by Daniel Hathaway
In place of today’s Diary, on the official observance of Independence Day let’s celebrate the return of live performances by The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom in two photos that vividly tell a before-and-after story. No. 2 is part of a set that the Orchestra’s official photographer Roger Mastroianni posted to his Facebook page over the weekend.
by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The Cleveland Orchestra returns to the stage this weekend at Blossom for identical Independence Day concerts on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 pm. Led by Brett Mitchell, the all-American program features Michelle Cann in Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement, Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, Mary D. Watkins’ Soul of Remembrance, Adolphus Hailstork’s An American Fanfare, and Aaron Copland’s Suite from Appalachian Spring.
As one member of the wind section posted on Facebook yesterday, “After 477 days apart, it is an incredible honor to be making music with The Cleveland Orchestra again!” Read a preview article here, and an interview with Michelle Cann here.
Americana is also on the agenda for Sunday’s 4:30 pm Encore Chamber Music Institute concert in Gates Mills. Copland’s Appalachian Spring will be featured, along with a bluegrass set by Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper. Read a preview article here.
Also, check out special online events from the Oregon Bach Festival (“Phenomenal Women Part 1”), London’s Voces8 (“A wide-ranging recital connecting natural and spiritual regeneration, recognizing loss, beauty, love and joy”), and pianist Min Kwon (“who has commissioned more than 70 composers including Terry Riley, Tania León, Nico Muhly, George Lewis, and more to each write a variation on America the Beautiful”). Details in our Concert Listings.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
On July 3, 1854, Czech/Moravian composer Leoš Janáček was born in Hukvaldy. Now seems a good time to recall one of his most remarkable works, the Sinfonietta, which was performed by Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra on January 10 of 2020. That was just weeks before the pandemic closed live Severance Hall concerts down and effectively banished wind players from the world’s concert halls.
I wrote about that evening in a review, and Roger Mastroianni captured the moment in a photo. Look at all those extra brass players!
by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Live events today include a noontime Independence Day weekend carillon concert in University Circle by George Leggiero, and an Encore Chamber Music Institute Friday Classics concert, “Sparked by Albert” (Einstein) featuring violinist Jinjoo Cho and cellist Clive Greensmith.
Online, flutist and composer Hong-Da Chin (pictured) plays original works on Chinese instruments in a concert sponsored by No Exit, and Nicole Keller makes an appearance on the American Guild of Organists’ Organfest 2021, playing the new Muller/Aeolian-Skinner/Skinner instrument in Trinity Cathedral and the new Paul Fritts organ in First Lutheran, Lorain.
Details in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
On the latest Crain’s Cleveland’s Business Landscape podcast, Cleveland Orchestra CEO André Gremillet talks with Dan Poletta about the return of The Cleveland Orchestra.
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen died in a care home in North Holland on Thursday, July 1 at the age of 82. In an NPR story, Tom Huizenga wrote, “Celebrated for his eclecticism, Andriessen devised his own bold brand of minimalist-influenced music. He embraced the pulsating repetitions of his contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but also wove elements derived from Igor Stravinsky’s music, big band jazz, popular styles and the rigid tenets of serialism into his compositions.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
“What a year!” Kent Blossom Music Festival director Ricardo Sepúlveda said in a recent telephone conversation. “But we’ve been fortunate. The challenges of the pandemic provided us with opportunities to learn, to explore, to be creative and innovative, and how to adapt to rapid change.”
The more you collaborate with others, the less control you have over your own operations. In the case of Kent Blossom, the summer education program that was established in the same year that The Cleveland Orchestra moved into its summer home in Cuyahoga Falls, the program that provides chamber music coaching for young players by members of the Orchestra takes its cues not only from the Orchestra, but also from Kent State University. And since the novel coronavirus made its appearance, the program has also been subject to the health protocols of the State of Ohio.
by Daniel Hathaway
What has happened to June? The sudden flood of openings and return to in-person performances has made the month fly past, but also left some unfinished business — like a review of The Cleveland Orchestra’s In Focus Episode 12, subtitled “Celestial Serenades” that features works by Aaron Jay Kernis and Josef Suk.
