by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

This was a busy weekend in history for the stork, who on January 23 delivered Italian composer Muzio Clementi in 1752, American composers John Luther Adams in 1952, and Mason Bates in 1977, followed on January 24 by Frederick the Great in 1712, and American composers Norman Dello Joio in New York in 1913 and Leon Kirchner in Brooklyn in 1919. Not to mention WCLV commentator, Cleveland Orchestra program annotator, and composer Klaus George Roy in 1924, who sent out itsy-bitsy compositions every year as Christmas cards.

The Fates were also busy, cutting the thread on January 23 of Irish composer John Field in 1837, and American harpsichordist Igor Kipnis in 2002, and of five American notables on January 24: composer Edward MacDowell in 1908, bass Paul Robeson in 1976, and composer Samuel Barber in 1981, followed on January 24 by American choral director and conductor Robert Shaw in 1999.

Let’s dig deeper into two of the figures who have had close connections with The Cleveland Orchestra.

Set the stage for Barber with this Camera Three interview from the composer’s New York apartment, marking his 67th birthday with a variety of musical selections including Dover Beach.

Conductor Artur Rodzinky (pictured above, Barber on the left) invited the 26-year-old composer to Cleveland in January of 1937 for the American premiere of his Symphony in One Movement (Symphony No. 1). Marin Alsop chose that work for her debut with the Orchestra in December of 2011, which sent ClevelandClassical.com executive editor Mike Telin into the Musical Arts Association archives at Severance Hall to see how Barber’s visit went and how local critics had written about the work on its first outing. Read that article here.

Nearly three decades later, George Szell led Barber’s Piano Concerto with the Orchestra and soloist John Browning at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Listen to a live recording here (or follow the performance along with a score of the piano part here.)

Last December, as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Pandemic-inspired Music Medicine partnership with the Cleveland Clinic, musicians joined baritone Thomas Meglioranza in Barber’s Dover Beach. Watch that performance from the Alley Cat Oyster Bar on the East Bank of the Flats here.

Born in California, Robert Shaw got his start after graduating from Pomona College in 1938, when bandleader Fred Waring (and inventor of the blender that bears his name) hired him to train a glee club to perform with his band.

Shaw went on to found the racially integrated Collegiate Chorale in New York in 1938. He came to the attention of Toscanini ten years later when he prepared Beethoven’s Ninth for a performance by the NBC Symphony, and continued preparing choruses for the exacting Italian conductor until 1954. He founded the Chorale that bore his name in 1948.

Shaw joined the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra in the late 1950s and worked with George Szell for eleven seasons, founding the all-amateur Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.

Among the videos documenting Shaw’s time in Cleveland is this clip of a chorus rehearsal for the Berlioz Requiem. Shaw was famous for his interactions with his singers, to whom he sent inspirational letters. During his time in Cleveland, he also served as music director at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Shaker Heights.

Shaw moved on to conduct the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, who performed one of his signature works, Brahms’ A German Requiem in 1992. Telarc founder Bob Woods relates a few Shaw-in-Atlanta stories here.

But the most definitive source of information about Robert Shaw is a website devoted to his career, speeches, aphorisms, and other material, including scans of his marked scores. It includes a link to the PBS documentary film Robert Shaw: Man of Many Voices, which WVIZ Passport holders can view at no extra charge.

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES THIS WEEKEND:

On Saturday at 7:00 pm, CityMusic Cleveland repeats the in-person chamber music program it gave on Friday, this time as an online event from the Maltz Performing Arts Center.  “A Women’s Sampler” includes Florence Price’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint, Ethel Smyth’s String Quintet, Op. 1, and Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet.

Northeast Ohio fans of the Jupiter String Quartet can enjoy the pre-recorded program they made for the Austin Chamber Music Center Saturday night at 9:00 pm. It features Michi Wiancko’s To Unpathed Waters, Uncharted Shores, and Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E-flat, Op. 12. A donation will get you in the digital door.

Antonio Pompa-Baldi and Emanuela Friscioni open the new, all-online season of the Tri-C Classical Piano Series on Sunday at 2:00 pm, when they’ll stream a free, pre-recorded program of Schubert, Debussy, and the first performance of Luca Moscardi’s Suite, Op. 13 from the comfort of their home to the comfort of yours.

Cleveland Cello Society springs to life with its annual Scholarship Winners Recital, this year streamed from the Bop Stop on Sunday at 2:00 pm. Seven young cellists who made it to the top of the Collegiate, Senior, and Junior divisions of the annual competition will showcase their talents in a free program (but donations are welcome).

