by Jacqueline Armbruster
As the decade comes to a close, the world is in a state of reflection — observing the drastic shifts that have occurred to land us in this constant state of upgrading, updating, and consuming new material, much to our own exhaustion. For lovers of classical music, though, this next decade will begin with the celebration of a timeless figure in the canon, Ludwig van Beethoven.
by Colin Roshak
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
This past Friday, in a night of highlights — a young virtuoso soloist, a powerhouse horn player, and an astonishing young ensemble — the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra more than earned their stage time in the legendary Severance Hall. The concert began with a modern selection in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s colorful Something for the Dark, a sort of concerto for orchestra. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
The November 9 concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra was a particularly eclectic program of five works exploring the theme of storytelling, beginning with Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. In the genre of opera buffa, there’s hardly a more scintillating curtain raiser than this madcap orchestral frolic. The fast-paced music is replete with crisply punctuated rhythms and many shifting colors, and the ensemble played it impeccably. [Read more…]
by Tom Wachunas
With music director Gerhardt Zimmermann in the pulpit, as it were, the Canton Symphony Orchestra took us to church with the first of the three works on its season-opening October 12 program. Written by the acclaimed contemporary American composer Jennifer Higdon in 1999, blue cathedral is a tone poem inspired by the searing loss of her younger brother, Andrew “Blue” Higdon, to cancer.
by Tom Welsh, Director of Performing Arts
Cleveland Museum of Art
The discovery of an unknown song by Karlheinz Stockhausen provides a humanising footnote to his barnstorming 1958 lecture tour of the US.
Reprinted with the permission of The Wire, the article was originally published in July 2019.
I’d been doing some research into the experimental arts scene that flourished in San Francisco’s Bay Area in the 1950s when I unearthed this curious little score — an unknown vocal piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen buried in the papers of composer Seymour Shifrin at Yale University.
Dated 4 January 1959, the piece was written by the then 30-year old Stockhausen as a present to Shifrin’s young son Teddy. The lyric — “Clasp the hands and know the thoughts of men in other lands” — is the last line of the final stanza of the John Masefield poem The Ship And Her Makers, a romantic paean to the fortitude of maritime explorers that had been published early in the century in Salt-Water Poems And Ballads. [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
It’s not often that one encounters a musical theater piece with book, lyrics and score all written by the same person. The Welsh genius Ivor Novello (nom de plume for David Ivor Davies) is one example of such a super-talented creator. Just the concept of such a thing is almost overwhelming, until you see his Perchance to Dream brought to life as the final production of Ohio Light Opera’s 2019 season. It sparkles and glitters and will not easily be banished from your memory bank. Yet another oddity about this production: the story line is very close to a time-travel romance. However, Londoners do know good theater when they see it. This one ran for 1,020 performances, roughly 2½ years after opening on April 21, 1945. [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
If, like me, you think there can never be too many Viennese-style operettas, you should be pleased with The Devil’s Rider, the latest presentation at Ohio Light Opera. You will also be happy that artistic director Steven Daigle is adept at translating German librettos into English (the original German libretto was by Rudolph Schanzer and Ernst Welisch), so it all makes sense as it proceeds. He has waved his magic wand once again, presenting the 13th OLO premiere of a work by Emmerich Kálmán. This one is also an American premiere. [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
What sets Music in the Air apart from most operettas that take place in Germany is the touch of screwball comedy that is interwoven with the musical side to produce a vastly different, yet totally enjoyable work of musical theater. It isn’t quite an operetta, nor is it strictly musical theater (imagine if you will, I Love Lucy meets The Merry Widow). It is totally tuneful, just as one would expect from Jerome Kern, and the book and lyrics for this 1932 production were by his frequent collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II. [Read more…]
by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com
Quick — name the only Gilbert & Sullivan operetta to have been written in the United States. Why, it’s The Pirates of Penzance, a delightful tribute to the absent-minded composer Arthur Sullivan. In the late 1870s, Sullivan and Gilbert and other artists, presumably, came to America to premiere their new musical here, after one performance in England, to protect their copyright. Except that, in rushing around to get on the boat, Sullivan forgot to bring the music. So he simply wrote it all over again. Once that little hangup was out of the way, the show was a triumph all around, and the copyrights (U.K. and U.S.) were indeed protected. [Read more…]
by Parker Ramsay
For those of us keeping track, June has been an eventful month for American opera. Premieres of Anthony Davis’ The Central Park Five (Long Beach Opera) and Ian Bell’s Stonewall (New York City Opera) placed narratives of society’s dispossessed front and center on opera stages on both coasts. So too has a lost opera found a rebirth: directed by Yuval Sharon, Meredith Monk’s Atlas moved audiences in a production by Los Angeles-based Industry Opera at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Meanwhile at the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, I had the welcome surprise of seeing an opera which incorporates experiences of racial prejudice and homophobia at the same time. Composed in 1965, Hans Werner Henze’s Der Junge Lord tells the story of Lord Edgar, a secretive English aristocrat who settles in Willhelmine, Germany, and soon finds himself under suspicion of homosexuality, child abuse, and the general social transgression of socializing with friends of African descent (two roles are specifically cast for persons of color). [Read more…]