by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Organist Michael Peters will give a free noontime concert today on the Tuesday series at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. Peters will play J.S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue on the gallery organ, then moves to the chancel organ for two popular warhorses: Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, Op. 25, and Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s Nun danket alle Gott.

INTERESTING READ:

British pianist and polymath Stephen Hough (photo: Antonio Olmos) covers a number of topics in an interview with Fiona Maddox of The Guardian: the primacy of music in life, his first live concert since the lockdown when he played to an empty Wigmore Hall, his novel The Final Retreat, his solitary childhood, the effects of Brexit on touring artists, his love of puddings, and how it feels to turn 60.

Oregon Artswatch profiles Pat Zagelow on her 30 eventful years as executive director of Portland’s Friends of Chamber Music (she’s also a pianist);. The organization recently gave her a surprise party attended by more than a hundred guests who managed to keep the event a closely-guarded secret. Read the article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1585, English composer Thomas Tallis died in Greenwich, having successfully weathered the back-and-forth religious machinations of monarchs and the stylistic changes that shifts between Catholic loyalists and Protestant reformers brought to the music of the Church of England. As his epitaph notes,

He serv’d long tyme in chappel with grete prayse
Fower sovereygnes reygnes (a thing not often seen);
I meane Kyng Henry and Prynce Edward’s dayes,
Quene Mary, and Elizabeth oure Quene

Tallis’ colleague William Byrd marked his passing in the elegy, Ye Sacred Muses, sung here by countertenor Daniel Elgersma to the accompaniment of a Viola Organistica, one of several such instruments invented by Leonardo da Vinci.

The extremes of musical style during Tallis’ career are captured in the recording Thomas Tallis: Lamentations, Motets, music for strings, performed on period instruments by Theatre of Voices (directed by Paul Hillier) and The King’s Noyse (directed by Daviv Douglass).

But today’s widest audience probably knows Tallis’ name from the simple psalm tune on which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra and string quartet. The BBC Symphony Orchestra plays it here in an atmospheric performance under Andrew Davis at Gloucester Cathedral, where the work premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1910.

On November 23, 1878, French composer André Caplet was born on a boat off the coast of Le Havre, eventually perishing in 1925 from the effects of poison gas in World War I. A friend of Debussy, he’s mostly remembered for his orchestrations of that composer’s piano works.

That Caplet also spoke with his own voice is evident in such works as his Légende (suite symphonique pour harpe chromatique, saxophone et instruments à cordes), performed here at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2017, featuring saxophonist Om Srivastava, and in his Messe à trois voix, from which a female chorus at the Utrecht Conservatory sings the “O salutaris hostia” movement.

Finally, composer Krzysztof Penderecki first saw the light of day on this date in 1933 in Debica, Poland. Among his best-known works are the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and the Passion According to St. Luke. He died on March 29, 2020, and in his honor, Cleveland Orchestra first associate concertmaster Peter Otto recorded Penderecki’s La Follia in a June, 2020 living room concert.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Two events on Saturday include a 3:00 pm, hour-long concert by BlueWater Chamber Orchestra at the Breen Center “celebrating what makes Cleveland so special,” and a 7:30 pm recital by Spanish guitarist Andrea González Caballero on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series at Plymouth Church.

On Sunday, the Cavani Quartet assumes artistic directorship of the Art Renaissance Tremont series as well as continuing their “Beethoven and Beyond” project with a 4:00 pm recital at St. Wendelin Church, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra returns to Mandel Hall at Severance after a long intermission for a 3:00 pm performance led by Vinay Parameswaren (pictured), and David Gilson guest conducts Choral Arts Cleveland in a 3:30 pm concert at Forest Hills Church.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

In an extraordinary exit ahead of the arrival of the Taliban, faculty and students of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and their families have fled to Qatar enroute to Portugal. Read the New York Times article 1,200 Miles From Kabul, a Celebrated Music School Reunites here.

Kathie Stewart has been named Curator of Historical Keyboards at Indiana University beginning in January. Stewart, who plays Baroque flute with Apollo’s Fire, has served as curator of harpsichords at Oberlin (read our Baroque Performance Institute interview here), and most recently as a keyboard technician at CIM.

Akron pianist and organist Daniel Colaner, 16, the winner of the Euclid Symphony’s 2021-2022 Tom Baker Young Artists Competition, will play Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto with Matthew Salvaggio and the orchestra on April 24. A piano student of Sean Schultze at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Colander also studies organ with David Higgs at Eastman. He’ll share the April program with saxophonist Samuel Dishon, winner of the 2020 competition, who will solo in Glazunov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On November 20, pianist Ruth Laredo made her life debut in Detroit in 1937 as Ruth Meckler, and American composer Orianna Webb was born in Akron in 1974.

