by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY ONLINE:

The new music ensemble No Exit once again joins forces with Zeitgeist, its frequent collaborators from Minnesota’s Twin Cities. The agenda is mostly solo works — the pandemic is still calling the shots — but the final piece, Coincident Episode 4 by Minnesota composer Scott Miller, brings everybody into the picture. Read a preview here.

Usually held during a packed weekend at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival marks its 21st season with a series of videos presented each Friday evening from May 21 through June 6. Tonight’s episode features lutenist Nigel North and Cleveland-based guitarist Robert Gruca (read previews here and here). The broadcasts are free.

Also online today, the Academy of Ancient Music traces the development of the Harmonie or Wind Band, Opera Saratoga celebrates Langston Hughes, and the University of Chicago presents the contemporary vocal ensemble Quince in David Lang’s love fail.

Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

We’ll keep the list short today because we should really be abandoning our screens and enjoying the premature, summery weather!

So we’ll raise a virtual glass to celebrate two European soloists born on the 21st of May: French trumpeter Maurice André who greeted the world in 1933 in Alès in the Cévennes, and Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger, who followed him six years later in Langenthal.

André espoused the piccolo trumpet, a small, modern instrument invented to allow players to negotiate the high trumpet parts favored by Baroque composers. Since then, the period instrument movement has spawned players who have mastered the art of playing clarino parts — like Steven Marquardt, who recently joined Amanda Forsythe and Apollo’s Fire in a wonderful performance of J.S. Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott.

Watch a video of André performing Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s concerto in E-flat in Madrid in 1986.

For listeners who have grown up with the French school of oboe playing represented locally by the late John Mack of The Cleveland Orchestra, Holliger’s European sound takes a bit of getting used to. Watch a video here where he performs several works with the Swiss Chamber Soloists in Geneva in 2021.

Holliger was also a composer who studied with Pierre Boulez. Listen along with the scrolling score to his Studie II from 1981 performed by Tamás Bartók. Judging from the comments, both the piece and Bartók’s playing made a strong impression.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S CONCERTS

For a change. each of the two concerts on today’s calendar can be attended in-person, following whatever protocols are being observed in their venues.

At noon, harpist Juan Riveros plays French music by Gabriel Fauré, André Caplet, and Jean-Michel Damase on the Tuesday noon series at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle.

At 7:30 this evening, violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong finally have the opportunity to complete their three-concert Beethoven Sonata series with a recital on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series in St. Paschal Baylon Church in Highland Heights. The final program includes the second and third Sonatas of Op. 30, and the much later Sonata in G, Op. 96. You’ll need tickets to attend in person, but a live stream is free. Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BITS:

The Lumière Quartet has won the Silver Medal in the Junior Division of the Fischoff Competition. The ensemble — Célina Béthoux, Moonhee Kim, Henry Rogers, and Ania Lewis — has been coached at the Cleveland Institute of Music by Si-Yan Li and Jessica Lee.

Naxos will release a new CD of Margaret Brouwer’s chamber music later this year. The recording will include her Rhapsodic Sonata, Declaration, The Lake, I CRY, and All Lines are Still Busy, performed by mezzo-soprano Sarah Beaty, tenor Brian Skoog, violinist Mari Sato, violist Eliesha Nelson, and pianist Shuai Wang.

Brouwer writes, “We recorded most of the music in CIM’s Kulas Hall in early January. Then in February, in true pandemic fashion, the mezzo-soprano recorded the vocal line of Declaration remotely in Los Angeles while I produced the recording session on FaceTime from Cleveland! This technology worked great and we were able to capture a beautiful recording even though the musicians were in different states.”

INTERESTING READS:

Sunday’s New York Times featured an article by David Allen about conductor Artur Rodzinski, who led The Cleveland Orchestra from 1933 to 1943. Read The Conductor Who Whipped American Orchestras Into Shape here. (“Possessing an ‘enormous’ vocabulary of Polish profanity that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with a revolver in his pocket.”)

