by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 noon, Trinity Cathedral’s free Brownbag Concert series will host Case Western Historical Performance Ensembles. Those musicians will reassemble at 6 pm this evening for a Chamber Music in the Galleries concert in the Donna and James Reid Galleries at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Also this evening at 6 pm, Piano Cleveland Live will present pianist Arseniy Gusev and violinist Shannon Lee (photo by Olivia Crumm) in a sneak peek at their new album Witraż (Stained Glass) at the Forest City Brewery.
For details of upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
From an email on Tuesday: “The Cleveland Orchestra is pleased to announce that Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will return to Cleveland earlier than expected to lead an additional subscription week on February 27-28 and March 1.
“Following his medical leave in the fall, we welcome Franz back to the podium for this extended period, which includes the Orchestra’s performances at Carnegie Hall on March 18-19 and culminates in an all-Tchaikovsky program featuring Yuja Wang at Mandel Concert Hall on March 22-23.
“Alan Gilbert, who was scheduled to conduct these subscription concerts, has graciously offered to relinquish the week to give his friend Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra more time together this season. Alan has long and deep ties with The Cleveland Orchestra, and we look forward to the resumption of his regular appearances at Severance Music Center soon.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC
On today’s date in classical music history, we gained two composers and lost one.
Norwegian composer and violinist Ole Bull entered the scene in Bergen in 1810. The other two were born in France — Jacques Ibert in Paris in 1890, and Ivan Tcherepnin near Paris on this date in 1943. Ibert makes today’s honors list having written fin to his career in the French capital on February 5, 1962.
Bull figures importantly in the establishment of Norwegian independence from Sweden, including the co-founding of Det Norske Theater in Bergen, where Norwegian was established as the house language instead of Danish.
He also encouraged the talent of Edvard Grieg, whom he met in 1858 when Norway’s most famous composer-to-be was only 15, and leveraged his admission to the Leipzig Conservatory.
As one of the leading touring virtuosi of his era, Bull collected important violins, performed with Liszt, and made several tours to the United States, where he bought land and established Norwegian communities. As a result, today you can visit Ole Bull State Park in the Susquehannock State Forest, enter Ole Bull’s concert hall at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and check out Ole Bull Cottage in Eliot, Maine, originally meant to be a music school.
For a taste of Bull’s music, listen to his Grand Concerto, Op. 4, performed by Annar Follesø with Ole Kristian Ruud and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, or his somewhat shorter Concerto Fantastico with the same artists.
And/or watch a documentary where two sisters, Ragnhild Hemsing and Eldbjørg Hemsing, go on a quest to discover the secrets behind the virtuoso’s unique tone.
Ivan Tcherepnin, who came from a family of Russian composers, studied with Leon Kirchner, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory and Stanford before becoming director of Harvard’s Electronic Music School from 1972 until his death in 1998.
Alas, I haven’t been able to locate recordings of what are said to be two of his defining works: the Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra that won the 1996 Grawemeyer Award, or his Samur Opera, which earned the Grand Prize at Austria’s 1982 Ars Electronica Festival. Any clues from our readers?
Jacques Ibert shared the predilection of 20th century French composers to write for wind instruments. Who could ask for a more alluring performance of his Trois Pièces Brèves than that played (and choreographed!) by the virtuosi of the Danish-Latvian wind quintet Carion? Begin here and click here for the last two movements.
But for sheer cuteness, here’s a video posted by pianist Conrad Tao of his performance of Ibert’s Le petit âne blanc (“The Little White Donkey”), captured at the tender age of 6.