The video captures a moment when the live concert world was still on hiatus, and face masks were more than merely de rigueur. Though we have moved on from that point in several ways, it’s good to have a reminder that the pandemic will remain with us for some time into the future, and that we’re not through with pondering mortality and creating memorials quite yet. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS:
Akron’s Tuesday Musical Association has announced that tickets will go on sale tomorrow, Thursday, July 1, for the Chanticleer concert in E.J. Thomas Hall on July 27 at 7:30 pm, rescheduled from last season due to the pandemic. The celebrated 12-voice male chorus from San Francisco will present “Awakenings,” with music by Monteverdi, Byrd, Vicente Lusitano, Villa-Lobos, Augusta Read Thomas, Ulysses Kay, Steven Sametz, Burton Lane, and a newly commissioned work by Ayanna Woods. Click here.
Chagrin Arts will present the Callisto Quartet — Paul Aguilar and Rachel Stenzel, violins, Eva Kennedy, viola, and Hannah Moses, cello — in a free, outdoor performance on Friday, July 16 at 7:00 pm in Solon Bicentennial Park. Formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2016, the ensemble won the 2018 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and took Second Prize at the 2019 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Currently serving as the Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the Shepherd School of Music at Houston’s Rice University, the Callisto have been appointed Fellowship Quartet in Residence at the Yale School of Music. Their concert on July 16 will include Haydn’s Quartet Op. 20, No. 1 & Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 59, No. 3. Details here. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Composer Hale Smith was born in Cleveland on this date in 1929. A precocious musician whose talents were recognized early on by Duke Ellington, after service in the U.S. Army, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1950 and 1952. Smith went on to enjoy a widely varied career in New York, where he moved easily between classical styles (including serial music), and jazz. He died in New York in 2009 at the age of 84.
As Dennis Dooley wrote when Smith won the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music in 1973,
His prolific output includes everything from TV advertising jingles to incidental music for stage productions of Lysistrata and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. His “Castle House Rag” was used in the documentary The Making of Citizen Kane. Smith has, nevertheless, always found time to lend his prodigious energies to such important undertakings as the Detroit Symphony’s annual Symposium on Black American Composers. He gladly served as an advisor to the Chicago-based Center for Black Music Research, but “bristled at the designation [Black composer],” The New York Times noted in its lengthy obituary, “He wanted his work, and that of his black peers, to appear on programs with that of Beethoven, Mozart and Copland” and to be judged simply as music.
A list of Hale Smith’s works (click the link to “Hale’s Music”) suggests that Cleveland should rediscover one of its hometown composers. Sample some of his music here,.
Among the better-served composers born on this date are Leroy Anderson (1908, beloved Boston creator of light classical music), Frank Loesser (1910, Broadway tunesmith), and Bernard Herrmann (1911, popularly known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, but a fine composer in his own right).
On June 29, 1934, radio station W2XR, a “noncommercial high fidelity experiment,” began broadcasting in New York City, soon to become WQXR when it was granted a commercial license in 1936. Always at the forefront of experimental broadcasting, in 1952, the station devised a way to broadcast in stereo, using two microphones placed six feet apart. Listeners could enjoy the stereo effect by similarly positioning two radios, one tuned to the station’s AM feed, the other to its FM feed.
And on this date in 1941, Polish piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski died in New York at the age of 80. Also a diplomat and statesman, the pianist had served as the newly independent Poland’s prime minister and foreign minister in 1919 when he participated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.
Paderewski’s dual career led to a curious situation after his demise in a New York hotel room while on a concert tour. Because of his diplomatic service and the exigencies of the Second World War, President Roosevelt granted permission for his body to be temporarily laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. But there it stayed in the vault of the U.S.S. Maine Mast Memorial until the fall of communism in 1992 when his remains were transferred to Warsaw Cathedral. With the exception of his heart, which is preserved in a bronze sculpture in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Read about that strange saga in detail here.
by Daniel Hathaway
LIVE AND IN-PERSON THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday evening, ChamberFest Cleveland ends its season with a Festival Finale at St. Pascal Baylon Church in Highland Heights. The ticketed event includes a champagne toast. On Sunday, organist Karel Paukert plays Music from Prague at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights, and members of the Akron Symphony perform at the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.
