By Daniel Hathaway

BREAKING NEWS:

Sunday’s Tri-C Classical Piano recital  by Jean-Marc Luisada has been rescheduled for Monday and the venue has been changed.

Franz Welser-Möst recently had a cancerous tumor removed and will need to undergo treatment between his conducting engagements for the next twelve to sixteen months. His first period of treatment will begin at the end of October. Regrettably, Welser-Möst must withdraw from all engagements from late October until the end of the year. He plans to resume his conducting engagements in January 2024. His doctors are confident of a full recovery. (Message posted on his website 9/8/23.)

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

The marriage of music and film, high on this week’s agenda, continues on Friday at the Cleveland Silent Film Festival with The Heart of Cleveland & the experimental soviet documentary, Man with a Movie Camera, and on Saturday with All Quiet on the Western Front. Live scores will be played by Colorado’s Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

On Saturday at 2pm, baritone Jason Fuh & and pianist Edward Bak will compare the solo vocal works of Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky in their free program, Russian, Realistic and Romantic at the Cleveland Museum of Art. And on that evening at 7 pm at Blossom, the Akron Symphony will present Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy accompanied by high-definition video. [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Who was that masked man? Before the Lone Ranger, there was Zorro, the populist hero who undermined the Spanish authorities in old California. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. starred in the 1920 silent film, The Mark of Zorro, which will be screened tonight at 7:30 at the Cleveland Silent Film Festival with a live score played by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Check our Concert Listings for details.

NEWS BRIEFS:

South Korean violinist Seohyun Kim, 14, has won the International Tibor Varga Violin Competition in Sion, Switzerland. If her name sounds familiar, in 2022, she took first prize at Oberlin’s Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition. Mike Telin caught up with her for an interview after that victory. Click here to read.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

The Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra has announced its 86th season, with concerts led by Victor Liva to be given at Cleveland State University, Westlake Performing Arts Center and West Shore Universalist Unitarian Church. Click here for details. [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

No live concerts on Tuesday’s agenda, but have a look at the Concert Listings to see what’s on the horizon later this week.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Free Instrumental Lessons

The Center for Arts Inspired Learning invites Cleveland residents from the 3rd to the 12th grade and CMSD students to receive free beginner to intermediate instrument instruction. Click here for details of the Inspiration Through Music/Play It Forward! ® Cleveland after school programming. The fall session runs from September 11 to November 17.

INTERESTING READ:

Keeping score: Riccardo Muti reflects on a lifetime in music

“The 82-year old conductor (pictured above), who recently stepped down as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director after 13 years at the helm, is in ebullient form, reminiscing about Queen Elizabeth II visiting his dressing room at La Scala and staying – longer than protocol permitted – for 23 minutes, then railing against the opera world where ‘stage directors have now become the gods.’ [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

On Saturday and Sunday at 7 at Blossom, Susie Benchasil Seiter will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in two more performances of “Disney in Concert: the Sound of Magic,” a retrospective of the first hundred years of the Walt Disney Company, including Peter Pan, Moana, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Frozen, The Lion King, Fantasia, Encanto, & Disney Parks classics.

Local #4 Music Fund presents the Hingetown Jazz Festival on Saturday at 4, featuring Jackie Warren and the Sammy DeLeon Latin Jazz Trio, the Johnny Cochran Trio, the Max Schhlenk Quintet, the Theron Brown Trio, the Tommy Lehman Quartet, the Jamey Haddad Quartet, and the Vanessa Rubin Quartet.

On Sunday at 2:30, the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble, Edwin Huizinga, violin, Michael Lynn, flute, Rebecca Landell Reed, cello & viola da gamba & Mark Edwards, harpsichord, will give a faculty concert in Kulas Recital Hall which you can experience live, or catch on  a webcast.

And later that afternoon, The Cleveland Opera & Cleveland Ballet present their annual Opera in the Italian Garden concert in the Italian Cultural Garden on East Boulevard. [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

This weekend at Blossom, Susie Benchasil Seiter will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in three performances of “Disney in Concert: the Sound of Magic,” a retrospective of the first hundred years of the Walt Disney Company, including Peter Pan, Moana, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Frozen, The Lion King, Fantasia, Encanto, & Disney Parks classics. The program debuts tonight, Friday at 7, and repeats on Saturday and Sunday.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Sir John Eliot Gardiner has withdrawn from all concerts to focus on his mental health after punching a singer. The world-renowned British conductor struck a member of his own chorus, William Thomas, in a furious backstage row following a concert in France, and has now decided to withdraw from all of his concert commitments to focus on his mental health with a counseling course. Read a story from The Telegraph here.

Click here to read a related article, John Eliot Gardiner and the stubborn archetype of the bully maestro, by Michael Andor Brodeur in The Washington  Post. [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Tonight at 8, WCLV’s Ovations revisits performances from the three concerts of Local #4 Music Fund’s “She Scores 2023,” which were presented in June. 

Tune in on 90.3 or listen online, and view a gallery of composers and artists here. (Pictured: executive director & violist Amber Rogers by Derek Snyder)

NEWS BRIEFS:

The Cavani String Quartet has been appointed ensemble in residence at Cleveland State University for the 2023-2024 academic year. The ensemble welcomes a new violist this season. Ayane Kozasa replaces Eric Wong, who has joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University,.

In a related story, former Cavani founding cellist Merry Peckham will leave her position as chair of chamber music at the New England Conservatory to become assistant dean and director of chamber music at the Juilliard School in New York beginning on January 1.

Single tickets are now on sale for Tuesday Musical’s six-concert series in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, which, features Latin Grammy winner Cuarteto Latinoamericano on Oct. 24, a holiday program by The King’s Singers on Dec. 5, the Kyiv Virtuosi Symphony Orchestra on March 12 & the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis on April 20. Click here.

Registration is now open for all programming at both campuses of The Music Settlement, including private lessons, Suzuki lessons, and group classes and ensembles. Click here for more information. [Read more…]

By Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

From 2-4 pm, Eric Charnofsky (pictured) hosts the latest edition of Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music from the studios of WRUW (if power has been restored to the station’s transmitter after the dramatic weather of the last few days).

Look forward to hearing infrequently encountered music by Alec Wilder, Michael Leese, Ernest Gold, Jane Antonia Cornish, selections from Handel Goes Wild, and works by Charnofsky himself. Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.

Click here to visit the Concert Listings page for information about coming events.

INTERESTING READS:

Why should composers write for amateur musicians?
Tom Service asks, “Why is there a gap between today’s composers and the repertoires of most of the musical ensembles in the country – which are not the professionals, but the amateur groups of all kinds who are the fabric of our musical life? It’s a situation that’s a historical anomaly in the wider course of the story of music.

[Read more…]

The Daily Diary is on hiatus until Monday, August 28 for a late summer staff holiday, but breaking news will appear here.

The next Thursday E-Newsletter will be sent on August 31.