By Daniel Hathaway

A CHANGE IN OUR NEWSLETTER SCHEDULE:

Beginning this week, our weekly newsletter will be emailed to subscribers at 5:00 pm on Wednesdays. This change will give the editors a bit more time to prepare the weekly Concert Listings and for our staff to write and copyedit articles before posting. Because details of the classical music scene can change so quickly these days, we recommend that you check the website frequently for new and updated information.

DALLAS INVITES THE MET ORCHESTRA:

Fabbio Luisi, who served as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera before taking the helm at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (photo above), has invited some 50 of his former colleagues to Texas to join the DSO in two benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony on April 30 and May 1.

The MET Orchestra has been furloughed without pay since the house closed its doors on March 12, 2020, although recent negotiations with general manager Peter Gelb have yielded a plan for partial salary restoration. On their Facebook page, the MET musicians wrote, “We cannot overstate the impact this unprecedented collaboration will have on our members, both financially and artistically, after this long year of cultural famine.” Read more in New York Times articles here and here.

MIGNARDA RELEASES NEW ALBUM:

The voice and lute duo of Donna Stewart and Ron Andrico, who perform as Mignarda, announce the release of their 14th CD on April 10.

“Unquiet Thoughts presents a selection of rarities and perennial favorites by John Dowland (1563 – 1626) and a few of his contemporaries, concentrating on songs with exquisite poetical texts by some of the best poets of the Elizabethan age. It is no accident that we chose the very first song from Dowland’s First Booke as the title of our album, as the eloquent term so appropriately describes a genre that pairs an intimate voice with the most personal of instruments to express the secrets of the soul. Unquiet Thoughts is also the title of our blog (soon to be published in book form), which since 2010 has been a platform that offers our insights and experience of music for voice and lute and its relevance in the modern era.”

More details here.

EVENTS ON TODAY’S CALENDAR:

Two online events look forward to Baldwin Wallace’s upcoming virtual Bach Festival. Director Dirk Garner speaks to recent Conservatory alumni and Festival Choir members in this Tuesday’s edition of BACHCAST, and half a dozen young scholars discuss the projects they’re pursuing through the Riemenschneider Bach Institute.

Today’s breakfast-time stream from London’s Wigmore Hall (still available at lunchtime, tea time, and suppertime) features Christian Wolff’s setting of Susan Griffin’s text about Underground Railway figure Harriet Tubman, while the New York Festival of Song features works written during the pandemic. Performers include Oberlin alum Joshua Blue.

Russian piano wizard Daniil Trifonov will be featured in works by Debussy, Prokofiev, and Brahms he recorded in January for New York’s 92nd St. Y, and the Baltimore Symphony showcases some of its soloists in BSO Session—Spotlight.

And organist Paul Jacobs, who soloed with The Cleveland Orchestra in last week’s Focus 8 performance of the Poulenc Organ Concerto (when he also gave a tour of Severance Hall’s E.M. Skinner instrument), pops up this evening in a concert from the University of Minnesota featuring music by J.S. Bach and Handel.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Two very different musicians to remember on this 13th day of April, when French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut died in 1377 in Reims, and Polish American pianist and avant-garde composer Frederic Rzewski was born in 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Machaut, whose musical creations helped define the Ars nova movement of the eventful fourteenth century, was equally active as the author of some 400 poems in the courtly love tradition. His Messe de Nostre Dame may have been the first cyclical setting of the Roman Catholic mass by a single composer. Listen here to a performance by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois in which other music appropriate to the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is interleaved.

Just in time for his obsequies, Cleveland’s Les Délices has joined Boston’s Blue Heron to produce Machaut’s Lay of the Fountain. Read Mike Telin’s article here and watch the hour-long program here until April 19.

Rzewski had a traditional academic education at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, studying with Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. Then he sojourned in Italy, where his career was influenced by Luigi Dallapiccolo and he was introduced to electronic music and improvisation.

Famous for politically-charged works, one of Rzewski’s most famous works is The People United Will Never Be Defeated! — 36 variations on Chilean leftist song meant to be a companion piece to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Conrad Tao plays it here at the 2020 Modern Music Festival. (While listening, think of editor Nicholas Slonimsky’s comment in Baker’s Dictionary: 

[Rzewski] is furthermore a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”

By Daniel Hathaway

CONCERTS THIS WEEKEND:

If the current trends continue, we’ll be posting an increasing number of in-person events in the Concert Listings. There are two on Sunday: CityMusic Cleveland at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus at 3:00 pm, and French chamber music on the Sacred Heart Concert Series in Oberlin (pictured) at 5:00 pm.

