by Daniel Hathaway

CELEBRATING LvB’s 250th:

There’s not much happening today except that we’re putting together a mammoth Tuesday email blast for our annual CD issue, thus a short diary for December 15.

We did want to remind everyone that we think Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16 in 1770 — at least he was baptized on the 17th, as most newborns were within a day of their birth. Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács has made sure that a group of colleagues and former students will be first out of the gate to celebrate — he’s organized a marathon of all the composer’s 32 piano sonatas that will begin at 12:01 am on Wednesday and last about 6 hours.

You don’t need to stay up for the party — neither do the performers, who have pre-recorded their sonatas for the occasion. The six-hour event will be available for replay following its debut. Read an Oberlin preview article by Cathy Partlow Strauss for more details.

Before all of that, Oberlin’s Arts and Sciences Orchestra and the faculty Kouzov Duo will also be streaming performances. Check the Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

This date in music history, marks the births and deaths of some famous figures in the popular music world: Stan Kenton (born in 1911), Fats Waller (died in 1943), and Glen Miller (died in 1944).

Otherwise, December 15 is memorable as the date when the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealed the 18th amendment, which had prohibited the sale, manufacture, and importation of alcoholic beverages. We’ll raise a glass to that.

by Daniel Hathaway

A CORNUCOPIA OF ONLINE HOLIDAY EVENTS:

We’ll start with Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights that began last night and runs through December 18. It’s a family affair celebrated at home, which makes it perfect for these socially distanced times. On Sunday at 4:00 pm, the Ariel String Quartet is hosting a Hanukkah Baking Special live from the Cincinnati Conservatory that features Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1, Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 18, No. 2 & Steve Cohen’s A Klezmer Nutcracker, along with family recipes for Viennese Apple Strudel and Chocolate Babka, and a bake-off matching up Lebkuchen and Hanukkah doughnuts.

Northeast Ohio holiday concerts include programs by the Factory Seconds Brass Trio, Cleveland Chamber Choir, Oberlin large ensembles (including the premiere of a violin concerto by Liam Kaplan) and the most recent complete Beethoven piano sonatas recital by Daniel Shapiro hosted by Music From the Western Reserve. And recent Clevelander Buck McDaniel joins tenor Matthew Jones from New York’s Church of St. John’s in the Village for a McDaniel premiere and music by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, and Nico Muhly on Sunday.

Casting a wider net, you can enjoy what Trinity Church, Wall Street advertises as “the best Messiah in New York,” and such groups popular with Northeast Ohio audiences as the Tallis Scholars and Voces8 (performing from London and other European venues). Check out our Concert Listings and Musical America’s Guide to (mostly) Free Streams and the concert world is at the tip of your cursor.

DISPATCHES FROM NORTHEAST OHIO:

Bop Stop manager Gabe Pollack writes that “This week’s ‘At Home Listening Session’ includes a variety six pack of beer and a copy of either Sophie from guitarist Sebastian Albornoz, or After Hours by pianist Jackie Warren. Each Session is $30. Additional CD’s can be purchased at check-out as well. These make great holiday gifts and are a fantastic way to support the local music scene.” Email Gabe to order and schedule your pickup.

Speaking of Jackie Warren, today’s print edition of The New York Times heads up its list of 20 recommended jazz CDs with Christmas in 3D, the latest album featuring the 3D (“Three Divas”) Jazz Trio of Warren, bassist Amy Shook, and drummer Sherrie Maricle. Critic Giovanni Russonello writes,“The latest flaunts the kind of powerful locomotion that drives the DIVA big band, steaming through 10 holiday tunes — Warren’s buoyant improvising right hand leading the day.”

And Jane Berkner, the flutist behind Akrton’s Urban Troubadour roaming concert series, writes that “Since we can’t create live events these days, we’ve been putting up video events each month that include music and various Akron artists. For November, Stephen Aron showed what it’s like to study music at Oberlin during COVID, and we featured John Sokol’s art while he read from his poetry. The holiday video is like an Akron postcard with lots of flute music. It’s fun!” Visit the Urban Troubadour website and scroll down to watch the videos.

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society president Erik Mann notes that Anastasia Sonaranda, its Creative Fusion artist-in-residence, will repeat the survey of traditional music from five Mexican regions she gave last weekend, but in English this time, on Saturday at 7:30 pm. Send an email to register for the Zoom session

Cleveland Opera Theater wants the community to know that it will continue its holiday tradition of presenting Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, but virtually this time, on Wednesday, December 17 at 7:00 pm. Donations support The City Mission.