Laredo’s musical future was established at the age of eight when her mother took her to hear Horowitz play Scriabin in Detroit. That began a lifelong interest in Scriabin and his contemporary, Rachmaninoff, and eventually to her recordings of the complete Scriabin cycle. Click here for her performance of the Sonata No. 9, “Black Mass.” She toured with violinist Jaime Laredo during their marriage (1960-1974), but made an auspicious solo debut with Pierre Boulez and the N.Y. Philharmonic in Ravel’s G-Major Concerto in 1974. She taught at Kent State University from 1968-1971.

Listen to an episode in David Dubal’s radio series “For the Love of Music” broadcast in April, 1980 featuring a conversation with Ruth Laredo (due to copyright issues, the musical selections have been removed!)

Orianna Webb’s collaboration with guitarist Daniel Lippel was broadcast on the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Virtual Festival on May 28, 2021. Her bio on the festival website makes for an interesting read, as does her works list.

Henry Purcell neatly timed his all-too-early demise — he was 36 — for the eve of the Patron Saint of Music’s feast day on November 21, 1695. That makes this an appropriate time to listen to one of the composer’s Odes written in her honor. Here’s a performance of Hail, Bright Cecelia by the Dunedin Consort led by John Butt.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Two conservatory orchestras go head to head tonight.

At 7 pm, guest conductor JoAnn Falletta leads the CIM Orchestra and viola soloist Alyssa Warcup in Schnittke’s Viola Concerto and Zemlinski’s The Mermaid, then at 7:30 pm, the Oberlin Orchestra takes the stage for a Fridays@Finney performance of  Gity Razaz’s The Strange Highway, Michael Tilson Thomas’ Street Song for Symphonic Brass & Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra, Rafael Jiménez conducts. Both concerts are available online as well as attendable in person.

And at 7:30 pm, Maria Schneider joins the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra as guest conductor and composer in a concert featuring selections from her album Data Lords. The performance at the Maltz PAC is free and available as a live stream.

Check our Concert Listings for details.

NEWS BRIEFS;

Heads up for Saturday’s Bluewater Chamber Orchestra concert. Head over to the Breen Center at St. Ignatius High School for a 3 pm, one-hour program inspired by Cleveland sights and landmarks. Details in our Concert Listings

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1828, 31-year-old Austrian composer Franz Schubert died from typhus — even younger than Mozart when he departed this life. Among his late works are the three Opus Posthumous piano sonatas and the “Great” C-Major Symphony. The B-flat Sonata is a personal favorite that I first heard from the fingers of Leonard Shure at the dedication of a new Harvard building back in the 1960s, but fans of Mitsuko Uchida will cherish her performance here.

And the C-Major Symphony is a personal favorite of Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Möst, as he notes in a heartfelt statement in this “On a Personal Note” episode on the Orchestra’s Adella streaming platform.

On this date in 1936, the first concert to be preserved on magnetic tape was recorded by Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic in the concert hall of the BASF Corporation in Ludwigshaven, Germany. Hostilities followed and the German technology that made tape recording viable only became available worldwide when Allied forces seized machines at the end of World War II.

Read more about the history of analog tape recording here.

And on this date in 1957, Leonard Bernstein was named Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, making him the first American-born and educated conductor named to lead a major American orchestra. His NY Phil career was summed up by Composers Datebook:

For sports fans, these were Bernstein’s “stats” as of May 17, 1969:

He had conducted 939 concerts, more than anyone else in Philharmonic history. He had given 36 world premieres, 14 U.S. premieres, 15 New York City premieres and led more than 40 works never before performed by the orchestra.

At Philharmonic concerts Bernstein conducted Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel, but also Babbitt, Cage, and Ligeti. He led the world premiere performance of the Second Symphony of Charles Ives and included other elder American composers like Carl Ruggles and Wallingford Riegger on Philharmonic programs, as well as works by his contemporaries, Ned Rorem and Lukas Foss, and his own compositions as well.

Bernstein would continue to appear with the New York Philharmonic as its Laureate Conductor, and as a popular guest conductor with major orchestras around the world. His final concerts were with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in the summer of 1990. He died in October of that year.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S CONCERT AGENDA:

The Tuesday noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature organist William Rehwinkel in music by Jeanne Demessieux, Jehan Alain, and himself.

Tonight’s Tuesday Musical program at 7:30 pm in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the annual Margaret Baxtresser Concert, features identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton (pictured), performing Copland’s Simple Gifts, Bernstein’s Candide for Four Hands, Paul Schoenfield’s Five Days in the life of a Manic Depressive, and John Adams’ Roll Over Beethoven.

Details in our Concert Listings.

IN THE NEWS:

In a Cleveland.com article published on Monday, Cleveland Orchestra President and CEO André Gremillet commented on the cancellation of its November 13 and 14 performances due to a suspected COVID case in the wind section. Read the article here.

