by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS;
On Friday evening at 7:30, concertmaster Alan Choo takes Apollo’s Fire to Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles for works written for the court of the Sun King by Lully, Marais, and Rameau. The second and third of four performances take place on Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Hts., and the fourth on Sunday at 4 at Rocky River Presbyterian Church..
On Friday at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, James Feddeck conducts The Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven Lives Upstairs. The program, designed especially for ages 7-12, features a lively exchange of letters between young Christoph and his uncle about the “madman” who has moved into the upstairs apartment of Christoph’s Vienna home.
On Friday evening at 8, Oberlin Opera Theater raises the curtain on two one-act operas by John Musto, directed by Scott Skiba and conducted by Timothy Weiss. Later the Same Evening is set in a single evening in 1932 Manhattan and brings to life the characters and scenes from five Edward Hopper paintings. Bastianello wraps itself around an amusing series of encounters derived from several versions of an old Italian folk tale. Repeated on Saturday at 8 & Sunday at 2.
On Saturday at 2:30 in Warner Concert hall, the Oberlin Conservatory will present a memorial tribute for the late voice professor Daune Mahy, who taught there for 39 years. Details here.
On Saturday evening at 7:30, Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša, a frequent guest, returns to the Mandel Concert Hall podium at Severance Music Center to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 3, Bohuslav Martinů’s Symphony No. 3, and Vítĕzslava Kaprálová’s Military Sinfonietta. Repeated Sunday at 3.
On Saturday at 7:30 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, Vietnamese-born classical guitarist An Tran, now based in Chicago, makes his Cleveland debut on the Cleveland Classical Society’s International Series. His program includes world premieres from his new recording, Illumina.
And on Sunday at 4:30 in Finney Chapel, organist James O’Donnell will play the annual David Boe Memorial Recital honoring the ninth Dean of the Conservatory, who taught at Oberlin from 1962 to 2008.
For details of these and other performances, visit our Concert Listings.
WEEKEND 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 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!)
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”).
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.