And today’s Times prints Anthony Tommasini’s review of the MET Opera’s first live concerts since the shutdown. “Members of the Met’s orchestra and chorus, conducted by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and joined by four soloists, twice presented a 45-minute program for an audience of 150.

“The location wasn’t the company’s home at Lincoln Center; instead, the concerts were held at the Knockdown Center, a door factory turned rough-hewed art and performance space in Queens.”

Artist managers act as liaisons between performing artists and their ultimate audiences. Billboard magazine takes a look at IMG Artists and Opus 3, who are redefining the landscape since Columbia Artists suddenly folded in 2020. Read Pulling Back the Curtain on Alexander Shustorovich, Classical Music’s International Man of Mystery here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Let us now praise famous musicians who arrived or departed on May 18.

First, two German composers. Johann Froberger was born on this date in 1616 in Stuttgart, and Georg Böhm took his leave in Luneburg in 1733.

When not in the service of the noble families of Stuttgart, Froberger traveled throughout Europe, establishing himself as a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist, and was the inventor of the dance suite that served the formal needs of composers well into the 18th century. He also pushed the Arca Musarithmica, an early A.I. device that assisted in the creation of music.

Watch French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau perform Suites by Froberger — and by Louis Couperin, whose music he influenced — in a live broadcast from Salle Cortot in Paris in 2020, and read more about the Arca Musarithmica here.

Böhm was working for the French-influenced court in Luneburg when Johann Sebastian Bach was a teenaged chorister at a church down the street. Enjoy two of Böhm’s engaging works played on the Schnitger organ in Groningen by Wim van Beek. We’ll start with his multi-sectioned Präludium in g, then move on to his variations on Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele — the next-to-last variation introduces some stunning blue notes into the harmony.

Two basses come up in today’s list: the birth of Ezio Pinza in Rome in 1892, and the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 2012. We featured the latter in an earlier Diary, so we’ll move on to Pinza, who, despite never having learned to read music, enjoyed a long and distinguished opera career beginning in Milan under Toscanini and continuing at the MET in New York.

Watch some rare video of Pinza rehearsing for a Bell Telephone Hour program in 1947, and recall his second career on Broadway in clips from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, where he appeared opposite Mary Martin as the French planter Emil de Becque.

German composer and conductor Gustav Mahler died in Vienna on this date in 1911, leaving nine-and-a-half monumental symphonies that were performed during his lifetime, but languished until their revival later in the century, notably by Leonard Bernstein. The works suited the conductor’s extroverted personality, as can be witnessed in this 1973 performance of No. 2, the “Resurrection” Symphony, at Ely Cathedral. (In 2018, the film of the performance was screened at Ely, preceded by interviews). I had the unforgettable experience of singing the work with Bernstein and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in the early 70s.

The roots of Mahler’s music are explored by Bernstein’s spiritual successor, Michael Tilson Thomas, in two episodes of Keeping Score with the San Francisco Symphony.

Finally, on this date in 1975, American composer and arranger Leroy Anderson died in Woodbury, Connecticut. Long associated with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, the Harvard grad was famous for such light classics as Bugler’s Holiday, played here by Cleveland Orchestra principal trumpet Michael Sachs with the UCLA Wind Ensemble and two of his young colleagues. Occasionally, Anderson aspired to more ambitious works. Watch a rare performance of his Piano Concerto here.

by Daniel Hathaway

ONLINE AND IN-PERSON TODAY:

Cleveland Chamber Choir, sidelined by the pandemic, has found ways to rehearse together and record. On Saturday, Scott MacPherson leads them in “Madrigals for All Times,” a pre-recorded program that contrasts different settings of the same poetry composed many years apart.

Although classes have ended for the year at the Oberlin Conservatory, there are still performances to be aired on its Stage Left platform, including Saturday’s large ensembles’ performances of works by David Clay Mettens, Eleanor Alberga, and Jennifer Higdon.

