by Daniel Hathaway
On Friday, Oberlin Opera Theater goes online with two mini-operas — Menotti’s The Telephone, and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine — which have also been rehearsed remotely (read the preview article here). And Apollo’s Fire continues its “Allure” concert set featuring ‘The Three Amandas,’ with in-person performances through Sunday.
On Saturday, CityMusic Cleveland presents its Pantheon Ensemble live at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, and repeats the performance remotely from the Maltz Performing Arts Center on Sunday.
Also on Saturday, the latest episode of Oberlin Stage Left features the Oberlin Orchestra and Sinfonietta, Raphael Jiménez and Timothy Weiss, conducting.
For details, check out our Concert Listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Lots of dates to take note of these three days. On Friday, the death of German composer Heinrich Schütz in Dresden in 1672, the birth of Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in Dinant in 1814, the birth of American bandmaster John Philip Sousa in the nation’s capital in 1854, the death of Tchaikovsky during a cholera epidemic in St. Petersburg in 1893, and the demise of French composer Edgar Varèse in 1965.
The lists for Saturday and Sunday are shorter. On November 7, 1949, American composer Steven Stucky was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and on the same date in 1983, French composer Germaine Tailleferre — the only woman among the group who called themselves “Les Six” — died in Paris at 93.
And on November 8, Spanish madrigalist Francisaco Guerrero died in Seville in 1599, and Belgian-born composer and organist César Franck died in 1890 after an accident involving a horse-drawn omnibus.
Because wind instruments are being sidelined during the pandemic, it seems only fitting to feature music written for them in this weekend’s Almanac.
We’ll start with Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxhorn or saxophone, which he patented in 1846. The instrument comes in all sizes, just like Renaissance recorders and viols, and has developed along parallel lines in classical music and jazz.
The Decho Ensemble opened this season’s virtual Brownbag Concerts at Trinity Cathedral with a varied program showing what the instruments can do in a classical context. Click here to watch Jake Swanson and Sarah Marchitelli, perform Jean-Baptiste Singelée’s Duo Concertant, Op. 55 from that concert with Alison d’Amato, piano.
And click here to watch saxophonists Kenneth Tse and Noa Even play Buck McDaniel’s 2019 ALEX KATZ Impala at Kent State University on November 24, 2019. The work was inspired by a painting in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
While waiting for every ballot to be counted, tip a hat to Sousa, the ultimate wind bandmaster, with his march, The Stars and Stripes Forever played by Cleveland Symphonic Winds under Frederick Fennell.
Probably Varèse’s most famous work is Density 21.5 for solo flute. The name comes from the specific gravity of platinum — the favored metal for constructing the instrument. Oberlin alum and International Contemporary Ensemble founder Claire Chase plays it here.
Steven Stucky’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary (after Purcell) was performed on the opening concert of the 2015 Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival. Listen here to a performance by the Central Michigan University Symphonic Wind Ensemble in 2016.
And of course, the organ is a wind instrument — a fact certified by an Act of Congress in 1977 when Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral appealed a tariff imposed on the importation of its Flentrop organ from the Netherlands. Which leads us to César Franck and his noble Three Chorales. Click here to watch French organist Vincent Dubois play No, 3 in a minor at Soissons Cathedral. Dubois, who played at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland in November, 2015, is now one of the three tenured organists at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.
If organ music isn’t your tasse de thé, try this performance of Franck’s Violin Sonata by ChamberFest Cleveland rising stars Nathan Meltzer and Evren Ozel in Harkness Chapel in June, 2019.