ONLINE EVENTS:
On Saturday and Sunday, Local 4 Music Fund continues its three-part series “She Scores,” and on Saturday, Burning River Baroque presents a one-time only, climate-based program, “Elements Worth Fighting For.” Details in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEF:
Earlier this week, fire destroyed the Dobson Pipe Organ Builders Ltd. workshop in Lake City, Iowa, including an instrument being built for an Anglican Church in Australia. The firm, founded by Lynn A. Dobson, has built distinguished instruments for such venues as Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, and St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York. Read a New York Times story here.
INTERESTING READ:
This week, British oboist Nicholas Daniel will premiere one of the late John Tavener’s last works, eight years after the composer’s death. He explains the delay in a Guardian article, and writes about the complex web that frustrates musical creativity in the U.K.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC
On June 26, we note the birth of American pianist and conductor Antonia Brico in 1902 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the death of Dutch composer Henk Badings in Maarheeze, a well as the birth of Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg in Helsinki in 1958.
On June 27 in music history, French composer and claveciniste Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre died in Paris in 1729, and several 20th century composers were born: George T. Walker (1922, in Washington D.C.), Jack Gallagher (1947, in New York), Daniel Asia (1953, in Seattle), and Magnus Lindberg (1958 in Helsinki).
We wrote in some detail about Jacquet de la Guerre, Walker, Gallagher, and Asia in the Diary for June 27, 2020, so today we’ll throw a bit of light on the more obscure composers.
Born to a Dutch single mother, Brico emigrated to California with her foster parents in 1908, where she studied at Berkeley and worked as assistant to the director of San Francisco Opera. She returned to Europe for conducting studies in Berlin and made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930. Back in the States, she was the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and after settling in Denver, became conductor of what was eventually named the Denver Philharmonic.
Brico’s life and career are dramatized in the Shooting Star Filmcompany’s The Conductor. Watch a trailer here (the R-rated full-length film can be rented on YouTube). There are also some poor-quality documentaries about the conductor, but you can listen here to her interview with Northwest Public Radio.
Like a number of his fellow Netherlanders, Henk Badings was born in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, but was orphaned early on and returned to the Netherlands to study mining and palaeontology in Delft and worked as a mining engineer before turning to a career in music. His fifteen numbered symphonies and other orchestral works were championed by such conductors as van Beinum and Mengelberg, and his catalogue of 1,000 works includes various experimental pieces.
For a taste of Badings’ music, listen to his 1954 symphony Louisville, dedicated to the Louisville Orchestra and performed by the Janacek Philharmonic under David Porcelijn.
Not that Magnus Lindberg is all that obscure, having served as composer in residence with the New York Philharmonic at the invitation of incoming music director Alan Gilbert, and having commissioned works performed by The Cleveland Orchestra, but his larger works haven’t been heard locally for several years now. The composer has passed through various stylistic episodes, with side excursions into Japanese drumming and German punk rock. One of his works that has gained popularity is his Clarinet Concerto, performed here by Emil Jonason at Concertgebouw Brugge.
by Daniel Hathaway
Since many Clevelanders don’t have a clue why State Route 91 in Cuyahoga and Lake Counties is called SOM Center Road, maybe it’s time to rename at least one five-mile segment of that thoroughfare that passes through the centers of Solon, Orange, and Mayfield townships.
Based on recent events, its new designation might well be “Chamber Music Way” in honor of the fine performances that are taking place this month at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills and The Grove Amphitheatre in Mayfield, courtesy of ENCORE Chamber Music Institute and ChamberFest Cleveland, respectively. In addition to the distinction of presenting some of the first in-person performances to come onto the calendar since the pandemic, both organizations were making their debuts in new venues. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Many pianists win prizes in international piano competitions but few return to the scenes of their triumphs to run them.
Make an exception for Yaron Kohlberg, the Israeli keyboardist who came in second in the 2007 Cleveland International Piano Competition at the age of 24, and became President of Piano Cleveland in 2018, just in time to have to cancel the 2020 competition due to the pandemic. (As a placeholder, he invented Virtu(al)oso, an online competition that increased the organization’s global audience.)
On Sunday, June 6, Cleveland piano fans got an opportunity to hear Kohlberg himself in a short solo recital that formed the coda to Music From The Western Reserve’s online concert series. [Read more…]
