by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Friday and Saturday, The Cleveland Orchestra winds up its European Tour with concerts in Vienna’s Musikverein.
On the home front, on Friday at 12 Noon, the Cleveland Institute of Music continues its series of Museum Melodies, free, one-hour programs initially featuring pianists on Thursdays and Fridays in the visitors hall of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
On Saturday at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, Helen Welch channels Karen Carpenter in “Superstar – The Songs. The Stories. The Carpenters,” and at 8 pm, Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project presents multimedia artists Paige Naylor & Haruhi Kobayashi, plus Cleveland-based musician Naomi Columna in the Calicchia Gallery Studio.
On Sunday at 3 pm, violinist Julia Kuhn and pianist Caroline Oltmanns (pictured) open the University of Akron’s Kulas Concert Series with Beethoven sonatas. And at 5 pm, Music from the Western Reserve presents saxophonist Perry Roth and pianist Hana Chu at Christ Church in Hudson.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these and other performances.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
September 6:
Born on this date in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, composer Joan Tower spent some of her formative years in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru before returning to the U.S. as a college student. Receiving her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 1968, a year later she became a founding member of the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players. In addition to being the group’s pianist, she wrote several successful works for that ensemble, including the mixed quintet Amazon I (1977).
That was an important period of time: the group won a Naumburg Award, Tower joined the composition faculty of Bard College, and she received a Guggenheim fellowship. A few years after the success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), she left the group — though they continue to orbit one another to this day. Tower still teaches at Bard, and the Da Capo have been in residence there since 1982.
September 7 — by Stephanie Manning:
Up until 1995, the Cleveland International Piano Competition was known by a different name. When pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet arrived in Cleveland in 1979, it was to participate in the Casadesus Competition. The French musician, born on this day in 1961, won Second Prize that year, and has since gone on to international success (pictured here with The Cleveland Orchestra, photo by Roger Mastroianni).
Thibaudet’s visit to Cleveland marked his first time in the United States — and the city left a lasting impression on him. In our 2018 interview, the pianist recounted a memory of telling a local taxi driver that he was a musician. “He almost stopped his cab and he turned around and said, ‘Sir, do you know that in Cleveland we have the best orchestra in the world?’ I said yes, I know.
“It was amazing to have that pride from a taxi driver,” he added. “Usually they talk about the baseball team, but he was so proud of his orchestra. And I’ve never seen that anywhere else.”
September 8:
On this date in 1613, Italian composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died in Naples. Distinguished for his harmonic adventures in madrigals and sacred music, Gesualdo was also notorious for having murdered his first wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante delicto. Cecil Gray and Peter Warlock (the nom de plume for composer Philip Heseltine) tell the story in their 1926 book, Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer. A court refused to prosecute.
Click here to watch a performance of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae factae sunt (a responsory for Good Friday) by TENET Vocal Artists, including tenors Owen McIntosh and Jason McStoots, who have recently performed in Cleveland with Apollo’s Fire and Les Délices. Or take a deep plunge into his madrigals courtesy of Ensemble Métamorphoses with this recording of his Sixth Book (score included).
