by Daniel Hathaway

CONCERTS TODAY:

The Noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature Bangor, Maine organist Kevin Birch at the 17th-century style gallery organ in works by Sweelinck, Weckmann, Bolt, and J.S. Bach.

And tonight at 7 in University Circle, the Cleveland Institute of Music will host the touring Sphinx Virtuosi and cello soloist Thomas Mena in a program highlighting Black and Latino composers. You’ll need a free seating pass for the concert in Kulas Hall.

On the West side of town, violinist Franceca dePasquale and pianist Scott Cuellar will join the Verona Quartet for a faculty recital in Warner Concert Hall at Oberlin at 7:30 pm (concertos by Lowell Lieberman and Ernest Chausson).

And at 8 pm in Berea, if the weather holds, BW Opera will present the second of four performances of Handel’s Alcina on the front patio of the Boesel Musical Arts Center (pictured). Some 50 reserved seats ($25) come with chairs. Free seating on the lawn if you bring your own chairs or blankets.

SAVE THE DATES:

Kent State University will hold a Celebration of Life for the late Richard D. Worthing, on Saturday, October 16 at 1:00 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall. Worthing, who died in 2020, taught music theory, analysis and orchestration, served as coordinator for the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, and Assistant Dean of the College of Fine and Professional Arts, and was named Dean Emeritus upon his retirement. Details here.

The Metropolitan Opera will simulcast its October 23 matinee performance of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, its season opener, and the first title by a Black composer to be staged by the company. Click here for a list of area theaters and to reserve tickets.

The 90th episode of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival to be held from April 8-10, 2022, will feature guest appearances by the period string band ACRONYM, the Diederot Quartet, and a performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. (More information to come in January). On Wednesday, October 27 at 8 pm, WCLV 104.9 will rebroadcast the 2021 Virtual Bach Festival Mass in B Minor Retrospective.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1872, Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Yorkshire, a village after which the British composer named one of the popular hymn tunes he wrote while serving as editor of The English Hymnal, published in 1906. (Listen to an arrangement made and played by Todd Wilson with the choir and instrumentalists of First-Pilgrim Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2014.)

The range of RVW’s work was vast. To suggest just two radically different compositions that reflect his lifelong interests, let’s choose Along the Field and A Vision of Aeroplanes.

The former represents his close association with English folksong, of which he collected numerous examples and made arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments. He so internalized that repertoire that he could write easily in the style, as in his settings of Edwardian poet A.E. Housman in Along the Field, simply but eloquently scored for solo voice and violin. Listen here to a performance of the cycle by soprano Marie Henriett Reinhold and violinist Dietrich Reinhold.

The other extreme finds Vaughan Williams exploring the full range of drama at his disposal as an early 20th century composer. Orchestrally, this expresses itself in his symphonies and in such works as Job, a Masque for Dancing, with its frightening musical depictions of Satan, but otherwise in his charmingly titled setting of the Vision of Ezekiel from the Hebrew scriptures for organ and chorus. The organ part is as fearsome for the keyboardist as the musical declamation is for the singers. Stay with it to the end in this performance by the University of Cambridge’s Clare College Choir.

And it was on this date in 1887 that Australian soprano Mrs. Helen Porter Armstrong made her sensational operatic debut in Brussels. We know her best by her stage name, Nellie Melba, as well as for two culinary items named in her honor, Melba Toast, and Peach Melba. Here’s a restored studio recording of the celebrated diva singing the finale of Act I of La traviata.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Live music is back in a big way this weekend, beginning with Oberlin’s Opening Festival, “Music, Sports, and the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece,” the third annual cycle of themed kickoff concerts shepherded by violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson (pictured) with input from his faculty colleagues. Read an article by Erich Burnett here, and either join the four-concert festival in person or watch online Saturday and Sunday at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm. In between, the theme is developed in symposia at 4 pm each day as well as in a listening party on Saturday at 10 pm when Conservatory students and Oberlin Athletics varsity team captains share their favorite music playlists from Warner Concert Hall.

Also on Saturday evening, the Stow Symphony plays its fall concert in Tallmadge.

Also on Sunday, the Chagrin Studio Orchestra continues its run of Carousel performances at 2, At 3, you have your choice of the CIM Orchestra at Severance Music Center under new conductor Carlos Kalmar, Cleveland Composers Guild at First Baptist, the CWRU Symphonic Winds at the Maltz PAC, MusiCLE’s Porchester Concert at the Cozad-Bates House, or the Akropolis Reed Quintet from the University of Michigan in Guzzetta Hall at Akron U.

But there’s more: on Sunday at 4, the Cavani Quartet continues its Beyond Beethoven cycle at the Music Settlement, and organist-composer Mark Thewes performs at First Church in Painesville. At 7:30, the Canton Symphony breaks its long silence with a concert of music by Ibert, Stravinsky, Haydn, and Margarer Brouwer’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn.

See our Concert Listings for details and links to live streams.

INTERESTING READS:

In last weekend’s Diary, we linked to a Van Magazine article about a recent attempt to complete Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony using AI. A followup review by Jan Swafford considers the success of the undertaking.

In the end, what were the creators of the AI Tenth Symphony actually trying to do? Did they want to create a piece that would be added to the Beethoven repertoire, played by orchestras everywhere? I hope that they weren’t attempting something that futile. Were they more modestly trying, like the creators of Watson and Deep Blue, to demonstrate the potential of computers to think faster and more pointedly than humans in mimicking human endeavors? If so, I’ll concede that they more or less succeeded: After an impressive feat of programming by its human proprietors, AI produced something that sounds unquestionably like a piece of music, only a gangly and forgettable one.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Earlier this week, the Michigan Daily reported that University of Michigan composition professor Bright Sheng had been removed from teaching an undergraduate class following the screening in a composition seminar of the 1965 version of Shakespeare’s Othello where actor Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface. Read the article here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Meet, if you haven’t already, two composers with Cleveland connections who were born on October 9 in 1869 and 1922 respectively.