Online only events on Saturday include NPR’s Amplify with Lara Downes, Oberlin Conservatory Large Ensembles, and the JACK Quartet with Shai Wosner.

On Sunday, there’s the New World Symphony with Matthias Pintscher and pianist Inon Bartanan, the CIM New Music Ensemble, Kent’s Black Squirrel Winds on Hudson’s Music from the Western Reserve series, violinist Jennifer Koh, and Chanticleer.

See our Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

There are only birthdates to honor this weekend. For April 10, that includes French jazz pianist and composer Claude Bolling (1930, in Cannes), and Uzbek pianist Yefim Bronfman (1958 in Tashkent).

For April 11, it’s a longer list: French composer Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682 in Avignon), Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (in 1866 in Empoli, near Florence), American composer, conductor, organist, and music critic Harvey B. Gaul (1881, in New York), Czech conductor Karel Ancerl (1908 in Tucapy), and Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916 in Buenos Aires).

We’ll concentrate on Ginastera, the most prominent composer on the list, who like many Porteños (denizens of Buenos Aires) was of mixed Spanish and Italian ancestry — his father was Catalan, his mother Italian. He spent most of his career in Argentina, with brief sojourns in the U.S. (the first in 1945-47 to study with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood) before moving to Europe in 1970. (Photo: Ginastera with his wife, Argentine cellist Aurora Natola, and Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.)

Ginastera’s compositions incorporated varying elements of traditional Argentine music in the course of his career, though those influences became more abstract over the decades.

Cleveland Orchestra principal cello Mark Kosower recorded the First Cello Concerto with his former orchestra, Germany’s Bamberg Symphony (follow along with the score), and played the Second Concerto with Cleveland in October of 2018 (here’s a brief excerpt from a Severance Hall  rehearsal with guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno).

In other Cleveland Orchestra performances, George Szell led Pampeana No. 3 in a live concert in November, 1956, and Louis Lane conducted the Variaciones Concertantes in a live radio broadcast in 1969.

More recently, Oberlin Harp Professor Yolanda Kondonassis recorded the Ginastera Harp Concerto on the Oberlin Music CD Ginastera: One Hundred. Her performance of the work with Raphael Jiménez and the Oberlin Orchestra was also featured in the inaugural edition of Oberlin Stage Left, where she talks about the piece with Conservatory Dean William Quillen.

By Daniel Hathaway

UPDATES FROM CLEVELAND CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY & APOLLO’S FIRE:

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society announced today that the last three performances of its season will be presented live at St. Paschal Baylon in Highland Heights, where social distancing protocols will be followed and face masks required. Free livestream access will be announced when information becomes available. Performances include violinist Alexi Kenney and pianist Renana Gutman on April 27, the Junction Trio on May 11, and the last of three programs of Beethoven sonatas by violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong on May 18. Check the CCMS website for ticketing details.

Apollo’s Fire has added a fifth performance to its all-Bach season finale on Wednesday, April 21 at 7:30 pm at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. Details here.

STREAMING ONLINE TODAY:

Former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor James Gaffigan, who also led CityMusic Cleveland, guest conducts the Orchestra of Berlin’s Comic Opera today at 2:00 pm, but you can hear the performances of Webern’s Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30, Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Cello & Winds with soloist Felik Nickel, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 on-demand through April 15.

Ilya Kaler leads the CIM Orchestra in Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a & Herbert’s Serenade for String Orchestra tonight at 7.

And at 7:30pm — from the Wellspring Theater in Kalamazoo — the Aaron Diehl Trio plays works in the early jazz tradition courtesy of The Gilmore.

Details in our Concert Listings.

AN INTERESTING READ:

The New York Times’ obituary for Lois Kirschenbaum, who died on March 27, at the age of 88  tells the extraordinary story of one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most loyal followers. “In New York opera circles, an autograph request from her, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said, was considered ‘a special type of approval.’” Read about “the Ultimate Opera Superfan” here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Three memorable dates in Black American classical music history appear on today’s calendar: the birth of composer Florence Beatrice Price in 1887, the birth of bass and actor Paul Robeson in 1898, and Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, that drew a crowd of 75,000. The performance (pictured) protested the decision of the Daughters of the American Revolution to prevent the contralto from performing at the DAR’s Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.