And stay tuned for next Tuesday’s rundown on various events that will mark Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th Birthday on Wednesday, December 16.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

French composer Hector Berlioz entered the world on December 11, 1803. A seasonally appropriate way to celebrate would be to listen to his Sacred Trilogy, L’Enfance du Christ, for which he wrote the libretto, and intended it to be staged. The quirky and ultimately charming work treats the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, where they suffer antisemetic taunts but find their way into a Jewish household that welcomes them with a wonderful trio for two flutes and harp. Other luminous moments include the “Shepherds’ Farewell” and the concluding chorus where the orchestra drops out, leaving the narrator and a choir of angels to finish the piece a cappella. 

Spotify will provide you with a number of complete performances of the work, but having sung in it, I have a personal preference for the December 13, 1966 performance led by Charles Munch with the Boston Symphony, Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society, and soloists John McCollum, Florence Kopleff, Theodor Uppman, and Donald Gramm. You can still purchase the DVD. Here’s just a taste: the aforementioned “Shepherds’ Farewell.”

Speaking of Boston, in December 1835, Phillips Brooks, Rector of Trinity Church and briefly Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, was born in 1835. He employed the architect H.H. Richardson, the muralist John LaFarge, and the stained glass artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to create an architectural masterpiece in Copley Square. But Brooks is probably best known for authoring the words of O Little Town of Bethlehem for a children’s service in 1868. The tune, known as St. Louis, was written at the last moment by his organist, Louis Redner, who later noted that “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

Live on it has, but with a different tune when the carol crossed the pond to England, where it’s sung to Forest Green, a folk tune collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal in 1906, but also to Wengen, a tune by Henry Walford Davies.

Which tune do you think fits the words best? If your vote goes to St. Louis, you’ll enjoy this setting by Stephen Paulus performed by Painesville Native Tom Trenney and the choir of First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska (who sing with face masks on.)

Back to Cleveland to note the birthday of Russian pianist and composer Victor Babin on December 13, 1908. One-half of the celebrated piano duo Vronsky and Babin, he served as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music for eleven years beginning in 1961.

Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin recorded the two Rachmaninoff two-piano Suites twice. It’s fun to compare their 1938 performances (11 sides of 78 rpm records with side breaks) with the re-do in 1961. How technology had changed!

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB TONIGHT:

Three very interesting Northeast Ohio programs debut this evening around the same time, but thanks to on-demand streaming, you can enjoy them later as you choose.

The Cleveland Orchestra is up first at 7:00 pm, with guest conductor Nicholas McGegan leading a program of Handel, Corelli, J.S. Bach, and Mendelssohn from the harpsichord in the fourth episode of “In Focus” on the Orchestra’s Adella platform. McGegan talked with ClevelandClassical.com’s Mike Telin about the program in a wide-ranging conversation that also touched on the conductor’s love of mystery novels. Did you know that some examples of the genre are based in Cleveland? [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865, an event The Cleveland Orchestra marked in an amusing little 2019 video. “Things got a little crazy as you can see.”

The composer’s symphonies have been played frequently by the ensemble over the years. Here’s a rare performance of the four-movement version of the Fifth from December, 1941 led by Artur Rodzinski (taken from 78 rpm discs with side breaks left intact).

There’s also a recording of a live performance of the Second led by George Szell in May, 1970 in Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan Hall, and Christoph von Dohnányi led a performance of the Fifth in June, 1999 when the Orchestra was in exile at the Allen Theater in Playhouse Square during the renovation of Severance Hall.

More recently, here’s a promotional snippet for a performance of the Second led by Franz Welser-Möst during the Orchestra’s Miami residency in February, 2017.

Finland — which didn’t yet exist as a country when Sibelius was born — celebrates the composer’s legacy each year on December 8 with “A Day of Finnish Music.” Although, rather like Rossini, he stopped composing in mid-life, he has inspired a widespread national educational initiative which has produced a distinguished list of musicians, classical, folk, and popular.

Celebrate Sibelius’ birthday with Fifteen Fun Facts from Classical FM.

Other celebrities blowing out the candles today include composers Manuel Maria Ponce (1882), and Bohuslav Martinu (1890), American singer Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925) and French baritone Gerard Souzay (1918). On a more somber note, the Beatles’ John Lennon was shot and killed on this date in 1980 outside his apartment in New York, shortly after a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. And in American history on this date, Washington crossed the Delaware with his retreating troops in 1776, and Congress declared war on Japan in 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6.

