by Jarrett Hoffman

ON TODAY:

Two afternoon, in-person options, both at 12:15 pm. Violinist Wendy Case and pianist Caroline Oltmanns play early Beethoven sonatas in a Dana School of Music faculty concert at the Butler Institute of American Art. And organist Florence Mustric plays music by Haydn and Pachelbel in “The wind at my back” at Trinity Lutheran Church.

Then at 7, with the option of attending either in person or via stream, a Cleveland Institute of Music faculty recital highlights oboist Frank Rosenwein, who is joined by Jaime Laredo, violin, Carolyn Gadiel Warner, harpsichord, and Marc Damoulakis and Thomas Sherwood, percussion, in works by Irving Fine, Alyssa Morris, and J.S. Bach.

Details in our Concert Listings.

IN THE NEWS:

The Cleveland Orchestra has updated its health and safety policies. Beginning September 15, all audience members ages 12 and over attending concerts and events at Severance Hall will be required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Guests who cannot be vaccinated will need to provide a negative PCR test completed within 72 hours prior to entering the building. Everyone will be required to wear a mask. Read the press release here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Performers bring the creations of composers to our ears, and so it is with our almanac today. We celebrate not only the 92nd birthday of Cleveland Orchestra music director laureate Christoph von Dohnányi (above), but also, through the motions of his baton, the 180th anniversary of the birth of Antonín Dvořák (1841), and 72 years to the day since the passing of Richard Strauss (1949).

Some quick facts about Dohnányi’s time on the podium in Cleveland (1984-2002). One of the big emphases of his tenure was international touring, which included performances at the Salzburg and Edinburgh Festivals, and the Orchestra’s first concert in mainland China. Another emphasis was recording, including the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann.

Among that large discography, listen to Dvořák’s Symphonies Nos. 6-9 in a YouTube playlist, and head to Spotify for an album that pairs Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche.

Plus, there was the founding of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Youth Chorus, and the two-year, $36 million renovation of Severance Hall (1998-2000). That included a new shell that retained the famous acoustic qualities of the so-called “Szell Shell” — perhaps also moving to a warmer and less bright sound, some say — and that better matched the hall’s art deco aesthetic.

But the Szell iteration had another, bigger problem — an internal organ problem. In the words of the firm behind the renovation, David M. Schwartz Architects,

The installation of the 1958 ‘Szell Shell’ also made the critical mistake of entombing — and thus rendering useless — the hall’s 6,025-pipe E.M. Skinner organ.

It’s true, the instrument often had to be amplified with speakers to even be heard. One part of the solution was a newly-constructed space behind the stage to house the organ chambers. Another was that the facade of the new stage design allowed the organ’s sound to project easily into the hall, as Kate Rogers describes in a story for the Cleveland Orchestra Archives.

Plus, the instrument underwent an extensive restoration by the Schantz Organ Company in Orrville. (Below, from the Orchestra’s Archives: restoration of the organ pipes, left, and construction of the new facade pipes, right.)

The result: an instrument regarded as one of the top concert hall organs on the continent. As Rogers puts it, “this ‘king of instruments’ has found its voice.”

Even without Dohnányi at the podium, any 21st-century performance on that restored instrument owes him a debt of gratitude. And so we conclude with a release from last year on The Cleveland Orchestra’s A New Century, Vol. 3: the world premiere recording of Okeanos, Bernd Richard Deutsch’s concerto for organ and orchestra, featuring Paul Jacobs as soloist. Here’s the third movement, a personal favorite of mine for its sonic and emotional power — “king of instruments” indeed.

by Jarrett Hoffman

ON TODAY, IN PERSON:

At 12:15 pm, Florence Mustric takes to the Beckerath organ at Trinity Lutheran Church to present “The wind at my back,” featuring music by Haydn and Pachelbel. A freewill offering will be taken.

LOCAL NEWS:

Single tickets go on sale today for the Canton Symphony’s 2021-22 season, including its Prelude Concerts, MasterWorks Series, Pops Concerts, and Divergent Sounds Series. Subscriptions are also available. Click here for more info.

After starting out in 2018 at First United Methodist Church in Akron, Jonathon Turner’s Urban Choral Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to music theory education for inner-city middle and high school students, has found a new space of its own at 222 West Ave. in Tallmadge. Read more about the history of the organization and what’s in store for its future in an article by Krista S. Kano in the Akron Beacon Journal.

There’s some overlap in locale with this next bit of news, and not just with regards to Akron. The ASO’s Unorchestrated podcast has moved into a four-part series on the Akron Symphony Chorus, and the first episode focuses on a recording session (pictured) that took place in May in, of all places, a parking lot — that of First United Methodist.