Having been neglected for decades, the music of Florence Price is now appearing on concert programs everywhere. We devoted much of the Diary on June 3, 2020 to Price on the anniversary of her death, and Lilyana D’Amato wrote about her in our Legacy of Black Musicians series on July 29, 2020. As more and more of her music is being re-engraved and re-issued, programmers will want to keep up with the progress of that project by visiting the Wisemusic catalog here.

Robeson had an eventful career that included venturing into the troubled political waters of mid-20th century America, where he fought against facism but got close enough to the communist party to be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. His life is summarized in the documentary Here I Stand, and a sample of his vocal artistry is available in this 1936, second version of Old Man River (note both versions of the lyrics in the notes).

And Marian Anderson, the first Black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, thrilled a huge audience on Easter Day, April 9, 1939 with this performance, accompanied by Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen. The occasion is treated at somewhat greater length in this short documentary, and the press had much to say about the incident.

The Philadelphia Tribune wrote, “A group of tottering old ladies, who don’t know the difference between patriotism and putridism, have compelled the gracious First Lady to apologize for their national rudeness.” The Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote, “In these days of racial intolerance so crudely expressed in the Third Reich, an action such as the D.A.R.’s ban … seems all the more deplorable.” — Wikipedia article on Marian Anderson

Other April  9 milestones to note in passing: the birth of impresario Sol Hurok (Russia, 1888), of conductor Antal Dorati (Hungary, 1906), and New York Pro Musica founder Noah Greenberg (USA, 1919), and the death of post-Romantic composer Siegfried Karg-Elert (Leipzig, 1933), who gave a much-anticipated but disastrous organ recital at the Cleveland Museum of Art shortly before his demise. We’ll catch them the next time around.

By Mike Telin 

STREAMING ON THE WEB TODAY:

At 7:00 pm The Cleveland Orchestra debuts “Visions & Impressions,” Episode 8 of the In Focus series. Franz Welser-Möst leads performances of Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, Opus 22a (15 movements for piano arranged by Rudolf Barshai for string orchestra) and Paul Jacobs is the soloist in Poulenc’s Organ Concerto (for organ, strings, and timpani). Filmed March 18-20 at Severance Hall, the playlist also features principal flute Joshua Smith in Takemitsu’s Air and Debussy’s Syrinx. Click  here for ticket information.

Also at 7:00 pm, it’s “Tuning In” presented by the Local 4 Music Fund. The ensemble “Nous,” features Howie Smith (sax), Theron Brown (keyboards), and Aidan Plank (bass) in a program to be announced. The Bop Stop event is free but donations are welcome. Click here at start time.

A half-hour later at 7:30 pm, Les Délices debuts Machaut’s Lai of the Fountain. Guillaume de Machaut’s flowing melodies become brilliant rainbows when refracted into three-voice canons in this 14th century piece. The program also features works by Johannes Ciconia and others to aid your exploration of the Medieval garden’s subtle beauty in this collaboration with Boston’s Blue Heron. There’s also a pre-concert conversation with Machaut scholar Domenic Leo and projection designer Camilla Tassi, and a live Q&A with the artists. Click here to read our preview article and here for tickets.

In other news, the Akron Symphony Orchestra has announced the debut of a new podcast channel, Symphosium, which will focus on all things related to classical music. The first podcast episode, ASO Goes Electric: Sam Petrey, is part of a collaboration with Akron-based EarthQuaker Devices where ASO musicians visited EarthQuaker’s studio to be recorded performing with a variety of effects pedals. The series includes Sam’s video, which you can view on EarthQuaker’s YouTube page.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today we remember three composers of note who took their leave of this world on April 8.

In 1848 Italian bel canto composer Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti died of neurosyphilis at the age of 50. A prolific composer best-known for his operatic works, he also wrote church music, a number of string quartets, and some orchestral pieces. Altogether, he composed some 75 operas, 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces.