To end on a lighter, non-musical note, American humorist James Thurber was born on December 8, 1894 in Columbus, Ohio. His drawings and writings for The New Yorker include updated versions of such fables as Little Red Riding Hood, and the following, which, like all good humor, has a timeless quality:

INTERESTING READ:

On his ‘Unanswered Question” blog, American cultural critic Joe Horowitz refers his readers to his 8,000-word American Scholar essay about the impact of the pandemic on the arts in the US. Check out his abbreviated readers’ guide here, and follow a link to the entire piece.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC — UNFINISHED BUSINESS:

On December 5, 1791, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who preferred to be called Wolfgang Amadé, died in Vienna after being bedridden for a fortnight with what was officially described as “severe miliary fever,” characterized by a rash that resembles millet seeds.

He left two extended works unfinished — the “Great” Mass in c minor, and the Requiem. Mozart had planned his “Missa Solemnis” for a return visit to his family in Salzburg to introduce his new bride. Constanze sang the et incarnatus movement in a performance of the incomplete work during a mass in October of 1783. There’s much speculation about why Mozart never finished the elaborate double-chorus work, but he did retext the movements and use them for his cantata Davide penitente, K. 469.

A web of intrigue surrounds the Requiem, much of it promoted by Mozart’s widow, who tapped Mozart’s pupil, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to finish the Mass so she could be paid by its commissioner, Count Franz von Walsegg — who may have intended to pass the work off as his own.

Leaving such works unfinished as magnificent ruins has a certain Romantic appeal, but that hasn’t deterred later scholars and composers from tying up their loose ends. In Mozart’s case, later hands have set to work both on the Mass and the Requiem, perhaps none so successfully as those of Robert Levin (pictured above), who is famous for channeling the composer by improvising cadenzas when performing the piano concertos. Read an article from the Juilliard Journal here.

Levin started early, completing the  “Amen” fugue that Mozart had sketched out for the end of the “Lacrimosa” movement, and performing it during his sophomore year at Harvard (I happened to sing in that concert). This weekend, lift a glass to Mozart either by revisiting your favorite performance of Süssmayr’s completion of the Requiem, or by getting to know the piece anew through Levin’s ears. There are several performances available on YouTube, including those by Boston Baroque, and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln. You can also compare five different modern completions of the “Amen” Fugue, including Levin’s.

Other anniversaries to mark this weekend include the birthdays of Ira Gershwin (1896), Dave Brubeck (1920), Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929), Bright Sheng (1955), and Osvaldo Golijov (1960).

THIS WEEKEND  ON THE WEB:

See our Concert Listings for details about webcasts by Voces8 from London, organist Nicholas Haigh from St. Thomas Fifth Avenue in New York, the Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus, Kent State New Music Ensemble, Oberlin large ensembles, Yefim Bronfman from The Gilmore, Alkemie, Kent State Bands, the Baldwin Wallace Holiday concerts, and CityMusic Cleveland’s Baroque Reflections.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1976, England and the classical music world lost one of its greatest composers when Benjamin Britten died in Aldeburgh, Sussex, at the home he shared with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and in the village where he and Pears had established the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 1948.

Britten’s operas are at the center of his compositional output (the MET opera will broadcast an archive performance of Peter Grimes on December 9), but he wrote in nearly every genre. He sat for an interview with the CBC in 1968 where he talked about his career as a composer.

As Christmas approaches, next Wednesday noon, Trinity Cathedral will broadcast an archive Brownbag performance of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Written on the U-boat-infested high seas as he and Pears were returning from a sojourn in America during World War II, the cycle for treble voices and harp perfectly captures the spirit of its medieval texts.

Another inspired setting of Medieval poetry is his 1930 A Hymn to the Virgin for chorus and semi-chorus, sung here by Quire Cleveland.

Recent Cleveland performances of Britten’s chamber music include his String Quartet No. 2, performed at ChamberFest Cleveland in 2013, and his Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, recorded on the Severance Hall stage this summer by physically-distanced Cleveland Orchestra musicians.

Britten’s renown as a composer is reflected in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Listen here to a performance by the Baltic Sea Youth Philharmonic.

And on this date in 1993, iconoclastic American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa died of cancer at the age of 52 in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging career is too complex to sum up in a few sentences, but Zappa equally impressed amphitheaters-full of rock fans and symphony orchestra conductors like Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, and Pierre Boulez with his compositional prowess and guitar playing.

Listen to a performance of Zappa’s Perfect Stranger by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Matthias Pintscher, and to a France Culture retrospective, Zappa et la musique du XXe siècle.

And this is National Cookie Day in the United States, invented in 1976 by Sesame Street (and you know who) but “officially” moved to December 4 by proclamation of the San Francisco Blue Chip Cookie Company’s Matt Nader.

