by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS:

Looking for outdoor music? Try Sheryl Modlin’s 12:15 pm concert on the McGaffin Carillon in University Circle (also live streamed), the 2:00 pm Ohio Light Opera performance of Trial by Jury in Wooster, or Canton Symphony musicians’ 6:00-8:30 pm event, Music in the Beech Creek Botanical Garden in Alliance (billed as an “adult evening”).

Online, tonight at 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition continues with Round 2, Session 4, featuring pre-recorded, 30-minute programs by Roman Lopatynskyi (27, Ukraine), Martín García García (24, Spain), Svetlana Andreeva (32, Russia), and Byeol Kim (31, South Korea).

Both live and online, the Kent Blossom Music Festival faculty recitals continue with the Miami String Quartet, who perform at 7:30 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall at KSU. Violinists Benny Kim and Cathy Meng Robinson, violist Scott Lee, and cellist Keith Robinson will play Haydn’s Quartet No. 30 in E-flat (”Joke”), Erwin Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 2 (1925) & Dvořák’s Quartet No. 10 in E-flat.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Oberlin Jazz Percussion Professor Billy Hart has been named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Read the Oberlin news release here.

And the Oberlin-Como Piano Festival, a five-day virtual celebration of the Conservatory’s partnership with Italy’s Accademia Internazionale Del Pianoforte Lago Di Como, recently offered online, is now available for on-demand viewing.

The sessions include interviews and master classes with Yefim Bronfman (“Piano Concerti of Beethoven and Brahms”), William Grant Naboré (“The Marvel of the Baroque on the Pianoforte”), Dang Thai Son (“Conversations with Chopin”), Robert Spano (“Performing Piano Concerti: A Conductor’s View”), and Oberlin-Como Director Stanislav Ioudenitch (“The Golden Age of Piano Virtuosity: Legacy of Lake Como”). Watch here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Italian composer and harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti died on this date in 1757, perhaps from exhaustion after composing 555 sonatas which have become favorite recital openers for many modern pianists, and technically demanding exercises for keyboardists in general. Thanks to the Petrucci Library, all of them are available here in eleven volumes edited by Kenneth Gilbert. Keyboardists: hone your sight reading by taking on one sonata every day, a challenge that will either thrill or frustrate you for the next year and a half!

Johann Sebastian Bach left us some 200 church cantatas, and speaking of challenges, British composer and conductor William Gillies Whitaker, born on this date in 1876, set out to perform all of them. He succeeded, presenting a third of them in Newcastle and the rest in Glasgow with his Bach Choir.

A number of conductors have recorded all the sacred cantatas, including Karl Richter, Masaaki Suzuki, John Eliot Gardiner, Helmuth Rilling, Nikolaus Harnoncourt with Gustav Leonhardt, and Ton Koopman. I’ve had friends who made it a habit to listen to one cantata every Sunday morning, an inspiring regimen that could take four years to complete. It would be interesting to listen to a single conductor’s interpretations, or to mix and match them. Time to get started!

July 23 marks the birthdates of a number of American composers who may not be familiar household names: Ben Weber (born in 1916 in St. Louis), Jerome Rosen (1921 in Boston), David Noon (1946 in Johnstown, PA), John Carbon (1951 in Chicago), and Steven L. Rosenhaus (1952 in Brooklyn, NY).

Another challenge: get to know the works of these sometimes prolific figures, using the following as points of departure. For Weber, his Piano Concerto (performed by William Masselos with the NY Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein). For Rosen, his String Quartet No. 1. For Noon, his Saxophone Quartet No. 1. For Carbon, his Fantasy-Nocturne for piano and orchestra. And for Rosenhaus, a “Meet the Composer” interview on Zoom, and his chamber work for soprano, string quartet and piano, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pigeon.

by Daniel Hathaway

EVENTS TODAY:

Just one local performance to plug: the BlueWater Chamber Ensemble (Stephen Tavani, Rachel Englander, Maria Monday, and Nancy Patterson, violins, Laura Shuster and James Rhodes, violas, and Linda Atherton and Derek Snyder, cellos), will play Mozart’s Divertimento in F, K. 138, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, and Mendelssohn’s Octet, Op. 20 in Evans Amphitheatre at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights. It’s free.

