by Daniel Hathaway

LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS:

Due to the recent increase of COVID-19 cases, Apollo’s Fire has postponed its July “Blues Café 1610” concert at Music Box Supper Club until September 20. Read the announcement here.

The buildup to Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition that launches on July 30 begins today at 11:30 am with the first PianoKids program — a series of 15-minute videos for children ages 3-8. Details here.

Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP) has released its July playlist. Click here to listen to Summer Sounds, including performances by Lea Bertucci & Amirtha Kidambi, Ammie Brod, Anika Kildegaard, Stephanie Lamprea & Zack Sheets, Martha Mooke, and Nina Dante & Dalia Chi.

TODAY ONLINE AND ON THE AIRWAVES:

The Miró Quartet — who have appeared on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series, and the ENCORE Chamber Music Series — open their cycle of the complete Beethoven string quartets tonight with a live performance from their hometown of Austin, Texas. It’s part of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, normally held in Washington State, but moved online this summer.

Also today, The Cleveland Orchestra continues its Lunchtime series on WCLV, 104.9 Ideastream with Brahms and Johann Strauss, Jr., and the MET Opera revisits its January 11 production of Alban Berg’s Wozzek with Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium. For streaming details, go to the Concert Listings.

Heads up: Nézet-Séguin is also scheduled to lead the first in a series of Philadelphia International Music Festival online master classes on Saturday, July 19 at 7:00 pm. Click here for more information and to purchase tickets (there’s a nominal fee). [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

We have just two anniversaries to mark today. The first is that of Swiss American composer Ernst Bloch, who died on this date in 1959 in Portland, Oregon. Bloch served as founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1920-1925 before moving on to the San Francisco Conservatory. After a hiatus back in Switzerland, he helped found the Music Academy of the West, and taught in the summers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Among Bloch’s music based on Jewish themes is his tone poem about King Solomon, Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque. Listen here to a live Blossom Festival performance in 1980 by cellist Janós Starker with The Cleveland Orchestra, led by Eduardo Mata. Or click here to listen to a January, 2019 performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music by Lydia Rhea, with pianist Evan Solomon.

Another CIM performance, this one by Cleveland Orchestra first assistant cello Richard Weiss, features the first of Bloch’s trio of solo suites, inspired by Bach and composed between 1955 and 1957. Click here to watch the video from September, 2009.

The second is that of English composer Harrison Birtwistle, born on this date in 1934 in Accrington, Lancashire. His 1986 Earth Dances have been compared to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Christoph von Dohnányi recorded the work in 1996 with The Cleveland Orchestra for Decca (listen here), but there’s also a video of a performance by Cologne’s Gürzenich Orchestra led by Marcus Stenz.

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

In a normal summer, Ohio Light Opera and Kent Blossom Music Festival would be in full swing. In this abnormal season, both institutions are offering blasts from the past in place of live events. This afternoon’s OLO Virtual Summer Festival features the 2020 company in selections from Jacques Offenbach’s 1875 Voyage to the Moon, inspired by Jules Verne. Tonight, the third concert in Kent Blossom’s Virtual Music Festival features members of The Cleveland Orchestra, festival young artists, and Kent State faculty in music by Barber, Nicolas Roussakis, Jean-Michel Damase, Mendelssohn, Erwin Schulhoff, and Brahms.

Today’s Lunchtime Special from The Cleveland Orchestra includes Sibelius and Brahms, and tonight’s episode from the MET Opera Archives is a production of Puccini’s Turandot from 2009 led by Andris Nelsons. Check our Concert Listings for details. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS:

The Akron Symphony has announced the postponement of its previously announced season to 2021-2022. During 2020-2021, an Interlude Season of free events will feature the Orchestra’s musicians “performing live, small-ensemble experiences with a wide variety of community partners.” Read more here.

Following the conclusions of experts that “there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place,” Cleveland Chamber Choir will also move its 2020-2021 plans forward by a year. In the interim, the Choir will broadcast past performances on WCLV and plans a flexible sixth season of live or streamed performances, depending on changing circumstances. Read more here.

Episode 15 of Apollo’s Fire’s “Music for the Soul” features five of the Orchestra’s musicians in solo performances, including violinist Alan Choo, luternist and troubadour Brian Kay, violinist Carrie Krause, oboist Debra Nagy, and violinist Augusta McKay Lodge, as well as introducing Alan Choo’s Singaporian ensemble, Red Dot Baroque. Watch here.

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

WCLV and The Cleveland Orchestra offer a lunchtime concert of French music for Bastille Day, organist Matt Bickett plays music by African American composers on the organ at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, and the MET Opera Archives reaches into its treasure for a 1981 production of Verdi’s La Traviata. Details in our Concert Listings.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Who hasn’t amused themself — and hopefully their dining companions as well — by applying a moistened finger to the rim of a wine glass? In technical terms, you’re creating a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, a type of friction idiophone. Benjamin Franklin, fascinated by the sound, created a mechanical version he called the armonica, a large spinning drum of glass bowls, which he announced on this date in 1762.

Click here to watch Dennis James play Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Harmonica on the Ars Lyrica Houston concert series, and here to join Mister Rogers on his final visit to Negri’s Music Shop. He meets seasoned performer Dean Shostack, and tries his own classically-trained pianist’s hands at the instrument. (Yes, the video is a mirror image with the bass and treble ends of the instrument reversed!)

On July 13, 1951, composer Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles — ironic because he was a triskaidekaphobic who was obsessed by the number 13. See below for the Opéra de Paris’ production of his unfinished work, Moses und Aron, and click here for a breezy introduction by Samuel Andreyev to Schoenberg’s fascinating progress as a composer.

