by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

One live and one virtual event to highlight today.

German organist Mirjam Laetitia Haag will give a recital at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights tonight at 7. The program includes pieces by Muffat, J.S. Bach, Liszt, Dupré, Reger, Mendelssohn, Hermann Schröder, Ian Farrington and Franck, as well as original improvisations. A freewill offering will be received.

Several musicians familiar to Northeast Ohio audiences will be featured on a live feed from the Seattle Chamber Music Festival tonight at 10 pm. James Ehnes and Stephen Rose are in the ensemble that will perform Florence Price’s String Quartet in G, and pianists Andrew Armstrong and Orion Weiss will share the keyboard for Schubert’s Fantasie in f. Purchase $25 tickets and access the feed here, either at concert time or on demand.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Cleveland Arts Prize announced its 2021 awardees yesterday in a press release. The list includes the collective Mourning [A] BLKstar, Happy Dog proprietor Sean Watterson, and two Cleveland Orchestra figures: Clara Rankin, and Franz Welser-Möst. The 61st annual award ceremony will be held on October 13 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This is a good time to mention that Welser-Möst’s recently published book, From Silence, is now available in an English edition from the Cleveland Orchestra store.

Cleveland Pops Orchestra will play an outdoor family concert on Sunday, August 15 at 2 pm on the grounds of the Mandel JCC. Vocalists Connor Bogart and Lauren Berry will join conductor Carl Topilow in Disney favorites and music by ABBA, Queen, and Elvis. Blankets, lawn chairs and picnic lunches are welcome, and kosher drinks and snacks will be on sale. Click here for free tickets and details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1880, African American concert violinist, composer and educator Clarence Cameron White (pictured above) was born in Clarksville, Tennessee. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory, from which his mother had graduated, from 1896 to 1901, then studied composition with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in England, and violin in Paris. He succeeded R. Nathaniel Dett as head of the music department of the Hampton Institute from 1932-1935. White’s compositions include a ballet (A Night in Sans Souci) and an opera (Ouanga), two works based on Haitian themes for which he collaborated with playwright John Matheus.

Click here to watch a recent performance of White’s Suite Spirituale for Clarinet Quartet (at Clarinettissimo 2020), and here to watch an online video of his Levee Dance, Op. 27, No. 4 (performed by violinist Augustin Hadelich, and pianist Joyce Yang).

And on this date in 1909, Leo Fender, one of the pioneers of the electric guitar, was born in Anaheim, California. While this new, 20th century invention became synonymous with rock virtuosi like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, it also gained something of a foothold in classical music. Click here to read Christopher Fox’s article, “How The World Plugged into the Electric Guitar” in The Guardian, and here to read Anastasia Tsioulcas’ NPR article, “Electric Guitars Amp Up New Classical Music.”

Click here to listen to Bang on a Can All-Star Mark Stewart play Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, written in 1987 for Pat Metheny. And click here to hear the electric guitar introduction to s aria “Here Where Footprints Erase The Grave” from Missy Mazzoli’s 2012 chamber opera Song from the Uproar.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

One year ago, on August 8, 2020, the second three of the six finalists in PianoCleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition played their ultimate round via videos. Two of them are back in the flesh for the 2021 Cleveland International Piano Competition, this time for final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.

Byeol Kim played on Friday evening, and Lovre Marušić is on for tonight at 7 with Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, sharing the program with Martín García García, who solos in Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. You can attend in person (face masks required) or watch the performances via live stream and stick around to hear the results after the jury decides who won what prizes. Click here for tickets.

On Sunday at 4, Oberlin professor Steven Plank plays a recital on the Flentrop organ in Christ Church, Oberlin featuring music by Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck and Heinrich Scheidemann. It’s free.

Outdoor concerts fill out the schedule on Sunday. At 4, guest Carillonneur Keiran Cantilina previews the program he’ll be playing from Belgian bell towers later this month on the McGaffin Carillon in University Circle. At 7, Martin Herman conducts The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom in Classical Mystery Tour, a Beatles tribute concert (tickets here). And at 7:30, Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony Virtuosi take music by Scott Joplin, Miguel del Águila, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa outdoors in Firestone Park.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has undergone emergency surgery in California for a brain tumor and has cancelled appearances through the end of October. Read more here.

The Baltimore Symphony announced on Thursday that it had fired Emily Skala, 59, its principal flute for more than three decades, after receiving complaints from musicians, audience members, and donors that she “shared Covid-19 conspiracy theories and other misinformation on social media.” Read the New York Times story here.

Since we’re now entering the Silly Season, the slow news period during late summer when frivolous news stories find their way onto front pages, our choice for today is a little Violin Channel feature about Paddy Moran, an Irish fiddler from County Mayo, who crafted a violin in 1972 made entirely out of parts from an old Ford Anglia. Read about that here (more such trivia to follow, we’re sure).

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Czech-American composer Karel Husa was born in Prague on August 7, 1921, He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, and taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years. In a January, 2017 New York Times obituary, Steve Smith writes

Mr. Husa created works in most of the standard concert-music forms apart from opera, including two symphonies, several concertos, four string quartets and three ballets.

… 

In “Music for Prague 1968,” a response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire.

The piece, given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, became one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date. 

Click here to listen to a retrospective of Husa’s music, including Music for Prague, from a 2005 symposium in which the composer participated.

by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC MOVES TO SEVERANCE:

The grand finale of the Cleveland International Piano Competition begins tonight at Severance Hall and continues on Saturday evening, as the four 2021 finalists play concertos with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra. At 7 pm Friday, Byeol Kim plays Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in b-flat, and Yedam Kim solos in Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in d. And on Saturday at 7, Lovre Marušić plays Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in G, and Martín García García solos in the second final round performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.