NEWS BRIEFS:

In addition to its forthcoming concert by Chanticleer on July 27, Tuesday Musical is resuming its “Music al fresco: Passport 2021” series of world music performances on the front lawn of West Akron’s historic Barder House. Three Sunday afternoons will feature “Irish Fiddle with Opus 216” (August 29), the Moises Borges Quartet in Brazilian samba and bossa nova (September 12), and Zydeco with Mo’ Mojo (September 26). Click here for details and tickets.

Opera Western Reserve announces local actor auditions for its November 12 production of Romeo and Juliet at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, which will combine text from Shakespeare’s play with orchestral and vocal music from Gounod’s opera, sung in French. “We are auditioning specifically for the roles of: Paris and Abram (stage combat experience preferred), Capulet, Lady Capulet, Montague, Lady Montague, Nurse, and Friar, who will be performing Shakespeare monologue and dialogue in English.” Auditions will be held on Monday, August 9 from 7-9 pm, and Tuesday, August 10 from 4-6 pm, at Stambaugh Auditorium. Contracts are paid. Rehearsals begin in October. Advanced audition appointment not necessary. For more information, email Lynn Ohle.

FEATURED VIDEO:

Erie, Pennsylvania’s Warner Theater, home to the Erie Philharmonic, in which a number of Cleveland musicians play and whose music director, Daniel Meyer, also leads BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, is being renovated for a grand re-opening in December. The orchestra has released a fun video of its brass section playing Copland’s Fanfare on the construction site, suitably decked out for the occasion. Thanks to timpanist Andrew Pongracz for the link.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Let’s celebrate the natal days of three avant-garde composers who burst onto the scene on July 20: Nam June Paik (1932, in Seoul, South Korea), Gernot Wolfgang (1957 in Bad Gastein, Austria), and Michael Gordon (1958 in Miami).

Paik, also a mixed media and video artist, was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, whose moment of notoriety came in 1967 when cellist Charlotte Moorman was arrested for performing his Opera Sextronique topless — although other works of his, like his hommage à john cage, which calls for the destruction of two pianos, stick in the collective memory. Click here to watch a collage of his film and music, selected by musicians who worked with him. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

EVENTS THIS WEEKEND:

Ohio Light Opera is busy this weekend, with afternoon performances of Trial by Jury and The Fantasticks as well as an evening edition of “The Musical Magic of OLO.” All planned for the great outdoors, but with rain plans at the ready.

Online piano events include the beginning of the second round of the Cleveland International Piano Competition and the continuation of the Oberlin-Como Piano Festival (with an interview featuring conductor Robert Spano).

Encore Chamber Music Institute hosts its Blooming Artist Marathon online all afternoon and into the evening on Saturday.

And on the Blossom stage Sunday evening, vocalist Capathia Jenkins (pictured) opens that mythical volume, “The Great American Songbook,” joining The Cleveland Orchestra for American standards by Gershwin, Ellington, and others.

Details in our Concert Listings

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

A year ago today, July 17, we highlighted the birth in 1935 in Ames, Iowa of American composer Peter Schickele (whose alter ego was the fictional P.D.Q. Bach), and the death of French composer, conductor, and organist Gabriel Pierné in Ploujean, Brittany in 1937.

This weekend, we’ll celebrate the birth of British pianist, scholar, and composer Sir Donald Francis Tovey in Eaton (July 17, 1875), and mark the demise of American harpsichordist and pianist Rosalyn Tureck in New York City (July 17, 2003).

Tovey, who held a professorship in music at the University of Edinburgh from 1914, is best known for his scholarly writings about music — his Essays in Musical Analysis were published by Oxford in six volumes from 1935 to 1939. But he contributed some impressive works to the British canon of orchestral and chamber works as well. Based on those pieces and on his scholarly editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue, Elgar is said to have recommended him for a knighthood in 1935.

Listen here to Tovey’s 1913 Symphony in D, Op. 32 performed by the Malmö Opera Orchestra under George Vass, and here to a scratchy archive recording by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony of his Cello Concerto, Op. 40, dedicated to Pablo Casals, who is the soloist.

As part of his editorial work on Bach’s great fugal textbook, Tovey wrote a completion to Contrapunctus XVI, which he plays here on the piano.

And for a sample of Tovey’s chamber music, listen here and follow along with the score to his Op. 1 Piano Trio, which he dedicated to his mentor, Sir Hubert Parry.

