by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S ONLINE & RADIO HIGHLIGHTS:

On Saturday afternoon, Kent Blossom Virtual Music Festival adds an extra event featuring Cleveland Orchestra members and friends, Piano Cleveland moves into the 3rd session of the First Round (No. 4 to follow on Sunday), Cleveland Classical Guitar Society announces its International Series, and WCLV remembers George Szell near the 50th anniversary of his death with a rebroadcast of a Blossom Concert from 1970 led by Pierre Boulez during which The Cleveland Orchestra’s music director for 24 years passed away.

And ClevelandClassical.com readers can access the world premiere of David Lang’s in nature by The Crossing for free by clicking through the special link in the Concert Listings (otherwise, it’ll cost you $7!)

On Sunday, WCLV’s Best of ChamberFest Cleveland revisits interesting music by Mahler, Schnittke after Mahler, and Korngold.

And MET Opera fans can tune in to free streams of Verdi’s Ernani and Wagner’s Die Walküre. See the Concert Listings for details.

BOP STOP SATURDAY POP-UP:

The Music Settlement has now obtained permits for temporary expanded service, and invites patrons for a socially distanced outdoor beverage on Saturday from 5 to 8 pm. No live music, and no kitchen, but you’re welcome to bring your own food. Masks are required, and beverages must be consumed at tables.

INTERESTING READS:

The President of Turkey has turned Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul that later became a mosque and then a museum, back into a mosque again, a move that discourages tourism and frustrates acoustical scientists’ efforts to capture its spectacular acoustic (it’s perfect for Byzantine chant). Read the New York Times article here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC: [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

LOCAL NEWS:

The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced the appointments of JoAnn Falletta as artistic advisor to the CIM Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor Vinay Parameswaran to the conducting faculty. Falletta will advise the school in its search for a permanent conductor, and lead five CIM Orchestra concerts over the next three years. Parameswaran, who is also music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, will work directly with graduate level conducting students.

NEW ONLINE EVENTS TODAY:

Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso online competition begins tonight at 7, when contestants Josquin Otal, Tian Tang, Elia Cecino, Roman Kosyakov, and Xiaoya Wan play 20-minute solo programs pre-recorded at Steinway Galleries in the U.S., Europe, and China. The program book is available for viewing here, and the session will be streamed on Piano Cleveland’s website.

Tonight at 7:30 pm,“Linking Legacies,” the latest episode of Oberlin Stage Left features Academic Support Dean Chris Jenkins, pianist Dianna White-Gould, and vocalist Matthew Jones in a concert featuring Oberlin-connected Black composers H. Leslie Adams, Dolores White, Hale Smith, and George Walker. Click here to watch.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

George Szell, Cleveland Orchestra music director for 24 years, died on this day in 1970 in Hannah House at University Hospitals — during a Blossom concert conducted by Pierre Boulez, who had the task of informing the players following the performance. Read an obituary by Donal Henahan published the following day in The New York Times (the article has been automatically digitized and is full of misreadings of the original, but it’s worth reading for the collection of anecdotes that Henahan has included).

Listen to WCLV’s “Cleveland Orchestra on the Radio” on Saturday, August 21 at 8:00 pm for a rebroadcast in Szell’s honor of that Boulez performance.

On July 30, 1921, American pianist Grant Johanneson was born in Salt Lake City. President of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1974 to 1985, he was a frequent guest performer with The Cleveland Orchestra. Click here to listen to a live performance of de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain by Johanneson and The Cleveland Orchestra under Loren Maazel ca. 1978.

And back in 1899, English pianist and celebrated accompanist Gerald Moore was born on this date in Watford. During his long career, he appeared on stage and in recordings with most of the eminent singers of his time, and did much to elevate the role of the pianist in recitals. As humorous as he was accomplished as a performer, Moore wrote a number of books: The Unashamed Accompanist, Am I Too Loud? and Furthermoore — Interludes in an accompanist’s life.

