TODAY ONLINE:
Live-streaming tonight at 8 from CIM is a duo recital by one former and one current Mary Hamlin Memorial Presidential Scholar: violinist Shannon Lee and percussionist Jeremy Sreejayan. Click here to watch, and to view their program.
Both have impressive resumes — top prizes at the Sendai Competition and the Modern Snare Drum Competition — but they also seem like really interesting and nice people. CIM has shared a little bit about their stories and personalities with a profile of Lee (beginning with the time she helped fix the computer system at the Curtis Institute of Music) and a “Day in the Life” video with Sreejayan (including his warm-up with hip-hop music, and his home-cooked spinach and steak).
Also tonight: the Met begins “Politics in Opera” Week at 7:30 pm with a 1980 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo. More details in our Concert Listings.
PLAYING WITH FIRE:
Playing With Fire, Allan Miller’s documentary about Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, won the award for Best U.S. Documentary at the Chagrin Documentary Film Fest earlier this month. ClevelandClassical.com’s Daniel Hathaway spoke to Sorrell about the project in April:
“Three or so years ago, we played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a gentleman came backstage afterward and introduced himself as Allan Miller, a film director. ‘I’m retired,’ he said, “but I feel that I have one more film left in me, and I want to make it about you.’ I thought, this is so sweet, but it will never happen — and everybody I talked to told me the same thing,” Sorrell said.
Read the full interview here.
LABÈQUE SISTERS:
A profile of duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque in The New York Times covers their wide musical interests, unconventional career path, differing personalities, embrace of the visual side of concertizing, and their new recording, out this week — an adaptation of Philip Glass’s opera Les Enfants Terribles. Read here.
It’s also fun to look back on the Labèque sisters’ last visit to The Cleveland Orchestra, in May 2019, when they brought along Bruch’s Concerto for Two Pianos. In a preview conversation, Mike Telin spoke to Katia Labèque about the fascinating history of that concerto:
Interestingly enough, Bruch composed the concerto for the American duo-pianist sisters Rose and Ottilie Sutr in 1912. However, without the composer’s permission, the sisters rewrote the concerto to accommodate their technical abilities. “I think it was massacred by the sisters,” Labèque said. “Bruch was furious with them, and he forbade them to play the piece in Europe. So I think it is great to come back to America and present it the way that it was written.”
Read more of that interview here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
October 26 in history has seen the birth of Italian composer and harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti (1685), the death of French composer and organist Louis-Nicholas Clerambault (1749), and the birth of French pianist and composer Jacques Loussier (1934).
Scarlatti is best known for his 555 (!) keyboard sonatas. Here are four of them (K. 466, 17, 11, and 135) performed by Chu-Fang Huang during the first round of the 2005 Cleveland International Piano Competition. (Huang would go on to win first prize.)
Clerambault’s biggest claim to fame is his twenty-some secular cantatas, often inspired by mythology. And here’s a convenient, current, and Cleveland-y way to celebrate him: Les Délices has included one of those cantatas, Medée, in “Bewitched,” the first program of their Concert Series this season, which is still available to watch until November 2. (Click here for tickets, and here to read our preview of that program, including a discussion of two morally ambiguous mythological witches.)
As for Loussier, these days it’s quite popular to cross over between different genres, but this musician mixed Bach with jazz improvisation and swing during a time when critics were much more likely to frown upon that kind of practice — read more in an obituary from The Guardian after his death last year.
Here are two suggestions to get a taste of Loussier’s sensibilities: first, his group the Play Bach Trio in a 2007 performance at the Burghausen International Jazz Week, beginning with J.S. Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C. Second, hear their take on that composer’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 — date and venue unknown, but unique approach definitely verifiable from the start.