Chorus director Chris Albanese and Steven Savanyu of Buford T. Hedgehog Productions join host Tom Moore to talk about how that event came together — plus, you can hear excerpts of the Chorus performing Haydn’s Awake the Harp. Listen to “Awakenings” here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

If there’s a conducting hall of fame, Seiji Ozawa, who turns 86 today, and Leonard Slatkin, who turns 77, deserve a spot in it. Both have led a number of famous orchestras over their long careers, and to great effect. Today we’ll spotlight Ozawa’s time as music director of the Boston Symphony, where he put in 29 years, and Slatkin’s leadership of the St. Louis Symphony — and not only because of his acclaimed 17-year tenure atop the podium there. The cherry on top is that the orchestra was founded on this same date in 1880, as the St. Louis Choral Society.

A well-known advocate of modern music, Ozawa’s many premieres in Boston included Henri Dutilleux’s five-part The Shadows of Time (1997), a work he and the orchestra recorded the following year. Listen to the first movement here, and browse a list of the ensemble’s premieres here.

Speaking of contemporary music advocacy, one composer Slatkin has championed — including while directing the Blossom Festival in the ‘90s — is Donald Erb. Cellist Lynn Harrel joins Slatkin and St. Louis in a recording of Erb’s Cello Concerto here.

As I mentioned, both conductors have held many posts, and for Slatkin that includes stints in London as principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Might Slatkin have made magic happen with that famous principal horn in those orchestras, Dennis Brain, had only he not died in a car crash at age 36 on this date in 1957?

Mozart was a particular specialty of Brain’s. Hear him out front of the Philharmonia Orchestra, led by Herbert von Karajan, in the last movement of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 in E here.

To bring things full circle, in somewhat complicated fashion (tighten your seatbelt), Ozawa famously studied with von Karajan on scholarship in West Berlin — whereupon he caught the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who appointed Ozawa as assistant with the New York Philharmonic.

Bernstein just graced our almanac last week, on the 103rd anniversary of his birth. And a few days earlier, August 20 brought the tragic passing of Michael Morgan — who worked with both Ozawa and Bernstein at Tanglewood, and was assistant under Slatkin in St. Louis.

All this to say, close ties among remarkable conductors.

Finally, these two composers don’t fit neatly into that web, but nonetheless are important to recognize: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (died on September 1, 1912) and Johann Pachelbel (baptised on this date in 1653).

Pachelbel is ubiquitous for his Canon in D — YouTube is full of recordings purported to be the “best” version — while Coleridge-Taylor is recently and deservedly gaining more attention from programmers, musicians, and audiences alike. A great way to immerse yourself in his music is the first entry in the Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered series.

Read our review here, and listen to the album here, which includes the Quintet in g for piano and strings, the five Fantasiestücke for string quartet, and the Quintet in f-sharp for clarinet and strings.

by Jarrett Hoffman

NEWS BITS & MORE:

The Canton Symphony has announced that it will require all patrons, except for children under age 12, to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test within 48 hours for entry to all performances. Masks will be required within the building. “Our orchestra has been silent for so long,” president and CEO Michelle Charles said in a statement. “The rise in cases once again threatens the live music industry. We needed to find a way to bring the music back.” See the full announcement here.

After great uncertainty and contentious negotiating, The Metropolitan Opera has reached a labor deal with its orchestra. That paves the way for the players’ return to work, and for the company to resume performances in September. Read Julia Jacob’s article in The New York Times.

Curious about The Cleveland Orchestra’s September 11 concert at Blossom featuring Police Deranged by Stewart Copeland — drummer, composer, and founding member of The Police? Yesterday the Orchestra brought Copeland onto the On A Personal Note podcast to talk about his early influences and his recent compositions. Listen here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Who better to honor Leonard Bernstein on the anniversary of his birth — he would be 103 today, and boy does his centennial feel like ages ago — than one of his own children? In 2018, I interviewed his daughter Jamie Bernstein, who is also an author, narrator, and filmmaker, and who had designed a program titled “Late Night with Leonard Bernstein,” which she was bringing to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

To describe her dad, she used a word that didn’t exist in his time. “He was so broadband,” she told me. “He wasn’t just a conductor, he was a composer. And as a composer he was always pulling down the walls between genres and mixing things up in a new way. His legacy as an educator is astonishing, and hasn’t been duplicated by anyone.”

In addition to those areas, and his talents at the piano, he was also an activist and humanitarian. “He was never afraid to stand up and speak out against injustice and violence, and that has certainly lost none of its relevance.” Jamie pointed to the modern idea of the citizen-artist. “That wasn’t a ‘thing’ back when my dad was doing it — in a way he was the granddaddy of citizen-artists. He’s a role model for artists today who want to make their work part of the world.”

