by Daniel Hathaway
NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PODCAST:
Released today, “Legendary,” the fifth episode in the current series of Cleveland Orchestra On A Personal Note podcasts, features Trustee Clara Rankin with President and CEO André Gremillet. Rankin reminisces about conductors, visiting artists, her own family ties, and “the people and performances that define The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here.
CMA’S “BEHIND THE BEAT” EPISODE 7:
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, one of the most widely respected contemporary classical composers, talks from Helsinki with Director of Performing Arts Tom Welsh about her large orchestra work, Orion, which has “a unique link to the Cleveland Museum of Art—not publicly known until now.” Watch the video here.
HAPPENING TODAY:
Christopher Houlihan’s “Virtual Vierne at 150 Festival features an interview with Olivier Latry, since 1985 one of the three “titulares” or tenured organists of Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral (along with Philippe Lefebvre and Vincent Dubois). Latry, who was guest professor at Oberlin in the fall of 2010, will talk about the devastating fire in 2019 and the reconstruction of the Great Organ, which escaped major damage, but needed to be removed for cleaning. Latry is a successor of Louis Vierne, who famously presided over the instrument for 37 years until his death in 1937 — in the saddle, so to speak. He collapsed at the console during his 1,750th recital on June 2 of that year.
The MET Opera has Wagner on its mind all of this week, and a 2015 production of Tannhäuser is waiting in the wings for streaming tonight.
Details in the Concert Listings.
HEADS UP FOR THURSDAY:
Former Akron Symphony Assistant Conductor Levi Hammer, now living in Berlin, spent his lockdown time during the pandemic learning all of J.S. Bach’s First Book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and will stream those 24 preludes and fugues on Wednesday, October 7 at 3:15 pm EDT from Berlin’s Norwegian Church. Join the stream here.
Hammer writes, “The first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, completed in 1722, already contains an encyclopedic summary of all music that came before and after it – even a 12-tone theme! It is a compendium of Bach’s expressive vastness, his musical science, and his pedagogy. For the performer it is an emotional, intellectual, and technical challenge like no other.
“It’s also the silver lining of my 2020. I offer it in the hopes that it brings joy and solace during uncertain times.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On October 6, 1882, Polish modernist composer Karol Szymanowski was born in Tomoshovka, Ukraine. Influenced by Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Scriabin, Debussy, and Ravel, as well as by Chopin and the folk music of the Polish Highlanders, his works were popular in the 1920s and 1930s and are experiencing a recent revival.
Szymanowski’s controversial opera Krol Roger was produced by Cleveland’s Opera Circle in October, 2011, and Frank Peter Zimmermann played his First Violin Concerto with Thomas Dausgaard and The Cleveland Orchestra in February, 2011.
Watch a performance of the First Violin Concerto in May, 2019 by Christian Tetzlaff and the Helsinki Philharmonic led by Susanna Mälkki here, and view the second half of pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin’s 2002 recital in Tokyo, devoted to works by Szymanowski, including the Second Piano Sonata.
And composer Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, NY on this date in 1938. Tower celebrated her 80th birthday with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra in March of 2019 (read a ClevelandClassical.com interview here), and her works appear frequently on Northeast Ohio concert programs.
Among the videos of performances of Tower’s music by musicians with local connections: Tower’s Rising with flutist Carol Wincenc and the Escher Quartet, Wild Summer by the Jasper Quartet, and Wild Purple by solo violist Serena Hsu in Mixon Hall at CIM in April, 2019.