Speaking of Oberlin, on Sunday, alumna organist Katelyn Emerson returns to the area for a progressive recital at two churches in Canton. And speaking of organs, the Stambaugh Organ Series is back with a recital by Joshua Stafford that can be attended in person or watched online on the Stambaugh Auditorium app.

North Coast Winds plays a Sunday concert at Lakeside Chautauqua under the auspices of the Firelands Symphony, including an arrangement of Dvořák’s Wind Serenade that pares the performing forces down from 15 to 5.

And baritone Allan Mosher and pianist Cicilia Yudha wrap up the weekend with a Youngstown State faculty recital pre-recorded at the McDonough Museum. There’s only one piece on the program: Schubert’s Winter Journey.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

The list of anniversaries is very short for May 15 and 16. Venetian printer Ottaviano de’ Petrucci published his Odhecaton A — the first of three volumes, with B and C to follow — on May 15, 1501, marking the first occasion when a collection of polyphonic music (chansons in this case) was printed from moveable type, making Petrucci the Gutenberg of Renaissance music. Although his process required passing each page through his press three times, his accomplishment was still a milestone in the dissemination of printed music. It’s not for nothing that the wonderful online library of public domain music in pdf format has been named the Petrucci Music Library.

Here’s Josquin des Prez’ chanson, Adieu mes amours in Petrucci’s elegant printing of the first Odhecaton volume. It’s laid out in typical Renaissance fashion with each of the four voices printed in a separate quadrant rather than on top of each other in score (as the chanson appears below). Watch a performance here by Fuse di Venere.

The great Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi was born either on May 15 or 14, 1567 in Cremona, later serving the household of the Duke of Mantua and the “most serene republic” of Venice, and launching the early Baroque period with a flurry of inventive works including opera, church music, and madrigals.

Jeannette Sorrell and Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, have programmed a lot of Monteverdi’s music in various halls in Northeast Ohio as well as across the U.S. and Europe. Here are a few videos from their archives.

We’ll start with a collection of secular works from the 2020 program, “L’AMORE — Love and Rejection in Old Italy,” performed at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights. (It begins with a piece by Barbara Strozzi, then goes on to selections from L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and the Scherzi musicali. Watch here.

One of the composer’s monuments is the Vespers of 1610, written for the Mantuan court, which has required some reassembly, having been published as individual pieces. One of the motets editors haven’t quite known what to do with but has to be included because of its powerful declamation, Duo Seraphim was sung by tenors Jacob Perry, Nathan Hodgson and Nathan Dougherty at First Baptist Church in October, 2019. Watch here.

Like all Vespers services, Monteverdi’s setting concludes with the Magnificat. His bravura setting covers most of the stylistic bases available to the composer, including wonderful echo effects (I heard a performance at the Edinburgh Festival where the conductor had the echo tenor sing his part from the Gents’ just off the balcony of the performing venue — a perfect location.) Apollo’s Fire performs it here in Trinity Cathedral in November of 2014.

Finally, here’s an exquisite performance by tenor Karim Sulayman of Monteverdi’s Si dolce è il tormento (How sweet the torment) from an Apollo’s Fire “Blues Café 1610” performance on Valentine’s Day of 2015 at the Music Box Supper Club in Cleveland.

The only other anniversary of note is the birth of American composer Richard Wilson in Cleveland on May 16, 1941. Having imbibed concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell at an early age, he went on to study at Harvard and Rutgers, then taught at Vassar from 1966 to 2016. Wilson was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1988.

