by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The concert schedule heats up on the weekend before Thanksgiving!
On Saturday: Oberlin faculty and guests present The Last Rose of Summer, Cleveland Silent Film Festival screens a 1925 ethnographic documentary with score by santour player Mahtab Nadalian, BlueWater Chamber Orchestra features concertmaster James Thompson, Les Délices continues exploring the 14th century Avant-garde, the Canton Symphony celebrates the centenary of Rhapsody in Blue, Firelands Symphony plays a Thanksgiving program, Relic Ensemble journeys into the Underworld, and The Cleveland Orchestra features violinist Stefan Jackiw.
On Sunday, the Canton Symphony repeats Saturday’s program, Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra plays its fall concert, Choral Arts Cleveland visits music by female composers of the last millennium, violinist Amy Lee (pictured) solos with Heights Chamber Orchestra, and clarinetist Stanislav Golovin is featured with Suburban Symphony, BlueWater String Quartet plays at St. James, Lakewood, Les Délices plays medieval music at Disciples Church, Firelands Symphony Chorale sings songs of Thanksgiving, Lakeland Civic Band remembers a childhood, the YSU Wind Ensemble plays at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, and the Baldwin Wallace Motet Choir performs in Berea.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
OMAR OPERA AT OBERLIN AND IN CLEVELAND:
Rhiannon Giddens’ and Michael Abels’ Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar will be presented in a concert version on December 6 in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel and December 8 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in Cleveland. Both performances are sold out, but live streams are available (click here for Oberlin information and here for Cleveland details).
The Opera chronicles the life of Omar ibn Said, the 19th-century West African Islamic scholar who was enslaved in South Carolina. Oberlin alumnus John Kennedy, who directed the opera’s premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA, will lead the Oberlin Orchestra and choral ensembles and alumni soloists in the concert production.
The performances will reunite four friends who met studying opera at the Oberlin Conservatory: Giddens ’00; Limmie Pulliam ’98; Michael Preacely ’99 and Daniel Okulitch ’99.
NEWS BRIEFS:
ArtsJournal writes in its Today’s Highlights: “When voters elected far right governments in Hungary and Poland, the new leaders started changing the rules for how government would work. Among the measures were laws to crack down on culture and media. This week, The US House voted to allow the Treasury Secretary to classify any non-profits as “terrorism-supporting” and strip them of their nonprofit status. Artists are alarmed. If a theater presents a play critical of government actions, might it find itself disappeared? These are the kinds of laws without oversight that create a chilling effect across culture. Here’s a report of the bill’s passage in the House (which doesn’t mean the Senate will also pass the bill), and here’s a good roundup of potential artistic risks.”
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
November 23:
On this date in 1585, English composer Thomas Tallis died in Greenwich, having successfully weathered the back-and-forth religious machinations of monarchs and the stylistic changes that shifts between Catholic loyalists and Protestant reformers brought to the music of the Church of England. As his epitaph notes,
He serv’d long tyme in chappel with grete prayse
Fower sovereygnes reygnes (a thing not often seen);
I meane Kyng Henry and Prynce Edward’s dayes,
Quene Mary, and Elizabeth oure Quene
Tallis’ colleague William Byrd marked his passing in the elegy, Ye Sacred Muses, sung here by countertenor Daniel Elgersma to the accompaniment of a Viola Organistica, one of several such instruments invented by Leonardo da Vinci.
The extremes of musical style during Tallis’ career are captured in the recording Thomas Tallis: Lamentations, Motets, music for strings, performed on period instruments by Theatre of Voices (directed by Paul Hillier) and The King’s Noyse (directed by David Douglass).
But today’s widest audience probably knows Tallis’ name from the simple psalm tune on which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra and string quartet. The BBC Symphony Orchestra plays it here in an atmospheric performance under Andrew Davis in the darkened Gloucester Cathedral, where the work premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1910.
On November 23, 1878, French composer André Caplet was born on a boat off the coast of Le Havre, eventually perishing in 1925 from the effects of poison gas in World War I. A friend of Debussy, he’s mostly remembered for his orchestrations of that composer’s piano works.
That Caplet also spoke with his own voice is evident in such works as his Légende (suite symphonique pour harpe chromatique, saxophone et instruments à cordes), performed here at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2014, featuring saxophonist Brandon Jinwoo Choi, and in his Messe à trois voix, from which Vox Reflexa sings the “O salutaris hostia” movement.
Finally, composer Krzysztof Penderecki first saw the light of day on this date in 1933 in Debica, Poland. Among his best-known works are the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and the Passion According to St. Luke. He died on March 29, 2020. Watch a ChamberFest Cleveland performance of his Trio by Diana Cohen, violin, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, and Oliver Herbert, cello, in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on June 13, 2019.
November 24:
On November 24, 1868, American composer and pianist Scott Joplin was born near Marshall, Texas. Most famous for single-handedly inventing ragtime — a syncopated American genre revived by William Bolcom and William Albright, who introduced the young musicologist Joshua Rifin to Joplin’s music in 1968, and further popularized in the movie The Sting — Joplin wrote two operas as well.
The materials for A Guest of Honor have been lost, probably seized by a rooming house owner in lieu of rent during a tour in 1904, but Treemonisha enjoyed a full production by Houston Grand Opera in May, 1975. Watch a video (with subtitles in Portuguese!) here.
Back to ragtime: Joplin made seven pianola rolls in 1916 including his most famous piece, the Maple Leaf Rag. In 1970, Rifkin’s Nonesuch recording of Joplin piano rags was the label’s first to sell a million copies.
Also born on November 24 (in 1934), Russian composer Alfred Schnittke adopted what he called his polystylistic technique in works like his remarkable Concerto Grosso No. 1, performed live in Moscow in 2004 by Gidon Kremer, Tatiana Grindenko and Kremerata Baltica.
On November 24, 1940, American jazz composer Wendell Logan was born in Thompson, Georgia. He joined the Oberlin Conservatory Faculty and founded the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble in 1973, later developing a jazz curriculum for the school, which adopted admission standards for jazz students in 1991. Watch a shaky cell phone video of Logan speaking at the dedication of the Kohl Jazz Studies Building in 2010 (he died later that year).
And listen to a February, 1991 recording of Logan’s Roots, Branches, Shapes and Shades (of Green), commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, composed for pianist Neal Creque, and first performed under the direction of Edwin London in February, 1991.
Finally, multi-genre double bass phenomenon and composer Edgar Meyer was born on this date in 1960. ChamferFest Cleveland violinist David Bowlin and bassist Nathan Farrington performed the third movement of his Concerto Duo at The Wine Spot in June, 2014. Watch here.