Who doesn’t like a Donizetti aria? One crowd pleaser is “Ah! Mes amis … Pour mon âme” (the one with nine high Cs) from La Fille du Régiment. Click here to witness the rare encore performance at the Metropolitan Opera by tenor Javier Camarena (that brings the total count of high Cs to eighteen). Read the New York Times review here.

Another aria sure to inspire the crowd is the “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoor. Natalie Dessay gives a stunning performance here.

It was the Spanish Flu that took composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ life in 1920 at the age of 35 in New York City. His most famous work is his 1915 piano piece, White Peacock, which he then orchestrated in 1919. Other compositions include his Piano Sonata, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (based on a poetic fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra.

In addition to many programmatic pieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and voice, it is his unpublished Sho-jo (1917) — a one-act pantomimic drama based on Japanese themes —  that makes him one of the first American composers to draw direct inspiration from Japanese music. Pianist Michael Lewin plays The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan here.

Last but not least, we pay our respects to American organist and composer Arthur William Foote, who died in Boston in 1937 at age 84. Foote was a member of the select group of composers known as the Boston Six which included George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker.

Foote was appointed organist of the First Church in Boston (Unitarian) in 1878, a position he held for 32 years. During his tenure he was an editor of Hymns of the Church Universal, published in 1890. He was also a founder of the American Guild of Organists.

Most of his catalogue is chamber music — A Night Piece for flute and string quartet immediately comes to mind (here’s a performance by Joshua Smith and the Cavani Quartet at CIM in 2008). But his Second String Quartet from 1893 is a gem. Listen to a performance by the Da Vinci Quartet here.

by Daniel Hathaway

IN THE NEWS:

Now that people are beginning to venture out again after a long stint of pandemic cocooning, summer festivals are beckoning. Musical America has just released their guide to over 100 of them. “We’ve asked each about their COVID-19 safety protocols, along with their dates, places, artists, and assorted platforms. Many heading outside: Aspen Music Festival and Tanglewood already have outdoor venues [Blossom too!] Those that don’t are finding them: Central City Opera Festival, for instance, is taking Carousel and Rigoletto to a nearby Garden Center and staging Dido & Aeneas in its backyard.” Read more here.

Summit Choral Society’s “Sing WIth Me,” a comprehensive early childhood music program for children from birth to age 5 (Pre-K) and their parents and caregivers, begins on Thursday, April 8. The Akron-based program is directed by Principal Conductor Heather J. Cooper. Find out more here.

More from Akron: Tuesday Musical is seeking applicants with proven abilities in artistic operations, development, and educational programming for their full-time position of Director of Artistic Operations and Educational Engagement in May. Read the position description and application requirements here. Applications received by April 26 will receive priority consideration, but will be accepted for consideration until the position is filled.

New Music USA announces the creation of the New Music Creator Development Fund, which offers grants to individuals who need support to reach the next stage in their creative practice during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Read more here.

And many have reacted with surprise and disappointment to the news that Oakland, California’s Mills College will likely cease granting degrees in 2023 and establish an Institute on its Oakland, California campus.

In a New York Times article, Geeta Dayal writes, “The school’s faculty over the years has been practically an index of maverick artists, including Darius Milhaud, at Mills for three decades beginning during World War II; Luciano Berio, who came at Milhaud’s invitation; Lou Harrison, who built an American version of the Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestra; the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros; Robert Ashley, an innovator in opera; Terry Riley, a progenitor of Minimalism; the influential composer and improviser Anthony Braxton; James Fei, a saxophonist and clarinetist who works with electronic sounds; and Maggi Payne, a longtime director of the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills’s laboratory for electronic work since the 1960s, when Oliveros was its first leader.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Two birthdays and two passings to highlight in today’s calendar. French-American harpist and composer Carlos Salzedo was born in 1885 in Arachon (official name, Charles Moïse Léon Salzedo), and German American conductor, composer and pianist André Previn entered the world in Berlin in 1929 (under a slightly different name:  Andreas Ludwig Priwin).

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky took his final bow in New York on this date in 1971, as did the great American blind singer-songwriter Ray Charles in Beverly Hills in 2015 (official name: Ray Charles Robinson).

Salzedo single-handedly created the role of the modern virtuoso concert harpist, establishing a summer harp colony in Camden, Maine, founding the harp department at the Curtis Institute of Music, and teaching at the Juilliard School. Listen to the master himself play his Variations on a Theme in Ancient Style, as well as to Debussy’s Danse Profane performed by Alice Chalifoux, and to a performance of his Steel by the Salzedo Harp Duo (Nancy Lendrim and  Jody Guinn) on the April 11, 2018 Brownbag Concert at Trinity Cathedral.

If Stravinsky needs an introduction, here’s one that Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst provided before the Orchestra’s all-Stravinsky concerts in Severance Hall in March of 2017. And anyone concerned about the younger generation carrying the classical music torch forward should give a listen to Brett Mitchell leading the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra in the 1947 version of Petrushka in March, 2016.

Equally at home in symphonic music, Hollywood scores, and jazz, Previn had serial relationships with the London and Pittsburgh Symphonies, and the Los Angeles, Royal, Oslo, and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras.

His opera based on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was produced by Scott Skiba and Cleveland Opera Theater in December 2015. Listen to Benjamin Czarnota singing Stanley Kowalski’s aria “It’s gonna be all right” here. And here’s a recording of Previn’s live performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on a 1966 episode of the Bell Telephone Hour.

Ray Charles was blinded by glaucoma in childhood, but that scarcely held him back in his distinguished career. Watch him here rehearsing in Bourges, France in 1987, introducing Nat “King” Cole at the 2000 Rock Hall Induction Ceremony, and joining Gospel diva Sarah Jordan Powell in “Christmas in Ettal” in Germany in 1979.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

So many arrivals and departures to note this weekend.

Debuts include on April 3: pianist Garrick Ohlsson (born in Bronxville, NY, 1948). On April 4: French conductor Pierre Monteux (Paris, 1875), and American film composer Elmer Bernstein (New York, 1922).

Denouements include on April 3: German composer Johannes Brahms (died in Vienna, 1897), British empresario Richard O’Oyly Carte (London, 1901), German composer Kurt Weill (New York, 1950), American composer and arranger Ferde Grofé (Santa Monica, 1972), and British tenor Peter Pears (Aldeburgh, 1986). And on April 4: American composer George Whitefield Chadwick (Boston, 1931).

For Monteux’ 80th birthday in 1955, Igor Stravinsky wrote a Greeting Prelude, “a sort of sung telegram” to be performed by the Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony. Let’s raise the curtain with a performance of the 45-second work by the Radio Philharmonisch Orkest (Hilversum, Netherlands), conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.

Then, because it’s Easter weekend, the culmination of Passover, and the beginning of spring, three musical selections seem especially apropos.

The 6th movement of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem represents what Easter is all about. Listen here (at 52:46) to “Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende statt” with Tom Krause, baritone, and The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, George Szell, conducting recorded live on April 24, 1969 in Severance Hall, Cleveland.

Passover is all about the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt, and what music first comes to mind? For many of us, Elmer Bernstein’s film score to The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and released in 1956, starring Charleton Heston and Yul Brynner. Here’s the Parting of the Red Sea scene, created during the era of Hollywood’s great biblical epics, with music from the composer who also wrote the score to The Magnificent Seven.

And Easter is also all about spring – which in Cleveland can mix snowflakes with daffodils as Mother Nature did for April Fool’s Day. The idea of the annual thaw and the sudden appearance of new flora and fauna must be intimately linked to Easter for Russians. Sergei Rachmaninoff (whose birthday Mike Telin noted in last Thursday’s Diary) captured the mood of Russian Easter with its cheerful din of bells in his Pâques. Pianists Marta Argerich and Lilya Zilberstein play it here.

ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:

Apollo’s Fire has made its full concert video of Bach’s St. John Passion available for viewing here. The performance was recorded in Trinity Cathedral in 2016with Nicholas Phan as the Evangelist.

Tune in today, for the Jupiter Quartet in concert, the Verona Quartet in an Oberlin master class, and Oberlin’s large ensembles in a Stage Left presentation.

On Sunday, London’s VOCES8 presents the Academy for Ancient Music in J.S. Bach’s B-minor Mass, CIM’s airs its annual Milhaud performance competition, and a CWRU curtain raiser for Daniel Shapiro’s final performance in his season-long cycle of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas features fortepianists Meng Yuan and Mikhail Grazhdanov.

Check the Concert Listings for details.