And WCLV’s Cleveland Orchestra on the Radio on Sunday at 4:00 pm features an archive performance of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ a work that the composer labored over for a number of years and actually composed in reverse order — beginning with the amazing Chorus Mysticus finale and ending with the overture. During that time, he became increasingly unstable mentally, so in addition to setting scenes from one of the iconic texts of German Romanticism, the work documents Schumann’s emotional status in retrograde order.

Check our Concert Listings for details.

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE TODAY:

The Oberlin Trio, the Conservatory faculty ensemble founded in 1982, goes online today at 7:30 pm from Warner Concert Hall with a new cellist — recently-appointed Dmitry Kouzov. The free concert includes works by George Walker, Haydn, and Schumann. Read a preview by Erich Burnett here.

A rare, in-person event tonight at 7:00 pm at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus features CityMusic Cleveland chamber players in “A Women’s Sampler.” It’s free, but only 100 audience members can be present (RSVP here), with face masks and social distancing in effect. The concert, which includes music by Florence Price, Ethel Smyth, and Amy Beach, will be repeated on Saturday in a live stream from the Maltz Performing Arts Center.

At 7:00 pm, the Cleveland Institute of Music will present the Catalyst Quartet in works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and Coleridge Taylor Perkinson.

Cleveland personalities will be involved today in two online programs from Philadelphia. At noon, a collection of ten Italian Opera duet scenes adapted for the virtual stage by Cleveland Opera Theater director Scott Skiba airs from the Curtis Institute. And at 6:00 pm, guitarist Jason Vieaux shares a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concert with cellist Clancy Newman.

Details and connection links in our Concert Listings.

HEMIDEMISEMIQUAVERS:

Do any of our readers remember the Sunday New York Times column of short news items named after the British term for 64th notes? Worth reviving! Here are our bits of information for Friday.

Les Délices has released a Sneak Peek at its forthcoming “Games & Grounds” subscription concert.

Piano Cleveland has announced a piano and keyboard donation program.

Pipa player Wu Man, who has performed on the Cleveland Museum of Art series, joins the New York chamber orchestra The Knights in Bits and Pieces from Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto.

Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin is featured in Sharon Isbin: Troubadour.

The Canton Symphony has posted Exploring Gender, Expanding Music Scholarship with guest Destinee Siebe, the most recent podcast in its “Orchestrating Change” series.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today’s birthdays include French pianist and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916),  Czech composer and church musician Petr Eben (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzatein died on January 22, 1964.

Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.

Cleveland organist Karel Paukert has frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.

Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.

If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)

And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

The Cavani String Quartet meets up for its latest collaboration with poet Mwatabu Okantah, Professor of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University. The subject of “Collage” is spoken poetry woven in and around music, and the program will be streamed live from the Bop Stop at 7:00 pm. Free, but donations welcome.

(Speaking of poetry, read the back story of Amanda Gorman’s electrifying contribution to yesterday’s Biden/Harris Inauguration ceremony.)

Fans of gaming music can tune in to Local 4 Music Fund’s latest episode of “Tuning In,” a program of piano arrangements of Nintendo soundtracks played by Rob Kovacs. Click here at 7:00 pm to access “88 bit.” Free, but donations benefit musicians.

And here’s a heads up for Friday, when a Curtis Opera Theatre duet scenes program streams at noon, and the evening lineup includes Jason Vieaux on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, CityMusic Cleveland chamber music in-person at St. Stanislaus, the Catalyst Quartet hosted by CIM, and the Oberlin Trio, when violinist David Bowlin and pianist Haewon Song welcome new cellist, Dmitry Kouzov. Some triage will be necessary!

INTERESTING READ:

New Yorker critic Alex Ross takes a different approach to Beethoven in the composer’s 250th anniversary year. Read Keep Beethoven Weird here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1575, Queen Elizabeth I granted English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd letters patent that gave them a monopoly over publishing music and music paper. The first collection, set that year by the Hugenot printer T. Vautrollier, was Cantiones sacrae, containing 17 motets each by the two composers. Listen to Tallis’ O nata lux de lumine sung by Almire here. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE PERFORMANCES DEBUTING NOW:

The all-Czech Bennewitz Quartet has recorded an exclusive, full-length concert in lieu of their cancelled performance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series this season. Violinists Jakub Fišer and Štěpán Ježek, violist Jiří Pinkas, and cellist Štěpán Doležal play Haydn’s Quartet in G, Op. 17/5, Schulhoff’s Five Pieces, and Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Op. 135. Watch free on-demand here.

