by Daniel Hathaway

WEEKEND EVENTS:

Today at 2:00 pm, the Semifinal rounds of the Cleveland International Piano Competition continue in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art (pictured: Thursday’s duo photo by Gregory Wilson). 

Rafael Skorka (32, Israel) performs Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story (arr. Kurbatov), Leighton’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Op. 24 (“Homage to Bach”) (1956) and Brahms’ Sieben Fantasien, Op. 116.

Martín García García (24, Spain) will play Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie in C, D. 760, Liszt’s “Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne)” from Années de Pèlerinage I, S. 160, Étude de Concert, S. 145, No. 2 (“Gnomenreigen”) and Transcendental Etude, S. 139, No. 10. Skorka and García García will then team up for Schubert’s Fantasie in f. Tickets are available online.

The Semifinal rounds continue on Sunday at 2:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium. Byeol Kim (31, South Korea) performs Clara Schumann’s Notturno in F, Op. 6, No. 2, Robert Schumann’s Arabeske in C, Op. 18, Gottschalk’s The Union, Op. 48, Mendelssohn’s Fantasie in f-sharp, Op. 28, Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arr. Kurbatov) and Jalbert’s Toccata (2001).

Lovre Marušić (28, Croatia) plays Scarlatti’s Sonata in E, K. 380, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16 and Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arr. Kurbatov). Kim and Marušić will conclude with Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos. Tickets are available online.

On Sunday at 7:00 pm at Blossom Music Center it’s The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Herbert Blomstedt. Garrick Ohlsson plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and Blomstedt leads the Orchestra in the composer’s Symphony No. 7. Tickets are available online.

At 7:00 pm at Guzzetta Lawn, outside Guzzetta Hall on Buchtel Common, University of Akron, Tucker Jolly leads the 21st Annual TubaSummer. The program features summer favorites performed by tuba, sousaphone, baritone and euphonium players from throughout the region. Lawn chairs and blankets are welcome. The event is free.

Then at 7:30 pm, the Akron Symphony continues its Outside Voices Concert Series at Goodyear Heights Metro Park. Christopher Wilkins leads the ASO Virtuosi in orks by Scott Joplin, Miguel del Águila, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa. The concert is free.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC: 

On July 31, 1886, Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany at the age of 74. The 19th-century classical equivalent of a 20th-century rock star, Liszt’s solo piano performances gave rise to such pan-European fame that the poet Heinrich Heine characterized audience acclaim as “Lisztomania.” The composer ended his career as “the Abbé Liszt” after taking minor orders in the Catholic Church.

Listen to two Cleveland performances that feature his forward-looking piano music. Vladimir Horowitz played Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata at Severance Hall on October 31 of 1976, and third-place winner François Dumont programmed his tone poem, Vallée d’Obermann, for his semi-final round in the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition.

There are no special Cleveland connections to celebrate for August 1 but how about a little quiz that references classical music figures who died on the first day of August?

1. English pianist John Ogdon died on August 1 in 1952. Which of these composers did he especially promote? a) Alkan. b) Reinecke. c) Busoni. c) Scriabin.
2. Russian pianist Svyatoslav Richter died of a heart attack on August 1, 1997. True or false: In 1952, Richter was invited to play Franz Liszt in a film based on the life of Tchaikovsky.

Click here for the answers to the quiz.

by Daniel Hathaway

CHANTICLEER UPDATE:

San Francisco’s celebrated 12-voice male choir stops in Akron tonight on their first tour since the pandemic shut singing down for over a year. Read about how the ensemble coped with the situation in this interview with music director Tim Keeler.

Tuesday Musical, the sponsor for the 7:30 pm performance in E.J. Thomas Hall, has emailed these details to ticket holders and prospective attendees:

Seats in the orchestra level start at $19. For the best selection, order on-line now. If seats are still available, tickets will also be sold at the door. 

After the concert, we’ll celebrate with a festive drinks-&-desserts reception for the entire audience!

Complimentary parking in the EJ Parking Deck and adjacent surface lots.

Are you a student? Receive a free ticket! Simply bring your student ID to the EJ Ticket Office that evening.

EJ Ticket Office opens at 6:30 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. Program begins at 7:30 p.m.

The singers of Chanticleer ask that everyone wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. Complimentary disposable masks will be available at the door.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

This is the week when the Cleveland International Piano Competition moves into a new phase with the arrival of eight pianists who will enter the Semifinal Round two-by-two, live and in person beginning on Thursday at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We’ll concentrate today on keyboard composers and performers who mark anniversaries on July 27.

French composer and harpsichordist Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre entered the Elysian Fields in Paris on this date in 1729. Born into a prominent family of musicians and artisans, she was educated by her father on an equal basis with her brothers, and became an early favorite of Louis XIV at Versailles. She composed in all contemporary forms, although not all of her works have survived.

Click here to watch Cleveland’s Burning River Baroque perform her cantata, Judith. Soprano Malina Rauschenfels and harpsichordist Paula Maust are joined by Sarah Lynn, baroque flute, and Glenna Curren, baroque cello, for a concert in Foxburg, PA in March, 2019.

For a sampling of her keyboard music, listen here to Elisabetta Guglielmin’s performances of several suites for the clavecin. Follow along with the score to see how one harpsichordist realizes the notation of the prélude non-mensuré, a popular way of encouraging a quasi-improvisatory performance.

