by Daniel Hathaway
Today, just a few Easter-themed works that resonate personally and that others may enjoy.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs received their premiere in September 1911 at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral. Set to poems by the 17th-century courtier-turned-country-parson, George Herbert, who spent the latter part of his life as vicar in the tiny church of Lower Bemerton, within walking distance of Salisbury Cathedral, the suite has received a number of local performances — by the Cleveland Orchestra (October 2010), at Trinity Cathedral (November, 2015), by the Akron Symphony Chorus (May 2017), and by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Chorus (March, 2019. Here are the first two movements (“Easter,” and “I Got Me Flowers”) from Last Night at the Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2004. Leonard Slatkin leads the BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus, and BBC Symphony Orchestra with baritone Thomas Allen.
The “Easter Hymn” is one of the highlights of Pietro Mascagni’s one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana. With some trepidation (the piece was used in the soundtrack of The Godfather III), I scheduled it for an Easter Day service at Trinity Cathedral, where it fit splendidly into the celebration. Some years later, I was gratified to see that others had the same idea. Here’s a performance from the 2017 King’s College, Cambridge BBC “Easter from King’s” broadcast. The late Stephen Cleobury conducts and the soloist is the Australian lyric soprano Kiandra Howarth.
Sergei Rachmaninoff captured the wild clanging of Russian church bells in Pâques (“Easter”), the fourth movement of his Fantaisie-Tableaux for two pianos, Op. 5. Emanuela Friscioni and Antonio Pompa-Baldi played the whole suite on the Tri-C Classical Piano Series in March of 2019. Here’s a recording by two other piano luminaries with Cleveland connections: Vitya Vronski and Victor Babin, who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where Babin served as its president for 11 years, beginning in 1961), and were personal friends of the composer.