Rosalyn Tureck’s early and lifelong advocacy of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach survived her training at the Juilliard School which she entered at the age of 16. She found the faculty unencouraging about her favorite composer, a situation that she also encountered elsewhere. In his New York Times obituary, Alan Kozin wrote,

When she entered the Naumburg Competition, she made it to the finals and presented an all-Bach program as her closing recital. As she told the story years later, the members of the jury said they could not give her the award “because they were sure that nobody could make a career in Bach.”

Well, she did, as you can learn from the video Rosalyn Tureck: Remembering a Legend, produced for what would have been her 100th birthday in 2014, and featuring a number of interviews with those who knew her best, including former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor Michael Charry. Watch here.

There’s also a video of her all-Bach recital in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1995 that includes the Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, and the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue.

 

by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:

On Saturday, Ohio Light Opera presents a cabaret of songs from musicals the company has produced since 1979 (outdoors in Wooster’s Public Square), Cleveland International Piano Competition releases the Round 1, Session 3 videos of performances by Vitaly Starikov (25, Russia), Anastasiya Magamedova (23, United States/Tajikistan), Ziyu Liu (22, China), Daria Parkhomenko (29, Russia), and Rafael Skorka (32, Israel), and Apollo’s Fire features violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in showpieces by Telemann and J.S. Bach in Avon Lake.

On Sunday, Cleveland International Piano Competition contestants Bowen Li (24, China), Roman Lopatynskyi (27, Ukraine), Martín García García (24, Spain), Svetlana Andreeva (32, Russia), and Byeol Kim (31, South Korea) perform via video in Round 1, Session 4, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute wraps up its concert series in Gates Mills with a program sparked by young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, The Cleveland Orchestra welcomes guests — conductor Dame Jane Glover and pianist Conrad Tao (pictured) — in its second Blossom weekend, and two orchestras perform al fresco: the Suburban Symphony in Shaker Heights, and the Akron Symphony at Hale Farm.

Details in our Concert Listings.

Just a reminder that we’ll be posting mini-reviews of the piano competition rounds soon after each session in the special CIPC section of our front page, and that once the individual round videos have debuted, they’ll remain available for viewing on the PianoCleveland website.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

On this weekend’s list of commemorations: conductor Herbert Blomstedt (born on July 11, 1927), who will conduct Beethoven at Blossom on August 1, Jerry Herman (born on July 10, 1933), composer of such Broadway hits as Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles, pianist Ferdinand Joseph Morton (a.k.a. Jelly Roll), who claimed to have invented jazz, a boast about which Gunther Schuller wrote there is “no proof to the contrary,” and Arthur Fiedler, longtime Boston Pops conductor (who died at the age of 84 on June 10, 1979). Here is some rare footage of the Boston Pops July 4, 1976 concert at the Esplanade that drew more than 600,000 people. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

NEWS AND UPDATES:

We’ve just received news of the death of Kathleen Shamp (pictured, right) on June 10 at the age of 93. The Wooster native served as music librarian at the Cleveland Public Library for 50 years (1950-2000), sang with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under George Szell and Robert Shaw (1954-1974), and served on the music staffs of Epworth-Euclid (now University Circle) United Methodist and Plymouth churches. A Memorial Service will be held at 11:00 am on Saturday, July 24 at the University Circle United Methodist Church, 1919 E. 107th Street. Read an obituary here.

Pianist Conrad Tao will replace Benjamin Grosvenor with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra on Sunday evening, July 11 at Blossom, and the Mozart concerto has been changed to No. 23 in A, K. 488.

The Cleveland Philharmonic announces auditions for the new season under music director Victor Liva. Openings are available in all string sections as well as percussion and oboe. Details here.

The Cleveland Institute of Music has named Alison King as its first-ever Director of Digital Media. She comes to CIM from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she served as director of marketing and business development.

HAPPENING TODAY:

Round One, Session Two of the Cleveland International Piano Competition will be conducted via pre-recorded videos made from around the world. Tune in at 7:00 pm to hear Lucas Thomazinho (25, Brazil), Zhi Chao Juli Jia (29, China), Jiarui Cheng (22, China), and Yedam Kim (32, South Korea). It’s free.

The next-to-last ENCORE Chamber Music Institute Concert of the season features guitarist JIJI, with Jinjoo Cho, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Minhye Choi, violins, Stephen Wyrczynski, viola, and Max Geissler, cello in “Sparked by Frida [Kahlo].” Music by Albeniz,  Ponce, Isabella Leonarda, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla, Frantz Casseus, Boccherini, and Roland Dyens. The in-person event begins at 7 pm in the Dodero Center for the Performing Arts at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills. [Read more…]