Hearing a performance of Tannhäuser at the age of 18 inspired Cleveland-born Henry Lawrence Freeman to compose opera, and by his death in 1954, he had written scores for at least 23 titles, 21 of which are preserved in manuscript at Columbia University. He also founded two opera companies — one at the age of 22 in Denver that bore his name, and the Negro Grand Opera in 1920 in New York. The Martyr — the first opera to be produced by an all-black company, was staged in Chicago in 1893 and in Cleveland in 1894. [Read more…]

CONCERTS TODAY

Organist Jonathan Moyer plays a Noon recital on his home turf at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle featuring musical prayers by William Bolcom, César Franck & Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Moyer will use organs at both ends of the Covenant nave, and there are cookies to be had.

This evening, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society hosts the Imani Winds, not on its home turf but in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Flutist Brandon Patrick George, oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz, clarinetist Mark Dover, hornist Kevin Newton, and bassoonist Monica Ellis will play Eugène Bozza’s Scherzo, Elliott Carter’s Quintet, Henri Tomasi’s Cinq Danses, Anders Hillborg’s Six Pieces, and former Imani flutist Valerie Coleman’s Afro-Cuban Concerto.

Check our Concert Listings for details.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Between its international competitions, which now take place every four years, PianoCleveland sponsors a series of pianocentric events to keep the buzz going. The latest is a video contest, PianoFlicks, featuring six musicians in a variety of 30-second to five-minute videos in a worldwide contest on Wednesday, October 27 at 7:00 pm.

In a press release, PianoCleveland president Yaron Kohlberg writes, “We are excited about the opportunity for musicians to express and create in ways that go beyond the boundaries of traditional piano competitions or recitals, while making music more accessible for listeners at the same time.” Viewers can cast votes for contestants during the live broadcast for an audience prize of $300. Details here.

Ahead of the arrival of the Taliban, more than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives who are affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, have fled the country,

“The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around midday Eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.” Read the New York Times article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

A death, a birth, and a premiere stand out among the events that occurred on this date in classical music history.

The death: Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas in 1940 in Mexico City. Revueltas was championed by composer Carlos Chavez, who invited him to serve as his assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico until the two had a falling out over a commissioned work. His visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, sponsored by a leftist organization, ended with the victory of Francisco Franco, as did his musical career in Mexico not long afterward. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Although it may look like a mistake in the Concert Listings, CityMusic Cleveland and No Exit are indeed performing the same programs on Saturday as they did on Friday, but in different venues — CityMusic at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, and No Exit at Heights Arts, both at 7 pm.

Indoors on Sunday at 3 at Youngstown’s DeYor Center, the Dana Ensemble opens its second season with William Walton’s Façade (lampooned in the photo), and Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale — two iconic 20th-century theater works, and at the same hour, pianist Jeffrey Siegel returns for another season of his long-running “Keyboard Conversations” series, but now presented at the Maltz PAC.

Unfortunately for two planned al fresco events, rain is in the forecast for Sunday afternoon. MusiCLE Yours has just informed us that the “Porchester Concert” at the Cozad-Bates House (Underground Railroad Museum) has been moved one week later to Sunday, October 10 at 3.

Rain may dampen the spirits but won’t stop the bells of the McGaffin Carillon from ringing out over University Circle. The 4pm “Healing Bells” guest concert by Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra will go on as scheduled, and can be enjoyed under an umbrella, from your car, or via live stream. Read more about the program here.

INTERESTING READS:

Attempts to use technology to complete unfinished classical music works usually prove to be misguided and futile, but a recent experiment using artificial intelligence to bring Beethoven’s tenth symphony to life piqued our interest because of the involvement of pianist Robert Levin, who has applied his own impressive human intelligence to improvising cadenzas in the style of Mozart and Beethoven. Click here to read “How a Team of Musicologists and Computer Scientists Completed Beethoven’s Unfinished 10th Symphony” in The Conversation.

With reference to the Boston Pops and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette classical music critic Jeremy Reynolds considers how orchestral pops programming has evolved since 1885, when symphony orchestras in Boston began venturing outside standard symphonic repertoire.

He writes, “The classical canon has grown at tortoise speed, while rock, hip-hop and other genres have proliferated faster than rabbits — a trend that has continued to accelerate in the digital age. Orchestral pops programming now ranges from film scores, cartoon medleys and video game music to rap artists and jazz and circus acts. It’s whatever fusion of orchestral music and flavor-of-the-day entertainment the ensemble selects.”

Click here to read “America’s classical pops tradition is evolving, and PSO’s Byron Stripling has a new vision for it.”

NEWS BRIEFS:

This week, classical music media are reporting the deaths of Opera composer Carlysle Floyd, 95, on September 30 in Tallahassee, Florida, and of concert violinist James Buswell, 74, in Boston (no date given). Read obituaries here for Floyd in Opera News, and here for Buswell in The Strad.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

Two prominent Black composers appear in this weekend’s honors list: R. Nathaniel Dett, who died on tour in Battle Creek, Michigan on October 2, 1943, and Zenobia Powell Perry, born in Boley, Oklahoma on October 3, 1908. [Read more…]