He has a long list of compositions in every genre, so it’s worth wondering why we don’t hear more of his music in his hometown. For a taste of Wilson’s style, read about his “shaggy dog” opera, Aethelred The Unready, here, then watch a performance conducted by the composer and directed by Drew Minter here.

by Daniel Hathaway

IN THE NEWS:

Oberlin Conservatory honored long-serving faculty members Michael and Marlene Rosen, Professors of Percussion and Voice, respectively, with a virtual retirement party last Tuesday. The online party culminated in an Oberlin Stage Left performance by the Oberlin Percussion Group conducted by Mike Rosen, who has taught at the school for 50 years (watch the performance here — scroll down to “New Release”). For a virtual celebratory toast, in keeping with newly-minted pandemic traditions, the Rosens provided a recipe for French 75, their favorite cocktail, in both original and non-alcoholic versions. Clink!

Apollo’s Fire has added outdoor concerts and touring dates to its summer schedule. Local concert sets include “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (May 30 & 31), and “Bach, Vivaldi & Friends” (July 10, 13 & 14). The Orchestra will be on the road for summer festival concerts at Tanglewood (July 16), Chautauqua (July 27), Caramoor (August 1), and Ravinia (August 3). Details here.

ORCHESTRAS RETURN:

The Canton Symphony returns to the stage of Umstattd Performing Arts Hall on Sunday, May 23 after a hiatus of 15 months for an in-person performance of Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings and Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 in A. Details here.

And BlueWater Chamber Orchestra is recording a concert at the Maltz Performing Arts Center to be broadcast online on Thursday, May 27 at 7:30 pm. Daniel Meyer conducts “Honor, Hope and Gratitude: Tender reflections on a challenging year,” with guest pianist Angela Cheng. Complete information here.

COMPETITION NEWS AND AWARDS:

Cooper International Piano Competition veteran and ChamberFest young artist Evren Ozel has advanced to the finals in the Concert Artists Guild competition. Winners will be announced on June 8.

Two local groups, the Eiless Quartet (Senior Division) and the Lumiére Quartet (Junior Division) are scheduled to perform in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, to be live streamed on the Violin Channel from May 14-16.

And Cleveland Orchestra Associate Conductor Vinay Parameswaren is among the fifteen recipients of career assistance awards from the Solti Foundation.

ONLINE AND IN-PERSON TODAY:

Check in for the first day of the 48th annual Fischoff Chamber Music competition, for Lunchtime With the Cleveland Orchestra (Uri Caine’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations), WCPN’s Applause Performances featuring Cleveland bossa nova king Moises Borges and percussion master Dylan Moffitt, Klaus Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Imani Winds with the Catalyst Quartet, and register for an in-person concert by CityMusic Cleveland at St. Stanislaus. Details here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Before lighting the birthday candles for historical figures born on May 14, let’s observe the passing of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel in 1847 at the too-young age of 43. That Felix Mendelssohn’s sister could hold her own is demonstrated in her piano cycle Das Jahr (played here on a doctoral recital in Montréal by Laurence Manning), and — all too appropriate during a pandemic — her “CholeraMusik” (Oratorium nach Bildung der Bibel), performed here by Cappella Clausura.

On to happier things, German conductor Otto Klemperer was born on this date in 1885 in Breslau, and forced to leave his post at the Hamburg Opera in 1915 after a scandal involving a recently married soprano. In popular culture, his son Werner probably eclipsed his fame as the actor who played the bumbling Colonel Klink in the CBS television series Hogan’s Heroes. But back to the concert world, here’s Otto Klemperer’s take on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the New Philharmonia Orchestra.

The life and career of American composer Lou Harrison, born on this date  in 1917 in Portland, Oregon, is summarized in a documentary that includes interviews with John Cage and Virgil Thomson. For a taste of Harrison’s lively music, watch a performance here of his Concerto for Organ, Percussion, and Strings at Trinity Wall Street in April of 2017 by organist Chelsea Chen and Rutgers Percussion conducted by Patrick Gardner, during the Lou Harrison Centennial Festival.

And Cuban-American composer Tania León, born in Havana in 1943, is credited with introducing Afro-Cuban percussion instruments into symphonic works. Her five-movement Ritmicas is a fine example. The performance was organized by the Chicago Center For Contemporary Composition.