You can attend in person (face masks required) or watch the performances online. Tickets for both live and virtual attendance are available online.

ONLINE TODAY:

Last Monday’s Diary linked to a New York Times article that previewed the Bard Music Festival’s two week-long exploration of the world of French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. The opening concert, which pairs several of her own compositions  with music by some of her female students goes online today at 5:00 pm.

Program: Nadia Boulanger’s Vers la vie nouvelle and Lux aeterna, Lili Boulanger’s Faust et Hélène and Pie Jesu, Priaulx Rainier’s Reminiscence, Louise Talma’s Alleluia in the Form of a Toccata, Grazyna Bacewicz’s Music for Strings, Trumpet, and Percussion, and Julia Perry’s Stabat mater. Performers include J’Nai Bridges mezzo-soprano, Fei-Fei piano, Joshua Guerrero tenor, Samantha Hankey mezzo-soprano, Joelle Harvey soprano, Joshua Hopkins baritone, Renée Anne Louprette organ, Nicholas Phan tenor, Bard Festival Chamber Players, and The Orchestra Now conducted by Rebecca Miller and Leon Botstein. Tickets are $10. View the live stream here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1904, German music critic Eduard Hanslick died in Baden at the age of 78. One of the most divisive figures in the demi-monde of music criticism, Hanslick allied himself with the traditions represented by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann that culminated in the music of Brahms, eventually waging a personal war on the “Music of the Future” represented by Wagner and Liszt and leading to Bruckner. This 1890 cartoon from the Vienna satirical magazine Figaro lampoons his position.

Summing up Hanslick’s achievements in The Hungarian Review, Nicholas T. Parsons writes: The times were propitious and newspapers were expanding to meet the demand from an increasingly cultivated bourgeois public for accessible but authoritative cultural journalism. When his career began mid-century, the Viennese competition in Hanslick’s speciality of music criticism was lamentable, as he put it: “stuffed with epithets and shallow enthusiasms, limp wit and phrase-making, unmanly heroisations and idolatry – echt wienerisch!” His first and perhaps greatest achievement was to raise musical appreciation to a professional level, diffusing his knowledge effortlessly in urbane prose, but dedicating himself to his task by playing every score right through before a performance. He would also do extensive background reading, for example of a Shakespeare play and commentary on it, before reviewing a Verdi opera. One lasting impact of his approach was that he addressed the work primarily and the performance secondarily, from which it followed that the quality of a work might not necessarily be obscured by inadequacy of performance, or, of course, vice versa…

And in a world-changing event, on August 6, 1945, the United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom, detonated the first of two atomic bombs over the city of Hiroshima, Japan (a second bomb was dropped over Nagasaki three days later).

Click here to watch a performance of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1960 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 string instruments, as performed by Sinfonia Varsovia led by Krzysztof Urbański at Penderecki’s 80th Birthday Celebration in Warsaw in November, 2013.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS:

Do they play well with others? Now that the solo rounds have shown the audiences and jury what they’re individually capable of producing from those 88 keys, four finalists in the Cleveland International Piano Competition will play piano quintets with the Escher String Quartet to test their mettle as ensemble players.

The first session takes place tonight at 7 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, when Byeol Kim joins the Escher in César Franck’s Quintet in f, followed by Yedam Kim in Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. Both in-person and virtual tickets are available. Click here. The second session happens on Wednesday, same time, same place.

Garage Opera? At noon today, Lyric Opera Chicago presents a filmed version of Yuval Sharon’s drive-through reimagining of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, produced last April in Millennium Lakeside Parking Garage. You may have read about its debut in October of 2020 by Michigan Opera in Detroit, and Cleveland Orchestra patrons will remember Sharon’s stagings of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande in Severance Hall. Register here to view Raphael S. Nash’s 70-minute digital feature until October 29. It’s free.

Support your local principal cello! The Cleveland Orchestra’s Mark Kosower joins other prominent musicians at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival in Stewart Goodyear’s Piano Quartet and Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 1. The performance debuts at 10 pm this evening and will be available here and on demand. Tickets are $25.

MAKE NO SMALL PLANS:

London’s 600-seat Wigmore Hall, which has to be one of the busiest recital halls in the world, has announced that its forthcoming season will feature 2,500 artists from more than 30 countries performing in 500 concerts. 150 of those will be live-streamed — a service that some 7 million viewers enjoyed during the past 18 months. Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

It’s a slow day for mentioning milestones in classical music, but here are two.

On June 3, 1929, German-born inventor Emile Berliner died in New York City of a heart attack at the age of 78. Like many second-wave innovators, Berliner has largely gone unmentioned for his pair of contributions to the classical music recording industry. The first was his development of the circular disk that replaced Edison’s cylinders and made the mass production of recordings possible. To that end, he founded several companies, including Deutsche Grammophon and the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Berliner was also among those responsible for the invention of the microphone. His achievements are on display at the Library of Congress (click here to view), including such non-musical inventions as a loom for mass producing cloth and an early version of the helicopter. Somewhere in between falls his invention of a type of acoustical tile.

The second milestone for which we can thank August 3 is the introduction of the Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80 personal computer through Radio Shack, a model that was snapped up by thousands of early adopters within weeks of its release in 1977 for $600  each (some $2,600 in today’s currency).

Lacking such mod cons as the ability to render lower case letters, the machine eventually became a device for tinkerers, even though until 1982, it outsold the Apple II series five to one. Most importantly, the TRS-80 presaged today’s ubiquitous PCs through which we’ve been notating and streaming music, attending classes on Zoom, and conducting our business affairs throughout the Pandemic. It’s difficult to imagine 1977 without access to that magic box, much less 2021.