by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Two items only!
On Friday evening at 7, the French harp-guitar duo of award-winning performers and composers Isabelle & Raphael Olivier will create a journey of soundscapes at Reithoffer’s Art, Spirits & Entertainment in Chagrin Falls.
And on Sunday at 7, Tony DeSare and the Blossom Band present “Sinatra and Beyond” at Blossom Music Center. Read a preview interview with DeSare here.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Music Settlement’s Kawai piano sale this weekend has been moved to the Kawai Piano Gallery in Beachwood’s Pinecrest Shopping Center. “The selection includes baby grands, studio grands, upright pianos, consoles, and performance level electronic digital pianos. Additional factory-crated new pianos will also be available. These instruments will be offered to the public at significantly reduced prices. Pianos have also been professionally maintained, and most include the original 10-year manufacturer’s warranty.”
Akron’s Urban Troubadour will present four roving events in 2024-2025: “Beethoven & Bluegrass” at Prime Vine Winery (Jane Berkner, flute, Amy Glick, violin & James Rhodes, viola, followed by The Bill Lestock Bluegrass Trio (September 22 at 2:30 pm), “Horns by the River” at Cuyahoga Falls Sheraton (horn quartet from the Cleveland Orchestra performing in front of walls of glass overlooking the Cuyahoga River, November 3 at 4 pm), “Art x Love + Tea” at the Tea Lady on Main Street (flute and cello music with Jane Berkner and Derek Snyder, plus harpist Nancy Paterson, March 9 at Noon), and “Idle Twittering” at Akrona Art Galleries (flute quartet and piano with Jane Berkner, Kyra Kester, George Pope & Linda White, flutes, and Eric Charnofsky, piano, April 27 at 2:30 pm). Tickets here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
August 23 — by Jarrett Hoffman:
American composer, pianist, and organist George Walker (pictured above) — who died on this date in 2018 in Montclair, New Jersey — was a true trailblazer.
Most famously, he was the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (1996). But even fifty years earlier, he was breaking boundaries. In 1945, Walker not only became the first Black pianist to give a recital at New York’s Town Hall, but also the first Black instrumentalist to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and one of the first Black graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music. (As for local connections, his studies at Curtis followed his graduation at age 18 from Oberlin College.)
His academic career was long and impressive, including posts at the New School, Rutgers University, the University of Colorado, the Peabody Institute, the University of Delaware, and Smith College, where he became the first Black tenured member of the faculty.
It’s important to emphasize those firsts, but also to move beyond them in framing Walker’s career. In a 1987 interview, he reflected on being termed an “African-American composer” rather than just an American composer:
I’ve benefited from being a black composer in the sense that when there are symposiums given of music by black composers, I would get performances by orchestras that otherwise would not have done the works. The other aspect, of course, is that if I were not black, I would have had a far wider dispersion of my music and more performances.
Here are a few works to begin immersing yourself in the world of this great, underperformed American composer.
His most popular piece is the 1990 Lyric for Strings, which he adapted from the second movement of his First String Quartet (1946). It’s interesting to hear both versions — the sparer beauty of the quartet, and the warmer and richer string-orchestra piece.
Many other works are more stylistically thorny, including his Pulitzer-winning (by unanimous decision) Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra, which sets a text by Walt Whitman in reflecting on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
And moving from that large ensemble down to the opposite, Oberlin faculty violinist David Bowlin recorded Walker’s 2011 solo work Bleu to excellent effect on the album Bird As Prophet. A personal favorite of mine — complex and accessible, emotive and playful all at the same time — Bleu was written for the composer’s son Gregory Walker, a composer himself as well as a violinist.
It wasn’t until age 87 that George Walker began to write for his son — with the 2008 Violin Concerto — and even then, Gregory Walker wasn’t aware of it until it showed up in the mail.
“Didn’t know about it until it was too late,” he deadpanned in an interview with NPR.
August 24:
The late American composer Stephan Paulus was born on this date in 1949 in Summit, New Jersey, though he spent most of his career in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. His life was tragically cut short by a stroke which led to his death in 2014.
His some 450 works are dominated by choral pieces of all dimensions and the four operas he wrote for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Paulus was a popular composer-in-residence, having served in that position with the Atlanta Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the orchestras of Tucson and Annapolis.
Organist Paul Jacobs performed his Grand Concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra in 2017, and Elizabeth Lentl soloed in his smaller Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Percussion with Trinity Chamber Orchestra at a Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert in 2012. Watch the latter performance here.
For a taste of Paulus’ choral music, click here to watch the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus sing his “Wonder Tidings” from Three Nativity Carols at Rocky River Presbyterian Church in 2013.
August 25:
American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts on this date in 1918. We’ve previously mentioned his sole appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra in a 1970 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony at Blossom, but today it might be fun to go behind the scenes and watch “Lenny” in rehearsal — a process even more revealing than the resulting performance.
I had the honor of studying with Bernstein in the conducting class at Tanglewood in the early ‘70s, and of singing in Mahler 2 with the Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses and the Boston Symphony on a radiant summer afternoon during that time. Click here to watch Bernstein rehearse Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring during the 1987 International Conductor’s Competition and Master Course at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany. And in a separate clip, he takes the triangle players in Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette aside for a brief tutorial.
And on August 25, 2002, American bass-baritone William Warfield died in Chicago at the age of 82 (read an obituary here). He launched his career with a debut recital at New York’s Town Hall in 1950, and two years later — in an age when cultural diplomacy was still important — he performed in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in the first of six tours he made for the U.S. State Department.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Warfield went on to teach at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and later at Northwestern University.
Toward the end of his career in 2000, he sang one of his signature pieces, Schubert’s Erlkönig in California. To appreciate another aspect of his artistic talents, you can hear his recitations of Paul Lauence Dunbar’s “Deacon Jones’ Grievance,” “Prometheus,” and “When Malindy Sings” here.
