DIARY: Tuesday, May 5, 2026

May 5, 2026 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY

Today at 12:00 pm, Tuesdays at the Covenant presents the Kachoufugetsu Japanese Handbell Choir, Kaori Hongo, director (pictured). Click here to view the program. Church of the Covenant, University Circle. Freewill offering.

Two concerts begin at 7:30 pm – pianist Marc-André Hamelin plays Haydn’s Piano Sonata in D Major, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 3, Weinberg’s Sonata No. 6, Rachmaninoff’s Étude-Tableau, Op. 39, No. 5 & Sonata No. 2 (1931 version) in Mandel Concert Hall. Tickets available online. And La Tanya Hall leads the Oberlin Gospel Choir In Finney Chapel, 90 N. Professor St., Oberlin. Free.

NEWS

Tuesday Musical is seeking a Director of Operations and Community Engagement with proven abilities in education and community engagement, artistic operations, development and related areas.. To read a position description click HERE.

About Daniel Hathaway

Daniel Hathaway founded ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008, after a thirty-one year tenure as music director of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, where he founded the Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert Series and Trinity Chamber Orchestra. A graduate of Harvard College and the Episcopal Divinity School, he also studied historical musicology at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Before coming to Cleveland in 1977, he served as head of humanities at the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City and as head of arts at Groton School in Massachusetts. In Cleveland, he has served on the music staff of Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the faculty of Laurel School. As an organist, Hathaway has played recitals in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and Austria. He team-teaches Music Journalism at Oberlin College and Conservatory and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.

Klaus Mäkelä leads powerful Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ at Severance (Apr. 23)

by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Do the arts have the wherewithal to take up great subjects like war? Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare sent his Prologue onstage at the top of his play Henry V to apologize in advance to the audience for its shortcomings:

Pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

In 1961, British pacifist composer Benjamin Britten addressed that question by writing his “War Requiem” on commission for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which rose next to the ruins from an 11-hour long Luftwaffe bombing raid on the night of November 14, 1940.

[Read on…]

Cleveland Pops plays Williams & Spielberg (Apr. 24)

by Kevin McLaughlin

On Friday, April 24 at Severance Music Center, the Cleveland Pops Orchestra played to a packed house with a program devoted to John Williams and Steven Spielberg — a partnership that reliably fills seats. Williams writes themes you can recognize in seconds, sometimes in two notes.

Carl Topilow made that point before the first downbeat. “Ladies and gentlemen — the two notes that changed the course of music history,” he said, letting Jaws swim in with low strings, and a steady pulse, the interval repeating then tightening like a screw.

From there, the program moved among Williams’ familiar modes. The “March from 1941” had a buoyant snap. Close Encounters offered short, bright phrases, almost conversational. And in Jurassic Park, the orchestra leaned into the composer’s gift for breadth.

Not all of Williams’ music trades in spectacle. As the New York Times has noted, it often works by taking older materials and presenting them in technicolor. The themes of Schindler’s List are spare and direct, the emotion carried by contour and tone rather than overt passion.

[Read on…]

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