Another death to report on July 27: Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi in Vienna. An odd feature of his legacy is that the “Red Priest” who authored more than 500 concertos wrote none that featured keyboard instruments. That hasn’t stopped others from arranging various concertos for performance by keyboardists, beginning with Johann Gottfried Walther, who repurposed several for organ solo. Click here to watch Bálint Karosi play Vivaldi’s RV 275 concerto in Walther’s arrangement (oddly attributed to a ‘Sigr. Meck’) on the organ of the Kreuzkirche in Suhl, Thuringia (Germany).

And the harpsichord duet of Tom Pixton and Edward Parmentier have recorded several Vivaldi concerto arrangements for Titanic Records. Listen here to their performances on instruments built by Pixton and Keith Hill.

Moving on to more recent, piano virtuoso-influenced times, July 27 marks the birth of Russian pianist Vladimir de Pachman in Odessa in 1848, and the death of Italian-German composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin in 1924 at the age of 58.

Pachman specialized in playing the works of Chopin, as well as for a long list of performing eccentricities. He was an early adopter of new recording technologies that emerged in the first decade of the 20th century. This RCA Victor Red Seal 12-inch recording from January 17, 1911 preserves his take on Liszt’s concert paraphrase of Verdi’s Rigoletto. And in posting his 1925 rendition of the “Minute” Waltz, YouTube contributor Beckmesser2 commented, “This recorded performance is probably the best documentation of what it was like to attend a Pachmann recital during the pianist’s final years.”

Pachman’s life, career, and eccentricities are documented in exquisite detail in this spreadsheet, compiled by Nigel Nettheim, which provides an interesting rabbit hole for piano addicts to explore.

We featured Busoni in the Diary on this date in 2020. Click here to listen to his recordings of several works captured in London in 1922. Known especially for his Romantic piano elaborations of works by Bach (click here to watch Antonio Pompa-Baldi play his arrangement of the great Chaconne in Mixon Hall at CIM in October of 2020), Busoni crowned his keyboard works with his immense Piano Concerto. Pianist Garrick Ohsson recorded it in the late 1980s with Christoph von Dohnányi, The Cleveland Orchestra and the men of the Orchestra Chorus. Thirty years later, Ohlsson revisited the piece with the Orchestra in February, 2019, and prefaced the performance with some of his thoughts.

by Daniel Hathaway

WEEKEND EVENTS:

Saturday and Sunday provide piano fans with their last opportunity to get to know the 26 contestants in the Cleveland International Piano Competition — after Sunday’s Round 2, Session 6 performances, the field will be whittled down to eight hopefuls as the competition moves into the Semifinal, Chamber Music, and Concerto Rounds. The early round sessions have been pre-recorded from locations around the globe, and you can tune in on Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 pm to listen in for free (or catch them later, on-demand).

Alas for procrastinators, Saturday’s Ohio Light Opera performance of Trial by Jury and Stars in the Classics’ garden concert are both sold out. But on Sunday evening at 7:00 pm, guest conductor Rafael Payare and violinist Stefan Jackiw will appear with The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom in music by Prokofiev and Dvořák, and lawn and pavilion tickets are available here. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni from last weekend, courtesy of The Cleveland Orchestra.)

INTERESTING INTERVIEW:

Musical America editor Susan Elliott holds a one-on-one conversation with Harold Brown, who took on the position of chief diversity and inclusion officer for the Cincinnati Symphony last March with the mandate “to effect change and broaden the institution’s personnel profile to better reflect its diverse community.” Watch here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

We’ll start by mentioning the birth of Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch in Geneva on July 24, 1880, who served as the first president of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1920-1925.

Then we’ll move on to celebrate the anniversaries of two of the great vocalists of the 20th century: soprano Adele Addison, born in New York on July 24, 1925, and contralto Maureen Forrester, born (as Kathleen Stewart) in Montréal on July 25, 1930.

Although trained in opera, Addison appeared most frequently in the 1950s and 60s in orchestral concerts and recitals. Listen here to her performance in the solo quartet of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell in April of 1961 (bonus: Richard Lewis is the tenor).

Addison’s supple voice was well suited to Baroque music, and she became a favorite of Leonard Bernstein. Listen here to Handel’s “Come unto him” from Messiah with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1956.

Among her other credits, Addison’s voice was dubbed in for Dorothy Dandridges’ in the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess, and she was soprano soloist for the world premiere of Poulenc’s Gloria with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony in 1961. Listen to “Bess, you is my woman” here (the voice of Robert McFerrin — father of Bobby — is also dubbed in, this time for Sidney Poitier).

As a young singer in Canada, Forrester made strong impressions on CBC talent shows, and received her big break in New York when Bruno Walter chose her as one of the soloists for Mahler’s Second Symphony. She also sang in the conductor’s farewell performances with the New York Philharmonic in 1957.

A true contralto, Forrester’s vocal gifts come to the fore in this 1957 performance of Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody with the Orchestra de Radio-Canada, led by Igor Markevich. But her singing could also be light and lively, as in this duet from J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 78 with soprano Lois Marshall and pianist Yehudi Wyner from a 1974 recital at Mt. Orford, Québec. “Wir eilen mit Schwachen doch emsigen Schritten” translates as “We run with eager but faltering footsteps,” an image that the composer captures brilliantly.