YouTube is full of material to celebrate Bernstein, but here’s a clip that Daniel Hathaway plucked from the internet last year that gives insight into Bernstein’s warm and exciting personality as a teacher. Click here to watch him rehearse Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring during the 1987 International Conductor’s Competition and Master Course at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany.

We’ll close today’s almanac with Undine Smith Moore, who was born on this date in 1904 in Jarratt, Virginia, and who has become known as the “Dean of Black Women Composers.”

Vocal music was her preferred genre, including 50 choral works. Her 1981 oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr, based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Listen here to an excerpt performed by the Detroit Symphony.

Like Bernstein, education and activism are important elements of Moore’s legacy. In the first category, she taught piano, organ, and music theory at Virginia State College (now University) for over four decades, beginning at age 23. A champion of music by Black composers, three years before her retirement she co-founded the Black Music Center at Virginia State, aiming to spread awareness of the “contributions of black people to the music of the United States and the world.”

Moore was outspoken about the Civil Rights Movement, and about racism in general. We’ll end with a quote from her in that arena, as she looked back on her career:

One of the most evil effects of racism in my time was the limits it placed upon the aspirations of blacks, so that though I have been ‘making up’ and creating music all my life, in my childhood or even in college I would not have thought of calling myself a composer or aspiring to be one.

by Jarrett Hoffman

GRAB BAG — NEWS, ARTICLES & VIDEOS:

Music teacher Sakira Ventura of Valencia, Spain, has created an interactive map featuring over 500 women composers from around the globe (pictured). “I had always talked about putting these composers on the map – so it occurred to me to do it literally.” Read her interview with The Guardian here, where you can also find the map itself.

The Canton Youth Symphonies and music director Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz are hosting auditions for the 2021-22 season from August 29 through September 1. Sign up here.

The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that its Mindful Music Moments series — four-minute modules featuring mindfulness prompts and classical music performed by the Orchestra — will be free for all Northeast Ohio schools through the upcoming academic year. See an example, and register here (Pre-K) or here (K-12).

And as part of the MusiCLE Yours project, four Cleveland Orchestra musicians — violinists Isabel Trautwein and Emma Shook, violist Lisa Boyko, and cellist Tanya Ell — came together at the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum of the Cleveland History Center to record the first movement of Dame Ethel Smyth’s String Quartet in e. Watch here.

ONLINE TODAY:

The area takes a breather to begin the week after a nice schedule of events this past weekend, but the internet beckons. Copland House presents Viet Cuong’s Fine Lines at 1 pm and 7 pm, the Pittsburgh Symphony gives a musical tour of Hollywood at 7:30, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center features the piano trio as heard from Beethoven and Saint-Saens, also beginning at 7:30 (and available for a year). Details in Musical America’s streaming guide.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

American composer, pianist, and organist George Walker — who died on this date in 2018 in Montclair, New Jersey — was a true trailblazer.

Most famously, he was the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (1996). But even fifty years earlier, he was breaking boundaries. In 1945, Walker not only became the first Black pianist to give a recital at New York’s Town Hall, but also the first Black instrumentalist to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and one of the first Black graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music. (As for local connections, his studies at Curtis followed his graduation at age 18 from Oberlin College.)

His academic career was long and impressive, including posts at the New School, Rutgers University, the University of Colorado, the Peabody Institute, the University of Delaware, and Smith College, where he became the first Black tenured member of the faculty.

It’s important to emphasize those firsts, but also to move beyond them in framing Walker’s career. In a 1987 interview, he reflected on being termed an “African-American composer” rather than just an American composer:

I’ve benefited from being a black composer in the sense that when there are symposiums given of music by black composers, I would get performances by orchestras that otherwise would not have done the works. The other aspect, of course, is that if I were not black, I would have had a far wider dispersion of my music and more performances.

Here are a few works to begin immersing yourself in the world of this great, underperformed American composer. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA CHORUS:

Auditions for the 2021-22 Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and Blossom Festival Chorus will be held August 17, 20, and 29 at First Baptist Church. Schedule an audition here, and read the full press release here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

In figurative terms, jazz is an easy connection to see between actor/comedian Robin Williams and painter Jackson Pollock, who both died on this date in history — in 2014 and 1956, respectively.

Among his many comedic and dramatic talents, Williams was known as a brilliant improviser, from his celebrity impressions as the genie in Aladdin, to the memories of his wife breaking wind in her sleep in Good Will Hunting, to the way he responded to frosting unexpectedly melting and dripping from his face into cups of tea in Mrs. Doubtfire. (Watch that amazing scene here.)

Speaking of dripping, Pollock’s wildly abstract canvases, sporting his trademark style of drip painting, have often been compared in their freedom and structure to jazz, particularly the avant-garde style of bebop that was prevalent at the time. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman saw such a strong similarity that he featured Pollock’s White Light on the cover of his 1960 album Free Jazz.

