by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
This evening at 6 at Market Garden Brewery, Les Délices takes a break from its usual French Baroque fare to play a pirate-themed event including a costume contest and sea shanty singalongs, and at 7 at Heights Arts, violinist Emily Cornelius and percussionist Ross Karre join in a pay-what-you-can concert.
More this evening: at 7:30 in Mandel Hall at Severance, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole and Concerto in G with pianist Seong-Jin Cho (pictured), and at at 8 in Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater opens a four-performance, double-cast run of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, directed by Stephanie Havey and conducted by Christian Capocaccia.
INTERESTING CLIP:
Film concerts: Performing movie music live
“An increasingly popular symphony orchestra concert is a movie screening accompanied by a live performance of the film’s music—reeling in new audiences to the concert hall. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue attends a New York Philharmonic screening of Jaws, featuring John Williams’ iconic score, and finds out how the technically complicated concert is managed.” Watch here (Tattled from The Cleveland Orchestra’s newsletter entry about the forthcoming screenings of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther with score led by expert film conductor Anthony Parnther.)
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On March 6, 1967, Hungarian ethnomusicologist, educator and composer Zoltán Kodály passed away in Budapest.
Listen to Kodály talk about his views on music education here. And listen to his Dances of Galanta performed by The Cleveland Orchestra under István Kertész at Blossom in 1969, with solos by former principal clarinet Robert Marcellus. We’re advised that there’s “a loud bang during his solo which is explained in the announcement at the end.” That would be the famous ‘Blossom Boom,’ created by the expansion and contraction of the pavilion beams.
ChamberFest Cleveland programmed Kodály’s Serenade for Two Violins and Viola in June, 2014. Watch the performance by Diana Cohen, David Bowlin, and Yura Lee here.
And on March 6, 1900, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is reported to have put the finishing touches on the little orchestral interlude he had written for his opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, that soon achieved its own life as The Flight of the Bumblebee. Compare performances by pianist Yuja Wang, the London Cello Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Wind Sextet, and Carolina Eyck (theremin!)
During Women’s History Month, it’s especially appropriate to remember two figures who left their mark on classical music.
American conductor and opera director Sarah Caldwell was born on March 6, 1924 in Maryville, MO. After studies at the New England Conservatory and the Berkshire Music Center, Caldwell launched her career as assistant to Boris Goldovsky, and founded the Opera Company of Boston in 1957.
Her colorful career is touched upon in an episode of Virginia Eskin’s “First Ladies of Music,” and related in some detail in Richard Dyer’s Boston Globe obituary of March 25, 2006 following her death at the age of 82.
Stories about Caldwell’s brilliance and eccentricities abound. I recall hearing about an almost nightly ritual when her staff fanned out to try to find where she had parked her car that day. And I showed up with hundreds of other ticket holders for a performance of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron only to discover a note taped to the theater door announcing the indefinite postponement of the production. Dyer notes that she “once sold tickets for Verdi’s spectacular and popular Aida, but offered Mozart’s intimate and little-known La Finta Giardiniera instead.” (That opera is being staged this weekend at Oberlin).
Continuing with famous women in music, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa was born on March 6, 1944 in Gisborne, New Zealand. After studies at the London Opera Centre, she made an auspicious American debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro at the Santa Fe Opera in July of 1971, a production that also featured the debut of Frederica von Stade as Cherbino.
Her later career included her appearance as Maria in the “Operatic” version of West Side Story, along with José Carreras as Tony, Tatiana Troyanos as Anita, Kurt Ollmann as Riff, and Marilyn Horne as the offstage voice. Here, she’s featured in a 1986 Montreal Symphony Concert led by Charles Dutoit in arias by Handel, Mozart, Bellini, Gounod, Boito, Puccini and Charpentier.