And yesterday, Apollo’s Fire released a special playlist for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Episode 18 in its Music for the Soul video series includes selections from AF’s “Resilience” concert featuring Ashlee Foreman, an aria from Bach’s Matthew-Passion sung by countertenor Reggie Mobley with Tenet, Joseph Bolognes’ Symphonie Concertante in G played by the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 featuring Stewart Goodyear with the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra. Watch here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On January 19, 1955, English conductor Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool. After leading the Berlin Philharmonic for 16 years, he returned to England to lead the London Symphony. A few days ago, he surprised the British classical music world when he announced that he was cutting his London ties in 2023 to lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich and applying for German citizenship. From The Guardian on January 16:

“My passport is on the way,” Rattle told a news conference on Friday, when asked if he had followed many EU-based Britons in applying for citizenship that will let them continue to work freely around the bloc. “The fact that musicians and artists in general suddenly have to get visas for Europe is absolutely not the Brexit bonus we were talking about,” he said. “We will have to fight it.”

Watch a full-length interview with Rattle by Classic FM presenter and soprano Catherine Bott here, and enjoy a live performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican Center in September, 2017.

And here’s live video of “Hope & Harmony,” a special concert that Rattle led in Boston in 2019 to raise funds for underserved women with breast cancer. The Orchestra for the performance in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory included members of Mistral, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the MET Opera Orchestra and others.

And on this date in 1961, Leonard Bernstein’s 36-second long Fanfare was performed at the Inaugural Gala for President John F. Kennedy by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band.

More fanfares are planned for the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Alexandria, VA-based Classical Movements has organized “Inauguration Fanfares” in association with Marin Alsop and the Hope & Harmony Ensemble, featuring musicians from 14 professional orchestras performing Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1. That project streams at 12 Noon today. Watch here and read more here.

Composer Peter Boyer has been commissioned by the United States Marine Band to compose a special fanfare for the 2021 ceremony. His Fanfare for Tomorrow will be featured in hour-long prelude music to the Inauguration conducted by Colonel Jason K. Fettig.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Check last Wednesday’s Diary for a rundown on events celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose official holiday is observed on Monday, January 18.

On Monday, two of Cleveland’s leading cultural institutions will re-open for the first time since November 19. The Cleveland Museum of Art is accepting timed reservations between 10:00 am and 5:00 pm (last reservations begin at 4:00 pm), and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum re-opens with an exhibit of some of the 100,000 images donated to the institution by Rolling Stone magazine’s first chief photographer Baron Wolman, who died in November.

And Ohio City’s Transformer Station will also open its doors to the public on Monday from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm.

INTERESTING READ:

Two baritone friends — New York freelancer Steven LaBrie and German baritone Jarrett Ott, who has a full-time job — are featured in a New York Times article that contrasts how two countries have supported their artists in the current public health crisis. Read “Two Friends, Two Continents, Very Different Pandemics” here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Among those who have affected the history of classical music who were born or died on these three dates:

Anton Schindler (d. January 16, 1864), who falsely claimed a close relationship with Beethoven and manufactured bogus information about the composer. But perhaps not as extensively as his critics have claimed. Watch Decriminalization of Beethoven’s first Biographer Anton Schindler here.

American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne (b. January 16, 1934), who has been a regular guest for master classes at Oberlin after her retirement from a distinguished career in art song and opera. Watch her coach soprano Greta Groothuis in arias by Handel and Mozart in December, 2019 here.

Italian-American conductor Arturo Toscanini (d. January 16, 1957), who led the NBC Symphony in groundbreaking radio and television broadcasts. Listen to him rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem here.

Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Gustav Leonhardt (d. January 16, 2012), who mentored such young musicians as Jeanette Sorrell, founder of Apollo’s Fire. Watch the Dutch documentary Traveler in Music here (partially subtitled).

American composer Donald Erb (b. January 17, 1927 in Youngstown), who graduated from Lakewood High School, spent his early career as a jazz trumpeter, and returned to the Cleveland Institute of Music where he had earned his master’s degree to become Distinguished Professor of Composition at CIM. Listen here to the fourth movement of his Ritual Observances (1991) commissioned by St. Louis Symphony and dedicated to Leonard Slatkin and the late Cleveland percussionist Bruce Collie. Slatkin conducts the CIM Orchestra.

And on January 18, 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy invited Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky to “a small dinner” at the White House. Read more here.

by Daniel Hathaway

CELEBRATING THE WOMAN BEHIND MLK:

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Stimm’ in unsern Jubel ein!
Nie wird es zu hoch besungen,
Retterin des Gatten sein.

Those are the words that close Beethoven’s Fidelio, when the entire company celebrates the freeing of Florestan and other political prisoners through the intervention of his faithful wife Leonora.

Somehow, in the curious way the mind connects things, listening recently to that ebullient finale made me wonder why the celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy around his birthday on January 15 every year rarely mention his own faithful wife, Coretta Scott King, who continued his campaigns against racism and injustice after his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Moreso, as Jeanne Theoharis writes in a February, 2018 article in The Guardian, “Martin Luther King’s ‘helpmate’ was a seasoned civil rights campaigner in her own right — ‘never just a wife, never just a widow.’” Read I am not a symbol, I am an activist’: the untold story of Coretta Scott King here.

