by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
On Friday at 11 am, conductor-composer John Adams and pianist Aaron Diehl join The Cleveland Orchestra for Adams’ Frenzy: a short symphony and his arrangements of Astor Piazzolla tangos, Charles Ives’ From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, and Timo Andres’ Made of Tunes. (Repeated on Saturday at 7:30.) • On Friday evening at 7:30, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series hosts the American Brass Quintet in Finney Chapel, and Cleveland Pops Orchestra features magician Michael Grandinetti in a night of music and illusions at Severance Music Center.
On Sunday at 5 pm, the Kent Keyboard Series welcomes pianist Stephanie Shih-yu Cheng to Ludwig Recital Hall, while Music from the Western Reserve presents cellist Brendon Phelps and pianist Alexandre Marr in a program designed around Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata at Christ Church Episcopal in Hudson.
On Sunday at 7 pm, James Feddeck leads The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Chorus in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, Antonín Dvořák’s Te Deum, and Howard Hanson’s Song of Democracy at Severance Music Center, and organist David Blazer and percussionist Andrew Pongracz provide a live score for the Cleveland Silent Film Festival’s screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these and other performances.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
There’s a long history of visual art influencing the creation of music, and vice versa. One important artist steeped in that cross-pollination is Andy Warhol, that leading figure of the pop art movement who was born in Pittsburgh, and who died on February 22, 1987 in New York City at age 58.
Warhol influenced many musicians, including David Bowie, but one more direct connection he had with music was his involvement with the experimental rock group The Velvet Underground. Having heard about them through the grapevine shortly after their formation, he went to hear them play in 1965. Impressed, he offered to be their manager — a partnership that raised the profile of the group significantly.
Soon the band was performing in Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” multimedia shows, which included music and dance alongside the artist’s films. The artist also served as nominal producer for the group’s now-iconic debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), where they were joined by that German-born singer at Warhol’s insistence.
Featuring a Warhol print of a banana on the front cover, that record also serves as an entry point for a discussion of Warhol’s album artwork, an area in which he was prolific, and highly varied when it came to musical genre. Perhaps his most famous entry was the provocative image that accompanied The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971), which included a working zipper and belt buckle.
In the area of classical music, Warhol designed album covers for figures such as composer and conductor Carlos Chávez and pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and ensembles such as the Indianapolis Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, Boston Pops, and Philadelphia Orchestra. Warhol cover art collector and researcher Guy Minnebach shares images of the classical album covers in his blog here, and Warhol’s album covers in general here.
Even if you think you aren’t familiar with Warhol’s work, you would probably recognize his vividly-colored series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Other celebrities to receive that treatment included Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, and — in a different use of the word ‘celebrity’ — Ludwig van Beethoven.
For the 1987 Beethoven series, Warhol began where else but with the famous portrait of that composer by Joseph Karl Stieler, an image you’ll recognize from its use in publications and press materials time and time again. From there, Warhol overlays a sheet of music — an excerpt from the “Moonlight” Sonata — and employs his signature, dramatic color scheme. Click here and scroll down, past the Mick Jagger material, to view the Beethoven series from the Masterworks Fine Art Gallery in San Francisco.