INTERESTING READS:

Today’s Harvard Gazette features an interview with jazz legend Wayne Shorter ,and bassist, vocalist, and Harvard faculty professor Esperanza Spalding about their new opera, Iphigenia.

The work, “a project Shorter began thinking about in the 1950s, is a bold reimagining of the classical figure, daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. Spalding wrote the libretto for the show and is performing in it. The renowned architect Frank Gehry, who has studied and taught at Harvard, designed the sets. Eight years in the making, the opera made its worldwide debut Nov. 12 in Boston.” Read the interview here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1895, German-born American composer, violist, and educator Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau. His music having been condemned by the Nazis in 1936, Hindemith spent some time in Turkey during that decade, setting up a national music school, then making tours of the U.S. as a solo violist and performer on the viola d’amore.

He ended up teaching at Yale, where he formed the Yale Collegium Musicum, and also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later collected in the book A Composer’s World.

One of Hindemith’s most popular works, the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, was recorded twice by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here to the 1947 performance, and here to a studio recording made in 1964. Discuss!

On November 16, 1904, in his first American tour concert, English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted his choral trilogy Hiawatha in Washington, DC. The composer, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, had already debuted the first of his three cantatas on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Song of Hiawatha in 1898 at the age of 22.

Coleridge-Taylor’s music was championed in England by Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during his American tour in 1904.

Click here to watch the documentary Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912.

And on November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music. Thirty-four years later, on November 16, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the ensemble in that hall for the premiere of William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Click here for a recent performance at Bard College led by Leon Botstein.

by Daniel Hathaway

EVENTS THIS WEEKEND:

The calendar is loaded, and if you can make it to all of these performances, you possess special powers of teleportation (and we’d like to talk to you…).

On Saturday, Oberlin Jazz Ensemble plays Finney Chapel at 7:30 pm, the Akron Symphony begins its season with music by Dvořák, Perry, Ellington, Price, and Beethoven at 8 in E.J. Thomas Hall, and at the same hour, the next concert in Apollo’s Fire’s Violin Fantasy set takes the Baroque Orchestra to St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights, while The Cleveland Orchestra repeats its Messiaen, Ravel, and Mussorgsky program under Thierry Fischer with Tom Borrow at the Steinway, and Oberlin Opera gives the third of four performances of Handel’s Acis & Galatea in Hall Auditorium (you’ll love what Johnathan Field has done with the Cyclops!)

Sunday’s agenda continues the runs of programs by Apollo’s Fire, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Oberlin Opera, and adds Christa Rakich’s Organ Rededication (2 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist), a Cleveland Winds concert (3 pm at CSU), the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra (3 pm at the Maltz, PAC), classical guitarist René Izquierdo (3 pm at the Butler Institute in Youngstown), Prism Percussion (4 pm at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron), and duo-pianists Antonio Pompa-Baldi & Emanuela Friscioni (pictured, 5 pm on the Music From the Western Reserve series at Christ Church, Hudson).

That busy day continues into Sunday evening with Local 4 Music Fund’s Nine Lives Project (7 pm at Tri-C Metro Auditorium), as well as with the 7 pm premiere of Quinn Mason’s Irish Dance Suite by Gerhardt Zimmerman and the Canton Symphony.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

On November 10, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture announced the awarding of grants totalling $11,613,452 to 249 Cuyahoga County nonprofit organizations in 2022 through its General Operating Support, including for the first time Cleveland Ballet, Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, Collective Arts Network and Doan Brook Watershed Partnership. Read more here.

Project Support grants ranging from $800 to $18.333 went to 169 organizations for a total of $1,198,438.

CAC’s new Cultural Heritage grant program provides flexible funding for organizations that primarily represent culturally-specific populations. Eleven such organizations will share $215,014 during this funding cycle.

INTERESTING READS:

More than a few sparks were flying back and forth between music critics and presenters this week on the subject of diversity in programming. The New York Times ran a response by artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel to Javier C. Hernández’ assessment of the Chamber Music from Lincoln Center season, and Bay Area critic Joshua Kosman followed up with an interview with the pianist and cellist in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read Wu Han and Finckel here, and Kosman here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini wrote his last act in Paris on November 13, 1868, having retired early after composing 34 operas between 1810 and 1823. He spent much of the next 40 years dining off his fame — and judging from his increasing corpulence, off such creations as Tournedos Rossini. One of his few late career works is the Petite messe solennelle for choir, piano and harmonium — neither small nor solemn, despite the title. Click here to watch a performance by the Czech Philharmonic Choir led by Paolo Gatto and featuring soprano Patricia Janečková.

And on November 13 (or was it the 14th?), 1943, NY Philharmonic assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein got his big break when guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill and Bernstein filled in on a few hours notice.

In 1989, Bernstein recalled his debut: [Read more…]