How to celebrate the ubiquitous cookie? (The name has been adopted into American English from the Dutch term koekie, but spurned by the Brits, who call them biscuits). Bake them, buy them, give them, eat them. Bakers might like to try Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for “World Peace Cookies.” If anything works, these might.

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:

Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church offers an Advent Procession with Carols, Case Western streams the Case Symphony Orchestra from the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the University of Akron features its flute choir, Kent State broadcasts its Jazz Ensembles, and the Western Reserve Chorale reaches into its archives for the first of three 30-minute Friday evening programs. Details in the Concert Listings.

by Daniel Hathaway

McGEGAN RESCHEDULED:

The Cleveland Orchestra’s fourth In Focus episode featuring guest conductor Nicholas McGegan, previously announced for today, has been rescheduled for viewing beginning on Thursday, December 10. Meanwhile, read Mike Telin’s interview with the always charming McGegan here. The wide-ranging conversation touches on such subjects as “Bach, Mendelssohn, Masks, and Mysteries.”

CHRISTMAS CHANGES:

Since radio stations are already dipping toes into Christmas music, the time is ripe to note some changes to long-established traditions this season due to the pandemic.

We read in an article in England’s The Guardian that the annual King’s College Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols will be presented as usual on Christmas Eve, but to an empty chapel for the first time since the service began in 1928. “We broadcast all the way through the second world war,” said Dean Stephen Cherry. “The location wasn’t disclosed but it was an open secret that it was King’s, partly because people said they could hear paper flapping in the windows where the glass had been removed [in case of bomb damage].”

The article includes updates on John Ruttter’s annual Royal Albert Hall Christmas Concerts (moved to St. Alban’ Cathedral, but no audience permitted) and changes to Christmas musical traditions at London’s Church of St. Martin in the Fields.

On the local scene, we’ve already reported that The Cleveland Orchestra has cancelled its popular Christmas Concerts at Severance Hall, and that Apollo’s Fire’s Christmas On Sugarloaf Mountain concerts will be replaced with a video recorded at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2018.

Summit Choral Society’s Candlelight Concerts will also go digital, and the Western Reserve Chorale is turning to its archives for three Friday evening winter concerts.

And Trinity Cathedral’s well-attended annual Messiah Sing will be replaced in these days of physically distancing with excerpts from that Brownbag Concert event from previous years.

Speaking of Messiah Sings, Toronto’s period instrument orchestra Tafelmusik has announced the rebroadcast of its Sing-Along Messiah, captured live at Koerner Hall in 2010, when “Mr. Handel himself” conducted the Orchestra, soloists, and “an audience of 1000 enthusiastic ‘sing-alongers.’ It airs on YouTube during a watch party on December 17 and remains available through December 26.

NEW MUSIC FOR VOICE AND PERIOD INSTRUMENTS:

Cornetto virtuoso Bruce Dickey writes from Bologna that he has commissioned two new works for a new CD, On the Breath of Angels, featuring his Breathtaking Collective and soprano Hana Blažíková, and due for release in January. “We have made a video of one of them, a gorgeous piece by Julian Wachner on a poem from 1906 by Rupert Brooke.” Wachner, who directs the music at Trinity Church, Wall Street in New York, guest conducted Apollo’s Fire in cantatas from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in December, 2019.

MEET DAME ETHEL SMYTH:

Another current article in The Guardian introduces a composer almost unknown to American audiences. “Expanding the classical canon brings us incredible music and extraordinary stories, not least that of Ethel Smyth, whose compositions and pioneering energy filled England in the interwar years.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Italian luthier Nicola Amati was born on this date in 1596 in Cremona. The most prominent member of the Amati dynasty, Nicola is said to have greatly influenced the work of Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, although his cellos and violins appear more frequently in museum exhibits than in the hands of today’s artists.

Austrian composer Anton Webern was born on December 3, 1883 in Vienna, and died in Mittersill in 1945. An American soldier accidentally shot him when he lit up a cigar outside his daughter’s house during the postwar Allied occupation. Webern’s life and compositional history are impossible to describe in a few paragraphs. Suffice to say that he came onto the scene writing late-Romantic music like the Langsamer Satz (played here in a follow-the-score performance by the Emerson String Quartet), and ended up crafting exquisite, pointillistic works like his Five Pieces (played here by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in April, 2018 — total performance time: six minutes). Cleveland’s BlueWater Chamber Orchestra played the Langsamer Satz during its recent collaboration with Verb Ballets.

And on this date in 1914, American composer Irving Fine was born in Boston. We marked the anniversary of his death in the August 22-23 diary last summer: “His music hasn’t been played often outside the Boston area, but his Serious Song, Lament for String Orchestra, composed in 1955, seems appropriate for the anniversary of his premature leave-taking. Listen here to a recording by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony from 1962.

