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by Daniel Hathaway

IN THIS EDITION:

. The Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert at Trinity features Todd Wilson’s CIM organ studio & Ólafsson solo piano recital in Reinberger Chamber Music Hall at Severance

. Tuesday Musical announces annual scholarship competition

. Elizabethan madrigalist Thomas Weelkes passes in 1623

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 12:00 pm – Trinity Brownbag Concert. Organist Todd Wilson & students of the Cleveland Institute of Music organ studio. Festive seasonal music played on Trinity’s two great pipe organs. Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering.

At 7:30 pm – pianist Vìkingur Ólafsson (pictured above) will play a long list of short pieces by Mozart & his contemporaries in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center, including works by Galuppi, C.P.E. Bach, Cimarosa, and Haydn and arrangements by Liszt and Ólafsson himself. Take a deep breath and order your tickets online.

IN THE NEWS:

Tuesday Musical’s 2023 Annual Scholarship Competition is Saturday, March 18, with significantly increased cash awards. Applications will be accepted online from January 1 through January 31, 2023. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

 HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Only two events are on our radar for the last weekend of January.

On Sunday at 7:30 pm, Paul Ferguson and Bill Rudman will host a joint retrospective, “The Gershwins on Broadway” with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and the Musical Theater Project at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Also on deck: the Joe Hunter Trio, and vocalists Treva Offutt & Evelyn Wright. Ticket prices include a live streaming option. Click here to reserve.

Another meeting of minds is scheduled for Sunday at 6 pm in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, when the Cleveland Chamber Choir (Scott MacPherson, artistic director) will team up with Cleveland State University’s composition programs (Andrew Rindfleisch, director), for a workshop of choral works written by CSU School of Music graduate and undergraduate Music Composition Majors. It’s free.

NEWS BRIEFS:

A reminder to music students: Tuesday Musical Scholarship Applications are due online on Monday, January 31. Details here.

Lisa Wong would like us to alert our readers to a job opening: The College of Wooster is receiving applications for Visiting Assistant Professor in Music-Voice. Read the details and download application materials here.

INTERESTING READS:

In an opinion piece, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette critic Jeremy Reynolds (who served as ClevelandClassical.com‘s Nicholas Jones Young Writer Fellow for 2015) ponders the primacy of live performances, even in the age of COVID. Read his comments in a review of The Rose Elf here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

We’ll begin by noting the first performance of William Walton’s Partita for Orchestra, dedicated to George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, which received its premiere on January 30, 1958.

Asked by Szell to provide program notes, Walton demurred. “It is surely easier to write about a piece of creative work if there is something problematical about it, Indeed — it seems to me — the more problematical, the greater the flow of words. Unfortunately from this point of view, my Partita poses no problems, has no ulterior motive or meaning behind it, and makes no attempt to ponder the imponderables.”

Online recordings give us the opportunity to compare performances both in musical and technical terms. Here’s a remastered recording of the piece by its original dedicatees, followed by a live performance Szell gave with the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra later in 1958.

Born on January 29, 1852, Jamaican-born British composer Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen represents a composer lauded in his lifetime for a large body of compositions — operas, oratorios, cantatas, orchestral suites, songs, and six symphonies — but now nearly completely forgotten. Of those Symphonies, No. 3, subtitled “Scandinavian” and dating from 1880, was widely performed in Europe and the U.S. Click here to hear a performance by the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra led by Adrian Leaper.

Cowen’s orchestral overtures — curtain-raisers for concerts — were among his most popular works. Click here to hear Leaper and his Slovak musicians play The Butterfly’s Ball, written in 1901 and based on a poem by William Roscoe partly quoted in the video notes.

by Mike Telin

TODAY’S EVENTS:

At 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition gets underway with Round 1, Session 1. Four of the 26 contestants perform 20-minute solo recitals, pre-recorded from around the world. Today’s lineup: Lin Ye (28, China), Stefano Andreatta (29, Italy), Ying Li (23, China) & Honggi Kim (29, South Korea). Click here at start time. Free. Click here to read a preview article.

IN THE NEWS:

When Jeanne Lamon (pictured), founder and longtime artistic director of Tafelmusik, the Toronto Baroque orchestra, passed away on June 20 at the age of 71, she left the world with many exceptional recordings she had made with that stellar ensemble. Writing in the July 6 edition of San Francisco Classical Voice, Nicholas Jones has assembled an annotated playlist in tribute to the violinist who led the ensemble for 33 years. Click here to read “The Essential Jeanne Lamon.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1883, Australian American pianist, composer, and folk tune arranger Percy Grainger was born in Melbourne — he became a U.S. Citizen in 1919. Click here to listen to a selection of piano rolls that preserve his performances of his popular works. And in 1939, Spanish composer Fernando Sor died in Paris.

July 8 also marks the world debut of American avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil in 1900 in Trenton, New Jersey. The young George began learning piano at the age of six. In 1916, he began studying composition with Constantine von Sternberg in Philadelphia. It was there that he was exposed to conceptual art, including Dadaism.  Anthiel would later become a pupil of Ernest Bloch. Although Bloch was initially skeptical of Antheil’s talents, calling his compositions “empty” and “pretentious,” his teacher was eventually won over by the young composer’s enthusiasm and energy.

During his lifetime, Antheil composed symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. In addition to music, his interests included endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history, and he was co-holder (with actress Hedy Lamarr) of a patent for what today is known as “spread-spectrum technology.”

An excellent writer, at the age of sixteen, Antheil wrote an essay for the Trenton High School Spector titled “A Madman’s Narrative,” which begins “I am not mad. They are all maniacs here; all but me. I, alone am sane; a great composer, yet they tell me I am also mad. Surely, sir, you will not make that mistake. See how calm I am, how measured I talk.” Click here to continue reading. He would pen many articles during his life including his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music.

Although Antheil composed over 300 works, his Ballet mécanique is the most famous. Written in 1924 the work is scored for 16 player pianos playing four separate parts, four bass drums, three xylophones, a tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three different-sized airplane propellers (high wood, low wood, and metal), as well as two human-played pianos. Click here to read more about that notorious composition and here for a performance by Ensemble Modern, led by Peter Rundel.