As far as music performance, Williams comes out on top, having delivered memorable musical numbers in films such as Aladdin, Popeye, and Happy Feet, and even onstage at the 2000 Academy Awards. Not only does he have good pitch, but his high-energy comedic style translates to his vocalizing, which is full of character and manic pizzazz. (Plus, he learned to play the saxophone for his performance in Moscow on the Hudson, apparently advancing quite quickly in lessons, such that he could play a jazz solo within a month.)

On the other hand, Pollock couldn’t carry a tune, according to his wife, painter Lee Krasner. But as a listener, he was obsessed. “He would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records,” she said, “not just for days — day and night, day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof! The house would shake.”

But what kind of jazz was Pollock listening to? It wasn’t, in fact, bebop. His record collection was dominated by music from his youth, from the ‘20s and ‘30s, especially Dixieland. The modern style of jazz simply wasn’t to his taste — one Charlie Parker LP in his collection was a gift from his lover Ruth Kligman, who assumed it would be up his alley. It wasn’t. Describing his taste in music, she called him “a real square.”

Whichever type of jazz he preferred, it’s colorful to imagine Pollock painting for hours and hours while dancing around the canvas listening to music. But that doesn’t seem to be the case either — his studio, a converted storage barn, didn’t even have electricity until 1953, “by which time Pollock had already painted virtually all the dynamic poured paintings that have been likened to improvisational jazz compositions,” writes Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, in a terrific essay about Pollock and jazz.

It’s very possible that Pollock took inspiration from jazz, but it’s interesting to note that when given the opportunity to choose music to accompany the short film Jackson Pollock 51, he did not recommend that genre. Watch an excerpt of the film here, and listen at 2:53 for music written by Morton Feldman especially for the occasion, who scored as if for choreography, the composer said.

We’ll close this article with music that Pollock would apparently like to hear when visiting one of his regular spots, the East Hampton, NY tavern then known as Jungle Pete’s. (That brings up another, more tragic connection between Williams and Pollock: long battles with alcoholism.)

The musicians at Jungle Pete’s may have rolled their eyes at Pollock’s old-fashioned requests, like I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, but Louis Armstrong and the Savoy Ballroom Five played that song to beautiful effect in 1929 — a recording in Pollock’s collection. Listen here.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TWO ENDINGS:

On Saturday evening, Piano Cleveland announced the prizewinners in the 2021 Cleveland International Piano Competition. Martín García García (24, Spain) took first, followed by Lovre Marušić (28, Croatia), Byeol Kim (31, South Korea), and Yedam Kim (31, South Korea). Click here to read about what prizes each of them will be taking home — from cash to management and consulting services — and which contestants won a variety of other awards.

And the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society has released its final three Creative Fusion videos, which sum up the project well. One video tells a story of racial injustice. Another focuses on the immigrant experience. And the final video, together with a few others, shows off the wide diversity of Mexican musical style. Read more about the entire video series here.

A big round of applause to Piano Cleveland and all the CIPC contestants, and to the Guitar Society and the three Creative Fusion artists-in-residence: Anastasia Sonaranda, Hermelindo Ruiz, and Thomas Flippin.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Last year’s almanac explored the salon songs of Reynaldo Hahn (born on August 9, 1874) and the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (died on this date in 1975).

This time around, we’ll turn to the music of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, who passed into the ether on this date in 1988, leaving behind a fascinating catalog of works that took too long to garner their deserved level of attention, and that still sound quite fresh.

The most famous of those is the 1959 Quattro pezzi su una nota sola, where each movement adheres almost exclusively to a single note — F, B, Ab, and A — albeit with a healthy dose of microtonality. That might sound like a gimmick, but the result is remarkable: an organic exploration of range, dynamics, and timbre across an orchestra of 26 players. It’s the perfect marriage between minimalism and the avant-garde.

In a virtual concert this past January, No Exit violist James Rhodes performed the third movement of another single-note-heavy work of Scelsi’s, Xnoybis (originally for solo violin). Listen here. As Rhodes explains before his performance, the piece also feels very improvisatory, reflecting a core belief of the composer beginning in what is known as his second period. During this time, he would often record improvisations, then transcribe and orchestrate them.

Scelsi collaborated with a host of important musicians, from the Arditti Quartet to fellow composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. But one of his closest partners was Frances-Marie Uitti, to whom Scelsi dedicated all of his works for cello. Those include La Trilogia, which Feldman described as Scelsi’s “autobiography in sound.”

That 45-minute work explores wide musical territory, and we’ll focus here just on the opening, where — like Cage with the prepared piano — Scelsi adorns the cello with a metal mute, which creates moments of intense rattling. It’s an exciting, invigorating sound, and it fits perfectly into the narrative that this section of the trilogy represented to Scelsi the concept of radical, untamed youth.

Bad boy!