She was also a musician, who went on after graduating from Antioch College to earn bachelor’s degrees in voice and violin at The New England Conservatory, where she met her future husband, who was pursuing his doctorate at Boston University. She talks about her singing career in a video interview for the National Visionary Leadership Project, and in a WFMT article.

Sample the flavor of Coretta Scott King’s oratory in her address at Harvard’s Class Day Excercises in 1968, when she stood in for her late husband only weeks after his assassination, and six days after Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.

An early protester against the Vietnam War who also campaigned for gay rights and was arrested in 1985 along with her son Martin III and her two daugherts for protesting South Africa’s policy of apartheid outside the country’s embassy in Washington, Coretta Scott King’s 15-year lobbying effort resulted in the Act of Congress that established Martin Luther King Day as an official national holiday — the first non-President to be so honored.

And just for fun, on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, actor John Lithgow recalled having Coretta Scott babysit him and his siblings in Yellow Springs, Ohio during her time at Antioch.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Here are three interesting local events to attract your attention, and all three air at 7:00 pm tonight.

Local 4 Music Fund of the Cleveland Federation of Musicians hosts a live stream featuring percussionists Mell Csicsila and Andrew Pongracz, who perform as Duo Anime, but haven’t played together for nearly a year thanks to the pandemic. The feed originates at Survival Kit Studios, and you can read a preview of the program here.

The Cleveland Orchestra is airing a repeat of its 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Celebration, led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. Check out yesterday’s Diary for details.

And live from the Bop Stop, long-time collaborators Jackie Warren, piano and Sammy DeLeon, timbales, come together again.

Whichever show you choose, do consider making a donation during the performance

INTERESTING READS:

In a timely Op-Ed piece, New York Times critic Jason Farago asks fundamental questions about the function of art and what it does for a person or a country. Read “The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s how Biden Can Help” here.

AKRON SYMPHONY SURVEY:

The Akron Symphony has developed a survey to determine “how people have been engaging with the arts and when they might be comfortable coming back to live events in a concert hall.” They’re interested to hear from you even if you’re not a regular ASO patron. Click here to log your responses.

ORMACO SEEKS PERFORMERS:

Ohio Regional Music Arts and Cultural Outreach writes, “For our 2022 schedule, we are seeking professional musicians from a variety of genres for the following: One-hour live stream or pre-recorded streaming concerts for: January 9, February 13, March 13 and April 10 from 2-3 pm. One-hour outdoor Concerts in the Country to be held at ORMACO’s home-HeARTland, 8187 Camp Road, Homerville, OH 44235 for: May 15, June 12, July 10, Aug. 14, September 11 and October 9. One-hour concerts at the Homerville Community Center Auditorium for: November 13 and December 11 We are also lining up Jazz under the Stars, which takes place at Medina’s Uptown Park Gazebo from 7 to 9 pm. for the following 2022 dates: June 4, July 9, August 6 and August 27 If interested, please email credentials and samples here.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Several sources claim that the clarinet was invented by German woodwind builder Johann Christoph Denner on this date in 1690 in Nürnberg. Well…Denner seems to have added a register key to the chalmeau, a single-reed instrument whose origins can be traced back to ancient times. In any case, clarinets entered the orchestra during the Classical period and such virtuosi as Anton Stadler mastered them an inspired two wonderful solo works by Mozart. A good excuse to revisit Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet performed by Franklin Cohen and his ChamberFest Cleveland colleagues here.

Speaking of Mozart, January 14, 1800 was the birthdate of the Austrian musicographer Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, who compiled the first comprehensive catalogue of the composer’s works, hence the “K” numbers that identify them.

Many composers kept their own lists of compositions, often assigning them Opus (“Work”) numbers if they thought them worthy of a position in their personal canon. We have four sets of catalogue numbers for Beethoven: his own Opus list (Nos. 1-135), then a 1955 list by Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm of “Works without Opus Numbers” (WoOo numbers 1-125), and a further list of works compiled by Willy Hess in the 1950s identified by Hess numbers. The final catalogue, compiled by Giovanni Biamonti in 1968, attempts a chronological listing of all of Beethoven’s works, Opus, WoO, and Hess numbers included. Otto Deutsch did a similar favor for Schubert, assigning his works “D” numbers.

Good trivia question: How many works did each of these composers leave to posterity? Mozart: at least 626 plus fragments. Beethoven: 849 according to Biamonti. Schubert: 993. Bach: more than 1,126. Numbers are approximate — some include lost works.

And looking forward to the celebrations this weekend, it was on this day in 1979 that President Jimmy Carter proposed observing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday.