by Daniel Hathaway

NEWS AND TALES FROM THE TRENCHES:

ChamberFest Cleveland has shared some archived concert videos in memory of the late violinist and violist Yehonatan Berick, who died recently at the age of 52. Click on the following links to watch Shostakovich’s Two Pieces, Op. 11, from 2012, the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Quintet No. 1 from 2013, and the first movement of Brahms’ Sextet, also from 2013.

Following up on his earlier survey of how the pandemic has affected European presenters and organizations, Bachtrack editor David Karlin moves on to consider the “State of Play in Asia, America, and Oceania.”

In a similar vein, Washington Post music critic Michael Andor Brodeur interviews representatives of choruses to get a sense of how they’re coping these days. Read Scattered and silenced by the pandemic, choral groups are trying to find their voice.

And in Van Magazine, Alarm Will Sound artistic director Alan Pierson relates the ‘bureaucratic feat of Olympian proportions” involved in rehearsing and conducting a new opera in Germany with COVID-19 travel restrictions in effect. Read his interview with Jeffrey Arlo Brown here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1483, German theologian, religious reformer and composer Martin Luther was born in Eisleben. Author of more than 30 hymns in the German vernacular, Luther joined composer Johann Walther to publish the first protestant hymn book in 1524. Probably his best-known hymn is Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, based on Psalm 46 and originally set to an “isorhythmic” tune whose dance-like rhythms had been smoothed out by the time J.S. Bach used it in his Cantata BWV 80. Boston-based organist Bálint Karosi improvises on that sturdier version of tune on the 1995 Richards & Fowkes organ in St. John’s Lutheran Church, Stamford, Connecticut.

French composer, claveciniste, and organist François Couperin was born on this date in 1668. Part of the Couperin dynasty that occupied the organ bench at the church of St. Gervais in Paris, he wrote two complete organ masses, one for parishes, another for convents, as well as some 230 individual harpsichord works and suites of chamber works. He also carried on a correspondence with Johann Sebastian Bach — a visitor to the Bach household after the composer’s death found that his widow had cut up letters to cover jam pots.

The noted French organist Michel Chapuis recorded the Mass for Parishes on the 1775 Isnard organ at the Basilique Sainte-Marie Madeleine in Provence. Listen here. (The organ verses are meant to be performed in alternation with chant.)

Two of Couperin’s most delightful works are the Apotheoses of Corelli and Lulli, narrated musical portraits of the two composers and their different national styles. Watch a video of a Juilliard master class where Les Arts Florissant’s William Christie comments on student performances of Le Parnasse, ou L’Apothéose de Corelli, recorded at the school in September, 2019.

And on this day in 1909, Gustav Mahler led the New York Philharmonic from the keyboard of an altered piano in his own symphonic arrangements of movements from J.S. Bach’s orchestral suites. In a letter to a friend back in Europe, Mahler wrote

“I had great fun recently with a Bach concert, for which I worked out the basso continuo conducting and improvising quite in the style of the old masters, playing on a rich-toned spinet specially adopted by Steinway for the purpose. This produced a number of surprises for me – and also for the audience. It was as though a floodlight had been turned on to this long-buried literature.”

Too bad we don’t have a recording to share.

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB THESE THREE DAYS:

On Friday, Oberlin Opera Theater goes online with two mini-operas — Menotti’s The Telephone, and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine — which have also been rehearsed remotely (read the preview article here). And Apollo’s Fire continues its “Allure” concert set featuring ‘The Three Amandas,’ with in-person performances through Sunday.

On Saturday, CityMusic Cleveland presents its Pantheon Ensemble live at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, and repeats the performance remotely from the Maltz Performing Arts Center on Sunday.

Also on Saturday, the latest episode of Oberlin Stage Left features the Oberlin Orchestra and Sinfonietta, Raphael Jiménez and Timothy Weiss, conducting.

For details, check out our Concert Listings.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

Lots of dates to take note of these three days. On Friday, the death of German composer Heinrich Schütz in Dresden in 1672, the birth of Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in Dinant in 1814, the birth of American bandmaster John Philip Sousa in the nation’s capital in 1854, the death of Tchaikovsky during a cholera epidemic in St. Petersburg in 1893, and the demise of French composer Edgar Varèse in 1965.

The lists for Saturday and Sunday are shorter. On November 7, 1949, American composer Steven Stucky was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and on the same date in 1983, French composer Germaine Tailleferre — the only woman among the group who called themselves “Les Six” — died in Paris at 93.

And on November 8, Spanish madrigalist Francisaco Guerrero died in Seville in 1599, and Belgian-born composer and organist César Franck died in 1890 after an accident involving a horse-drawn omnibus.

Because wind instruments are being sidelined during the pandemic, it seems only fitting to feature music written for them in this weekend’s Almanac.

We’ll start with Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxhorn or saxophone, which he patented in 1846. The instrument comes in all sizes, just like Renaissance recorders and viols, and has developed along parallel lines in classical music and jazz.

The Decho Ensemble opened this season’s virtual Brownbag Concerts at Trinity Cathedral with a varied program showing what the instruments can do in a classical context. Click here to watch Jake Swanson and Sarah Marchitelli, perform Jean-Baptiste Singelée’s Duo Concertant, Op. 55 from that concert with Alison d’Amato, piano.

And click here to watch saxophonists Kenneth Tse and Noa Even play Buck McDaniel’s 2019 ALEX KATZ Impala at Kent State University on November 24, 2019. The work was inspired by a painting in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

While waiting for every ballot to be counted, tip a hat to Sousa, the ultimate wind bandmaster, with his march, The Stars and Stripes Forever played by Cleveland Symphonic Winds under Frederick Fennell.

Probably Varèse’s most famous work is Density 21.5 for solo flute. The name comes from the specific gravity of platinum — the favored metal for constructing the instrument. Oberlin alum and International Contemporary Ensemble founder Claire Chase plays it here.

Steven Stucky’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary (after Purcell) was performed on the opening concert of the 2015 Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival. Listen here to a performance by the Central Michigan University Symphonic Wind Ensemble in 2016.

And of course, the organ is a wind instrument — a fact certified by an Act of Congress in 1977 when Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral appealed a tariff imposed on the importation of its Flentrop organ from the Netherlands. Which leads us to César Franck and his noble Three Chorales. Click here to watch French organist Vincent Dubois play No, 3 in a minor at Soissons Cathedral. Dubois, who played at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland in November, 2015, is now one of the three tenured organists at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

If organ music isn’t your tasse de thé, try this performance of Franck’s Violin Sonata by ChamberFest Cleveland rising stars Nathan Meltzer and Evren Ozel in Harkness Chapel in June, 2019.

by Daniel Hathaway

ON TODAY:

For “Allure,” its second run of subscription concerts, Apollo’s Fire gathers three fine sopranos, all Amandas (Forsythe, Powell, and Crider) for virtuoso trios composed for the famous Three Ladies at the Court of the Duke of Ferrara, plus music by Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, and Monteverdi. Eight instrumentalists add dances from the palace of the Dukes and the countryside. In-person performances begin today and run through Sunday (check availability here), and a video will be available to subscribers a week later.

And Christ Church, Hudson organist Mario Buchanan will stream a recital on the fine Noack organ tonight at 7. Check the Concert Listings for details.

Speaking of organ recitals, if you missed Nicole Keller’s Brownbag Concert program yesterday on the Flentrop instrument in Trinity Cathedral, a video is still available to watch on demand.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1494, German Meistersinger Hans Sachs was born in Nuremberg. A shoemaker by trade, he wrote over 4,000 Meisterlieder, poems, tragedies, comedies, fables, and religious tracts, having become an enthusiastic follower of Martin Luther. That earned him the opprobrium of the town council until Nuremberg signed on to join the Reformation.

Sachs is portrayed in Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. Watch the Act I scene, “Beckmesser’s Judgment and Sachs’ Rebuttal,” from a 1970 Hamburg State Opera production in which Giorgio Tozzi plays Hans Sachs.

November 5, 1989 marked the death of Ukrainian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz. He gave up his concert career two years earlier at the age of 84, but not before giving spectacular recitals in Vienna (Klavierabend in the Goldener Saal at the Musikverein) and Hamburg (his last public appearance).

And American composer Elliott Carter died on this date in 2012, in New York at the age of 103, having written more than 20 works since reaching the century mark. He was the subject of a Classical Nerd episode, The Uncompromising Elliott Carter (watch here), and his last interview was a conversation with cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

For a taste of Carter’s later, modernist works, follow along with the score while pianist Ursula Oppens plays his 1980 Night Fantasies, and watch 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition laureate Sean Chen perform his Caténaires.

CIM New Music Ensemble flutist Alexandria Hoffman, oboist Devin Hinzo, cellist Joseph Teeter, and harpsichordist Taylor Flowers performed his 1952 Sonata in Mixon Hall on February 7, 2018.

While many admire the composer’s later works, others find charm in Carter’s earlier, neoclassical pieces. Here are two:

The USC Thornton Chamber Singers programmed his 1945 setting of Emily Dickinson’s Musicians Wrestle Everywhere on its May 2, 2013 concert, “Americans in Paris: The Legacy of Nadia Boulanger.”

And the Harvard Glee Club recorded Carter’s 1947 work, Emblems, on poetry of Alan Tate, on its 150th Anniversary Tour in Cincinnati in March, 2010. Carter dedicated the work to G. Wallace Woodworth and the HGC. Here, assistant conductor Michael McGaghie conducts the ensemble.

by Daniel Hathaway

“PLAY FOR THE VOTE” — BACH WITH YOUR BALLOTS:

From The Violin Channel: “Founded by Silkroad cellist and composer, Mike Block, the ‘Play For The Vote’ initiative is organizing musical performances at polling locations across the United States.

“As a Producer of ‘Play For The Vote,’ the Silkroad organization is activating its nationwide network of performers and encouraging them to perform for those waiting in polling lines.”

As part of the initiative, Classical Revolution Cleveland has been popping up at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections and plans to show up at random polling locations today to support the democratic process with music. On their Facebook page, CRC writes, “So many smiles, lots of folk saying thanks, and affirmation that music makes a difference.” Keep an ear out if you’re voting in person today.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Israeli-born violinist Yehonatan Berick died of cancer on October 31 at the age of 52. Based at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, he was a frequent performer at ChamberFest Cleveland. Click here to read remembrances by Canadian musicians in a CBC article, including remarks by Diana Cohen, ChamberFest co-founder and concertmaster of the Calgary Symphony.

A change in plans at Severance Hall brings Nicholas McGegan back to lead The Cleveland Orchestra on December 3. In Episode 4 of the pre-recorded In Focus series, McGegan will lead the orchestra in Handel’s Overture and Pifa Pastorale from Messiah, Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, and Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 7.

INTERESTING READS:

Washington Post critic Michael Andor Brodeur muses on his experience attending a concert by the 21st Century Consort — one of seven in the audience — and then viewing a video of the performance (which included a work by Cleveland composer Jeffrey Mumford).  “Re-watching the concert feels more like lighting up the darker corners of my own recollection of the experience than returning to my seat in the church to experience it anew. And although that might seem too obvious an observation — or too abstract a distinction — for established orchestras and smaller ensembles alike, this problem of presence brought on by the pandemic amounts to a creative crisis. Read As the novelty of Zoom wears off, classical music reluctantly embraces its new virtual reality here.

And England’s Slipped Disc editor Norman Lebrecht takes some symphony orchestra music directors to task for disappearing during the pandemic (but not Cleveland Orchestra’s Franz Welser-Möst). Read “No Direction from Directors” in The Critic here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German organist and composer Samuel Scheidt was baptized on this date in 1587 in Halle, where he spent his whole career after studying in Amsterdam with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Click here to hear Hespèrion XX play his Ludi Musici under Jordi Savall, and here to watch a performance by Paolo Crivellaro of Scheidt’s Cantio Sacra: Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz on the organ of the Jakobikirche in Lübeck.

Italian bel canto opera composer Vincenzo Bellini was born on November 3, 1801, in Catania, Sicily. There’s a film about the composer’s brief life (he died at 33) that takes its name from one of Bellini’s most famous arias — from Norma. Click here to watch Carmine Gallone’s romanticized 1954 film Casta Diva, unfortunately only available in Italian. For the aria itself, obvious choices are performances by Maria Callas and Leontyne Price, but for visual as well as aural splendor, you probably can’t beat Renée Fleming’s performance in the Palaces of the Czars in Saint Petersburg.

And on this date in 1939, the body of French organist and composer Charles Tournemire was discovered in a bog in Arachon — he went out for a walk and never returned. A student of César Franck, Tournemire succeeded his mentor at the organ of the Basilica of St-Clotilde in Paris, and in addition to a eight symphonies, four operas, piano works and chamber music, wrote L’Orgue Mystique, a set of 51 suites for each Sunday of the Ecclesiastical year.

Oberlin alumnus Nicholas Capozzoli recorded the suite for the feast of the Epiphany live at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York in January, 2013, and the famous Belgian organist Flor Peeters appears in a unique video made at Sint Rombouts Cathedral in Mechelen performing the suite for the Octave of the Ascension — which the composer dedicated to him.

by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

It’s time for the annual celebration of Hallowe’en, and probably also time to put that apostrophe back in its name, which is a contraction of “All Hallows Eve,” or the day before the Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. So on Saturday there will be “ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night” out and about, and on Sunday, holy people to remember.

A variety of scary mix tapes is available, but Dark Classical, one of the better collections to listen to on Hallowe’en, will give you an hour and 45 minutes worth of thrills and chills while you’re waiting to pass out sugary treats.

Everyone has their own favorite hair-raising music, and comments on the aforementioned collection have lamented the omission of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and proposed adding Schnittke’s Requiem, and the “Dance of the Knights” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

My own recommendation for generating goose bumps is “Satan’s Dance” from Ralph Vaughan William’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, based on drawings by William Blake (above, Satan smiting Job with boils). The composer dedicated his 1930 work to conductor Sir Adrian Boult, who leads it here with the London Philharmonic at the age of 83. (Satan enters around 4:12).

On the All Saints’ Day side of the weekend, you could hardly do better than listen to the third movement of Heinrich Schütz’s Ein musikalische Exequien, a setting of the Song of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis) overlaid by a trio of soloists singing “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors.” Follow the score in this performance by Philippe Herreweghe and La Chapelle Royale. Incidentally, Schütz died on October 31 in 1672.

On this weekend in 1517, the German Augustinian monk and university professor Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, an act that many regard as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Luther, a complicated figure who composed his own music and set vernacular hymn texts to secular tunes, has inspired many documentaries. Here’s one by PBS travel guru Rick Steves, himself a Lutheran of Norwegian extraction.

That leads us to the later German organist, composer, and choral conductor Hugo Distler, who died at his own hand in Berlin on November 1, 1942. Though he suffered depression over the fate of his colleagues during the Third Reich, as Nick Strimple writes in Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, “it appears that he saw the futility of attempting to serve both God and Nazis, and came to terms with his own conscience unequivocally.”

Distler wrote a great deal of neo-Baroque music for organ and choirs. For just a sampling, listen to his motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied as sung by the Oberlin Collegium Musicum under Steven Plank on a Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert on May 4, 2011.

A work particularly suitable for this Hallowe’en/All Saints’ weekend is Distler’s Totentanz, a 14-movement choral cycle based on poetry by Angelus Silesius. Between the movements, Distler interleaved a friend’s paraphrases of poetry from the Lübecker Totentanz, “a dialogue in Middle Low German between Death and its victims.” The Netherlands Chamber Choir performs the 1934 piece here.

by Daniel Hathaway

AIRING TODAY ONLINE:

Timothy Weiss, Oberlin Conservatory professor of conducting and ensembles will give this year’s President’s Lecture tonight at 7. The livestreamed talk will center around the responsibilities of future classical music programming. In Weiss’s words, “We are not just inheritors and interpreters of a tradition. We define the tradition by the choices we make. And, we must use our agency for change to pass on an art form, both to audiences and students, that is broader, more inclusive, and more socially engaged than the one we inherited.”

CIM Piano Professor Daniel Shapiro continues his complete Beethoven sonata project tonight at 7:30 in a streamed recital featuring the three Op. 31 works and the Op. 13 “Pathétique.” sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Music

Tonight at 8:30, Oberlin State Left will broadcast a faculty recital devoted to music by William Grant Still, performed by violinists David Bowlin, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Francesca dePasquale, with pianists James Hoswmon.

And the nightly MET Opera stream is a production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov from October 2010, led by Valery Gergiev.

Check the Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1864 American music patroness and composer Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born in Chicago. Her generous advocacy for chamber music led to the founding of the Berkshire Music Festival in 1918, the precursor of Tanglewood, and she was responsible for the commissioning of a long list of important works for the Library of Congress, including quartets by Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, Schoenberg and Webern, a flute sonata by Poulenc, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Click here to watch Demarre McGill perform the Poulenc sonata with pianist Michael McHale. 

English composer Philip Heseltine, who used the nom de plume Peter Warlock — a nice touch for Halloween weekend since he had a lively interest in the occult — was born on October 30, 1894 in London. A close friend of Delius since their boyhood at Eton, Heseltine was such a character that he appeared as himself in novels by such authors as D.H. Lawrence. “Classical Nerd” host Thomas Little devoted an episode to Warlock’s life.

Heseltine wrote musical criticism sporadically and composed a long list of songs and choral pieces significant for their eccentricity. Rumor had it that he attended an amateur choral society’s performance of his Three Carols in December, 1930, went home depressed, put the cat out, and gassed himself at the kitchen stove. The Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus programmed those pieces in 2015 without such a tragic after effect.

Listen to his popular carol Benedicamus Domino sung in 2013 by Quire Cleveland, and another carol, Bethlehem Down, performed by King’s College Choir. The latter resulted when poet Bruce Blunt and Heseltine decided to enter a newspaper contest for a new carol. They won, and had “an immortal carouse on the proceeds.”

On this date in 1934, Dutch flutist, musicologist, and virtuoso recorder player Franz Bruggen was born in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to him play his reconstruction of a Bach recorder concerto with the Orchestra of the 18th Century at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. For an explanation of the piece, scroll down to read the comment by Skip Sempé.

And on October 30, 1953, Hungarian-born operetta composer Emmerich Kálmán died in Paris. Click here to watch a virtual Kálmán Festival “from the Merry Widow Vaults,” produced by Ohio Light Opera, who have championed his works in Wooster during their summer seasons.

by Daniel Hathaway

AIRING TODAY ONLINE:

The second Cleveland Orchestra In Focus episode airs tonight at 7:30 pm and remains available to subscribers for three months. Pianist Yefim Bronfman joins Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra in Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra, and the strings play an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Harp’ Quartet.

Aidan Plank’s Pulse Quartet is live from the Bop Stop tonight, and the MET Opera — fixated on politics all this week — presents John Adams’ Nixon in China.

Details in the Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Whatever happened to Maria Anna Mozart, “Nannerl,” the composer’s beloved older sister, who died on this date in 1829? An accomplished pianist in her own right, she is said to have written music herself, although none survives. Her life was re-imagined in René Féret’s 2010 French language film, Nannerl, la sœur de Mozart. Watch a trailer here, and learn how you can rent the movie.

On October 29, 1911, Hungarian-born newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer died in Charleston, South Carolina. His estate endowed the Pulitzer Prizes, which, beginning in 1943,  included an annual award for a classical musical composition by an American composer. In the late 1990s, the entry rules were expanded to include a wider range of American music, and the first such prize recognized Wynton Marsalis’ 1997 Blood on the Fields. George Gershwin and Duke Ellington were subsequently honored on their anniversary years in 1998 and 1999.

It’s interesting to read down the list of Pulitzer Prize winners in music, both to see what works have passed into wide use and which seem to have fallen by the wayside. Click here to view the list.

On this date in 1863, representatives from 18 countries met in Geneva to form the International Red Cross. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a piece to celebrate the centenary of the organization in 1963, resulting in his Cantata misericordium, Op. 69, a treatment of the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan which has been called a “miniature appendix to the War Requiem,” and featured two of the same soloists, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, at its premiere with Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande in Geneva on September 1, 1963.

Listen to a 1965 recording with the London Symphony, Britten, Pears, and Fischer-Dieskau here.

And on this day in 1929, dubbed “Black Tuesday,” the New York Stock Exchange crashed, launching the Great Depression. Just something to ponder, no music to suggest.