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About Daniel Hathaway

Daniel Hathaway founded ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008, after a thirty-one year tenure as music director of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, where he founded the Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert Series and Trinity Chamber Orchestra. A graduate of Harvard College and the Episcopal Divinity School, he also studied historical musicology at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Before coming to Cleveland in 1977, he served as head of humanities at the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City and as head of arts at Groton School in Massachusetts. In Cleveland, he has served on the music staff of Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the faculty of Laurel School. As an organist, Hathaway has played recitals in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and Austria. He team-teaches Music Journalism at Oberlin College and Conservatory and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.

Ehnes & Armstrong in second of three CCMS concerts (Jan. 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

When a pianist is performing center stage and seating is open, audiences tend to drift toward the keyboard side of the auditorium to get a good view of the performer’s hands. I like to head toward stage right, the better to catch the expressions on the pianist’s face. That paid off on Tuesday evening, January 14 on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s series at the Maltz Performing Arts Center when violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong continued their progress through Beethoven’s complete sonatas. Per il Clavicembalo o Forte-Piano con un Violino is how the first edition subtitled them, making it clear that if the pianist isn’t the major actor, the two instruments are at least equal partners in this musical enterprise. [Read more…]

Mack & McGuire’s Ghosts of Gatsby at Music Box Supper Club (Jan. 12)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Although the turbulent marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald —  self-caricatures of the Jazz Age — has inspired a number of literary efforts in addition to their own near-autobiographical novels, the subject never seems to have been approached through the lens of opera. Composer Evan Mack and librettist Joshua McGuire have stepped in to fill that void with their one-act The Ghosts of Gatsby, commissioned by Samford University (Montgomery, Alabama), where it premiered in November 2018. [Read more…]

Cleveland Orchestra with Bronfman & Welser-Möst (Jan. 10)

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by Daniel Hathaway

While many American orchestras were just beginning to stir again after the holidays, Franz Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders were busy pulling off one of the most impressive programs in recent memory. A neglected Dvořák symphony, a darkish Mozart piano concerto featuring Yefim Bronfman, and a standout among Janáček’s few orchestral works served up sequential delights on Friday, January 10. [Read more…]

Announcements

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Tuesday Musical invites college-age students pursuing careers as music performers and/or educators to apply online for its 2020 Scholarship Competition to be held in Akron on March 21. The deadline is February 1. Click here for information.

Cleveland’s Broadway School of Music and the Arts is hiring part-time teachers of violin, piano, woodwinds & drums for classes on weekdays between 2:00 and 8:00 pm and possibly on Saturdays. Click here to download application details.

Cleveland Chamber Symphony will be accepting scores from Northeast Ohio composers until midnight on January 17 to be considered for its April 7 NeoSonicFest concert at Baldwin Wallace. Click here for criteria and details.

Cleveland Chamber Music Society: Second Ehnes & Armstrong recital features Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata

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by Daniel Hathaway

Credit Opus 47 for inspiring the complete cycle of Beethoven’s violin sonatas that James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong are touring this season to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday.

As the Canadian-born violinist told us in a phone conversation last fall, he and his piano colleague once booked a studio in England to record a commissioned piece, but the work wasn’t ready yet. “The space, the recording engineer, and the producer were all on hold and we were faced with a whole day of dead time. What could we do to turn this into a useful day?”

Having performed Beethoven’s Ninth Sonata (the “Kreutzer”) quite frequently around that time, Ehnes proposed using that day to record it. “It’s never a bad idea to have a recording of the ‘Kreutzer,’ and we could figure out what to do with it later.”

What they did with it later was to record Beethoven’s Sixth Sonata and release the two sonatas on the same disc. “Some publications assumed that this was the start of a cycle,” Ehnes said, and that prediction came true when the violinist was looking for a way to mark the big anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. [Read more…]

Vinay Parameswaren to conduct 40th MLK Celebration at Severance Hall

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Cleveland Orchestra will celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the 40th consecutive year on Sunday, January 12 at 7:00 pm in Severance Hall. Assistant conductor Vinay Parameswaran will lead the Orchestra and the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus, William Henry Caldwell, director, in a program whose repertory departs slightly from past concerts.

“There won’t be a featured soloist this year,” Parameswaren said in a telephone conversation late last month. Instead, the majority of the program will feature African American composers.

“We’ll open with Adolphus Hailstork’s Fanfare on Amazing Grace, then move to a couple of pieces from Duke Ellington’s suite, The River, and on to the first movement of Florence Price’s First Symphony. Jahja Ling is going to conduct her Fourth Symphony in April, and I’m doing a movement from that piece with the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra during the Open House on January 20. It’s nice to get to celebrate a composer like Price, who wrote a ton of music and had premieres performed by the Chicago Symphony and other big orchestras, but who doesn’t make it onto concert programs very often these days.”

Duke Ellington’s music is a similar case. “I’ve conducted his Harlem and I’ve studied his Three Black Kings,” Parameswaran said. “Ellington doesn’t get as much recognition for his orchestral writing as he does for his jazz, but he certainly knew what he was doing. Again, it’s a rarity to find his music appearing on a classical program, but I’m glad it’s on this one.” [Read more…]

A note from the editor

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To everyone who enjoys ClevelandClassical.com:

Since the beginning of our fiscal year this past July, we’ve published 224 articles, evenly divided between previews and reviews, and posted 764 calendar listings of events that reflect the vibrant classical music scene in Northeast Ohio.

Please take this opportunity to think about how you use the services that ClevelandClassical.com offers, and consider a gift to our Annual Fund. Our goal is to raise $10,000 in individual donations.

Go to our Donate page, where a contribution by PayPal is only a click away!

With thanks and best wishes for the season,

Daniel Hathaway
founder and editor

Julian Wachner & Apollo’s Fire: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at CMA (Dec. 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In 1735, Johann Sebastian Bach’s congregations in the two principal churches of Leipzig were treated to six new cantatas between Christmas Day and Epiphany, at a rate of one per feast day. In 2019, Apollo’s Fire’s audiences got to hear two-thirds of those pieces in one sitting, as guest conductor Julian Wachner led Cantatas Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in five venues around the city. I heard the performance on Friday, December 13 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Read more…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir at First Baptist (Dec. 7)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Countering the widespread practice of giving a half-hearted nod to Hanukkah during December choral concerts, Cleveland Chamber Choir dedicated an important chunk of this year’s “Holidays Old and New” programs to the Jewish Feast of Lights, which included this latest pair of annual commissions. At First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday, December 7, Scott MacPherson and his 24 professional singers interleaved Hanukkah music by Andrew Rindfleisch, Baruch J. Cohon, Samuel Adler, Judith Clurman, David Chase, and chorister Corey K. Rubin with pairs of old and new versions of Christmas pieces. [Read more…]

Dover Quartet at Cleveland Chamber Music Society (Dec. 3)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Departing slightly but refreshingly from the time-honored pattern of classical era quartet + modern piece + major romantic work, the Dover Quartet brought a challenging but engaging contemporary quartet by David Bruce to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series at Plymouth Church on December 3, prefacing it with an evanescent Britten quartet and following it with dependably sturdy Brahms. [Read more…]

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