Listen here to his witty recorded version of The Unashamed Accompanist from 1955. And click here to listen to his recording of six Richard Strauss songs with Janet Baker, recorded in 1968.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS AND UPDATES:

Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso online competition gets underway this evening at 7:00 with an opening ceremony and recital by Omri Mor. The first round begins on Thursday. We’re interviewing four of the contestants before they play their first 20-minute programs. Click here to learn more about Russian pianist Arseniy Gusev, and check back this afternoon for an interview with German competitor Jonas Aumiller. Both are studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Sergei Babayan.

The fifth concert in Kent Blossom’s Virtual Festival tonight at 7:30 features Kent State faculty, the Emerson String Quartet and Met Opera Principal Cello Jerry Grossman.

Les Délices’ outdoor concert at Plymouth Church scheduled for tonight at 7:30 is now “sold out.”

And a new “Best of ChamberFest Cleveland” program tonight at 7:30 on WCLV, 104.9 Ideastream includes music by Janáček, Schulhoff, and Schubert.

See the Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On July 29, 1856, Robert Schumann died at the age of 46 after spending two years in an asylum in Bonn, having been taken there at his own request after he attempted suicide by throwing himself off a bridge into the Rhine River.

Among his legacies were wonderful cycles of songs and piano works, four symphonies, and a quantity of chamber music.

Listen here to a 2014 recording of Dichterliebe by German baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu (the two performed the cycle on the Cleveland Art Song Festival series at the Cleveland Institute of Music in January, 2019).

Schumann’s symphonies have frequently come under fire for what conductors have considered the composer’s inept orchestration. George Szell, who made significant changes to the scores, recorded them between 1958 and 1960. Click here to listen to all four works. A Gramophone review of the cycle’s later release on CDs noted:

Szell loved the Schumann symphonies (his eloquent booklet annotation makes that abundantly clear), but readers in search of Urtext reportage should be warned that he attempts to correct – and here I quote the Maestro himself – “minor lapses [in orchestration] due to inexperience” with “remedies” that range from “subtle adjustments of dynamic marks to the radical surgery of re-orchestrating whole stretches.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On July 28, 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig at the age of 65, following two unsuccessful eye operations by the discredited surgeon who would unsuccessfully treat George Frederic Handel a year later.

With some 1,128 surviving works, picking just a few to mark the composer’s passing is an exercise in futility. Two of them bookend his career in fascinating ways.

At the end of his life, Bach crowned his contrapuntal achievements with The Art of Fugue, a work that in a manuscript from the early 1740s contains twelve fugues and two canons on a single theme. By 1751, a year after the composer’s death, a revised edition had added two new fugues and two new canons as well as three pieces he may never have intended to include in the collection.

One of those three pieces is the autograph manuscript of an unfinished fugue that breaks off after measure 239 with a notation in the hand of C.P.E. Bach (above):

At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.

That’s probably another of the musicological legends that makes classical music history so appealing to program commentators — scholars have pointed out that the composer’s failing eyesight would have made writing impossible well before 1750.

In any case, that errant fugue has come to be known as the final Contrapunctus in the collection. Some composers have set out to finish it, while various performers — there’s no instrumentation indicated — have decided to just let the piece unravel as a symbol of Bach’s unfinished business.

Click here to watch Musica Antiqua Köln take the latter course.

At the other end of his career, when Bach was about 22 and organist of the Church of Divi Blasii in Mühlhausen, he wrote the funeral cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (“God’s time is best”), a work that continues to hold a special place in his portfolio.

Click here to watch a performance of BWV 106 by Oberlin Baroque on Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival in Boston on June 17, 2011. The sound is a bit sub-par, but the performance is lovely. Or for a more atmospheric experience, watch Ton Koopman lead his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir in a candlelit performance in a Gothic church (somewhere!)

Incidentally, on this date in 1850, the Bach-Gesellschaft was founded and embarked on the publication of the composer’s complete works, a monumental task that was completed with the publication of its 46th volume in 1900. Robert Schumann was among the founders.

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