Two more historical events pop up on December 3. That was the date in 1833 when Oberlin College opened its doors for classes, making the Ohio school the first “coed” institution of higher learning in the United States. And on this date in 1992 — for better or for worse — an engineer for the Sema Group used his personal computer to send the first-ever text message to a colleague over the Vodafone network.

by Daniel Hathaway

REMEMBRANCES ON DECEMBER 1:

As we turn the calendar page to the last month of 2020, my inbox has replaced notices about Black Friday deals with reminders of what we might have missed buying on Cyber Monday, and added Giving Tuesday appeals (a fine opportunity to support your favorite non-profit organizations). But in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic, we shouldn’t forget the continuing plague that led to the establishment of World AIDS Day, observed on December 1 each year since 1989.

In May, 2019, the New York Philharmonic dedicated an end-of-season concert to John Corigliano’s First Symphony, his 1990 tribute to those who lost their lives to AIDS. (Watch a Nashville Symphony video where the composer talks about the work, and hear a full performance by the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim).

In a New York Times article, Joshua Barone notes that a “Nightcap” Series performance at the same time remembered five young composers whose voices were silenced before they reached their full musical maturity. Corigliano, who arranged the program of music by  Robert Savage, Deolus W. Husband Jr., Robert Chesley, Kevin Oldham, and Chris DeBlasio, said, “The Philharmonic is playing my First Symphony, but it is not a complete evening until you hear the music of the young composers who didn’t make it. The real people who died need a voice, too.”

One Northeast Ohio-raised composer who didn’t make it was Calvin Hampton, who grew up in Ravenna, graduated from Oberlin in 1960, and enjoyed a distinguished career on the New York church music scene before his untimely death in 1984.  Known for his Friday midnight organ concerts at the Parish of Calvary, Holy Communion and St. George’s in Manhattan and for his imaginative hymn tunes, Hampton was “a prolific and eclectic composer, utilizing such diverse elements as rock, gospel hymns, synthesizers and quarter tones in his works. In 1977, the New York Philharmonic performed the local premiere of Mr. Hampton’s Concerto for Saxophone Quartet, Strings and Percussion” (Times obituary).

Listen to Hampton’s Alexander Variations for two organs as performed by Brian Harlow and Christopher Jennings at the 2015 Mid-Atlantic Convention of the American Guild of Organists at Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh.

And did you know that December 1 is Rosa Parks Day in Ohio? (I didn’t). The unassuming seamstress was arrested in 1955 for breaking Montgomery Alabama’s segregation laws, leading to a bus boycott that rocketed her to fame as a civil rights icon. Parks talked about that event at the City Club of Cleveland thirty years later on March 8, 1985. Watch here.

But wait — there’s more. On this date in 1707, British organist and composer Jeremiah Clarke took his own life in London at the age of 33, perhaps as the consequence of an unhappy love affair. Countless brides in happier relationships have marched down the aisle to his Prince of Denmark March (often titled Trumpet Voluntary and mis-attributed to Henry Purcell).

And among today’s death anniversaries, British-Irish composer E.J. Moeran died in Kenmare, County Derry, Ireland in 1950, as did American choreographer Alvin Ailey in New York in 1989 at 58, and French classical and jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli in Paris in 1997 at 89.

We’ll just suggest one work or performance to honor each of those figures. For Moeran, that would be his “somber and Sibelian” Symphony in g (1934-1937), performed live by the Ulster Orchestra in 2000. For Ailey, his frequently performed ballet Revelations, preceded by Chroma, Grace, and Takademe in a full-length program by his American Dance Theatre from Lincoln Center. And for Grappelli, his performance at the Montréal Jazz Festival in 1984 with Martin Taylor.

TUESDAY MUSICAL SCHOLARSHIPS

Akron’s Tuesday Musical Association announces that applications are being accepted beginning today for its 65th annual Scholarship Competition, which offers $26,000 in awards to university students embarking on careers as music educators and performers. This year’s competition will be conducted entirely online. Visit the TMA website for application details.

INTERESTING READS:

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross considers the many different ways that orchestras are reacting to the challenges of the pandemic. Read What Does It Mean to “Reimagine” an Orchestra Season here.

And British pianist and polymath Stephen Hough hopes that the ubiquitous pre-COVID formula of two hour performances interrupted by an intermission (“interval” in England) won’t survive the pandemic. Read Don’t go breaking my art: it’s time to axe the mood-ruining, bar-scrambling interval in The Guardian here.