made the news by announcing his plans to resign as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, citing creative differences with the orchestra’s board.
Click here to watch a later performance of Mahler 3 with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London, when Salonen returned in October 2017 to the scene of his earlier triumph.
American violinist, composer, and educator Clarence Cameron White died on this date in 1960 in New York City. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory from 1896 to 1901, then studied composition with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in England, and violin in Paris. He succeeded R. Nathaniel Dett as head of the music department of the Hampton Institute from 1932-1935. White’s compositions include a ballet (A Night in Sans Souci) and an opera (Ouanga), two works based on Haitian themes for which he collaborated with playwright John Matheus.
Click here to watch a recent performance of White’s Suite Spirituale for Clarinet Quartet (at Clarinettissimo 2020), and here to watch an online video of his Levee Dance, Op. 27, No. 4 (performed by violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Joyce Yang).