One of his best-known works, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, was performed on July 16, 2017 by Encore Chamber Music on its Sunday Unplugged series in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Watch the performance by violinists Jinjoo Cho and Nancy Zhou, violists Ettore Causa and Dimitri Murrath, and cellists Amit Even-Tov and Mindy Park here.

And on this date in 2013, former Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Lorin Maazel died at his Castleton Farms estate in Virginia. His appointment in Cleveland to follow George Szell was fraught with controversy. In The Cleveland Orchestra Story, Donald Rosenberg quotes then Plain Dealer critic Robert Finn in a neat summation of the issue: “Lorin Maazel is a strong personality. Where his ideas suit the music, they create real sparks. Where they do not, they become annoying mannerisms.” [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND ONLINE AND ON THE RADIO:

It’s all nostalgia from the past this weekend, as organizations tap their archives for pre-pandemic performances, featuring singers with Northeast Ohio connections. Saturday’s streams and broadcasts come from Ohio Light Opera, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society (a look back at educational projects), the MET Opera (Madama Butterfly starring Oberlin grad Elizabeth DeShong, left), and The Cleveland Orchestra performing Haydn’s Harmoniemesse.

Opera on Sunday includes Florida Grand Opera’s Eugene Onegin (starring CIM faculty member Dina Kuznetsova), and the MET’s Tristan and Isolde (featuring former Baldwin Wallace faculty member Jane Eaglen). The Cleveland Orchestra remembers Beethoven and Berg performances from 2010, and Best of ChamberFest Cleveland revisits Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G from June of 2014. Details here.

FEATURED VIDEO:

Violinist Ida Haendel died on July 1 in her 90’s in Florida, and was remembered in a New York Times obituary by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim published on July 8. Praised by the composer for her interpretation of the Sibelius concerto, she also championed works by Benjamin Britten and William Walton. Click here to watch her play the Sibelius with the Montréal Symphony in 1981.

INTERESTING READ:

Helmsing Associates has alerted us to a recent Wall Street Journal article by organist Paul Jacobs about the organ concertos of George Frideric Handel. Jacobs is featured in the third of the Cleveland Orchestra’s A New Century CDs in the world premiere recording of Okeanos, Bernd Richard Deutsch’s concerto for organ. Read Jacob’s thoughts on Handel here (WSJ subscribers can click through to the original article). [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

NEWS BRIEFS:

In a conversation with Musical America’s Susan Elliott, Sphinx Organization President and Artistic Director Afa Dworkin characterizes the impact of the pandemic as simultaneously “abrupt, disturbing, and transformative.” Through its focus areas of education, artist development, performance, and leadership, Sphinx is “the core program for the creation of diversity in classical music. COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter Movement have only added urgency to its mission: transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts.” Listen here.

Beginning on July 13, Early Music America and Voices of Music will offer a five-part webinar series, “Creating and Sharing Video Online from Home.” The 45-minute sessions cover Recording at Home: the Basics (July 13), YouTube and Social Media for Musicians (July 15 & 17), Putting it all together: the inter-    connectedness of all things (July 20), and Video and Social Media for ensembles, orchestras, and organizations (July 22). Find more information and register here.

Viewers who have enjoyed streaming Hamilton may be interested in hearing what Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed has to say about the Broadway hip-hop phenomenon. Holder of endowed chairs in the History Department as well as at Harvard Law School, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Gordon-Reed told a student-sponsored event last week that she likes the show, but found it problematic in its portrayals of Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Fathers, and the issue of slavery, adding, “Artists have the right to create, but historians have the right to critique.” Read a story here.

Singers everywhere are approaching the future of their art with trepidation, but especially those who sing in close proximity to each other in choirs. Read a story by Ysenda Maxtone-Graham in The Spectator about how the pandemic is threatening choirs in Britain.

FEATURED VIDEO:

In its series, LA Opera at Home, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who grew up in Youngstown, invites viewers inside his digs in Florida for an informal hour-long program featuring selections from every beginning vocal student’s bible, 24 Italian Songs. Watch here (start at 8:00, after Larry settles a few technical matters!) Myra Huang accompanies him remotely from New York. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

NEWS BRIEFS:

Chagrin Arts announces a free, live, open-air concert by the Callisto Quartet, formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2016, winners of the 2018 Fischoff Competition, and now the graduate quartet-in-residence at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston. The performance in Solon Community Park on Friday, July 17 at 7:00 will require face masks and promote social distancing.

Erik Mann, president of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, has written to let us know about a new video, “Beyond Ferguson, based on a melody by Michael Brown. It’s one of the few social justice pieces for classical guitar. The video was premiered for the Guitar Foundation of America convention in June and at Station Hope, a social justice event here in Cleveland.” Mann also recommended an Ideastream radio interview the Society’s education director Brian Gaudino conducted with composer Thomas Flippin and CCGS alumna Alana Colvin, now at the Berklee School.

The Music Settlement’s Bop Stop has announced that its Ohio City space is now available for rental to private parties of up to 15 attendees, as well as for rehearsals and recording. Some outdoor live, public concerts and live streams are also in the works. Read more here.

TODAY ONLINE AND ON THE RADIO:

Thursday’s online and broadcast events include Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra (featuring Respighi’s Church Windows — it’s the composer’s birthday), selections from Patience on Ohio Light Opera’s Virtual Summer Festival, a ticketed program from the Caramoor Festival about Shirley Graham Du Bois’ opera Tom-Tom (see our article about Du Bois here), an Oberlin Stage Left episode featuring the Arts and Sciences Orchestra, and a 2013 production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini from the MET Opera Archives. Details in our Concert Listings. [Read more…]