by Daniel Hathaway

LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS:

On Wednesday evening, Piano Cleveland announced the names of the six finalists in its VirtuI(al)oso online competition who will play 30-35 minute programs on Friday and Saturday at 7:00 pm. Read the story here.

Tri-C Jazz Fest has added a third day to its 2020 online festival, which now runs from Friday, August 21 through Sunday, August 23. Read more here.

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

In the latest episode of Oberlin Stage Left, violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson introduces the Verona Quartet, Oberlin Conservatory’s quartet in residence for 2020-2021, who will respond with some Beethoven, Adolphe, and Janáček, as well as a little bluegrass.

WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra includes Benno Sachs’ masterful reduction of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, tailor-made for the age of the pandemic, but actually made to introduce the piece to members of Vienna’s Society for Private Musical Performances (founded in 1918 by Arnold Schoenberg). And the MET Opera will stream a 2016 performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1619, composer and singer Barbara Strozzi was baptized in Venice. She survived an outbreak of the plague to become the most-published composer of her era, with eight books of mostly secular songs to her credit.

Click here to listen to her i baci sung by Burning River Baroque sopranos Malina Rauschenfels and Josefien Stopplenburg at St. Alban’s Church in Cleveland Heights in September, 2016, and here to watch Adriana Ruiz sing several of Strozzi’s works at Indiana University as part of Early Music America’s 2018 Emerging Artists Showcase during the Bloomington Early Music Festival.

And on this date in 1945, the United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom, detonated the first of two atomic bombs over the city of Hiroshima, Japan (a second bomb was dropped over Nagasaki three days later.

Click here to watch a performance of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1960 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 string instruments, as performed by Sinfonia Varsovia led by Krzysztof Urbański at Penderecki’s 80th Birthday Celebration in Warsaw in November, 2013.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

ChamberFest Cleveland continues its rebroadcasts of archived performances on WCLV’s Ovations series tonight with Franklin Cohen soloing in (and conducting) Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Also on deck: Brahms’ Trio with violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Oliver Herbert, and pianist Roman Rabinovich.

Earlier today, WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra is all-Beethoven: Franz Welser-Möst leads a string orchestra version of the “Heiliger Dankgesang” movement from the String Quartet Op. 132, and the “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony.

At 7:00 this evening, Piano Cleveland goes online to announce the names of the six pianists who will play 30-35 minute programs in the Final Round of its Virtu(al)oso online competition on Thursday and Friday.

And the MET Opera rebroadcasts a production of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra from 1995. Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Du Fay was presumably born on this date in 1397. Associated on and off throughout his career with Cambrai Cathedral, where he was buried, he became the most celebrated composer in Europe while working at different times for the Papal Chapel, noble Italian families, and the Duke of Burgundy, among others.

Du Fay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores, written in 1436 for the consecration of Brunelleschi’s dome for the Cathedral of Florence, reflects the composer’s rich contrapuntal gifts. Listen here to a September, 2014 performance by Quire Cleveland led by Ross W. Duffin, whose program notes reveal the elaborate symbolism behind Du Fay’s musical construction.

Other local performances of Du Fay’s works include his secular motet, Ma belle dame souveraine, performed on a March, 2013 Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert by the Case Collegium Musicum, Debra Nagy, director, and his Gloria, sung by Contrapunctus Early Music in March, 2015 at St. John’s Cathedral, directed by David Acres.

And here’s an unusual entry: On this date in 1978, Parowan, Utah, named a local mountain Mt. Messiaen to honor the composer of Des canyons aux etoiles (‘From the canyons to the stars’) commissioned in 1971 by Alice Tully to celebrate the American bicentennial in 1976. Olivier Messiaen was inspired by the natural beauty of Bryce Canyon, and this seems like an important time to revisit one of the country’s remarkable natural landscapes. Listen here to the 90-minute work for mixed ensemble in a performance by pianist Paul Crossley and the London Sinfonietta led by Esa Pekka Salonen.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Tonight at 8:30, Cleveland musicians will be featured in the online Sun Valley (Idaho) Festival program “Strings and Mallets.” Si-Yan Darren Li and Marc Damoulakis will perform Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel for cello and marimba, and Damoulakis and his Cleveland Orchestra colleague Thomas Sherwood will join Ian Ding and Joseph Tomkins for Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet. Damoulakis and Li talk about recording the Cleveland segments in Mixon Hall at CIM here.

And tonight at 7:30, Piano Cleveland winds up the First Round of its Virtu(al)oso Competition. Performers in Session 6 will be Abuzar Manafzade, Michael Lu, Michael Davidman, Anna Han, and Martin James Bartlett.

WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra presents a single work: Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and the MET Opera nightly stream revisits a production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann from 2015.

INTERESTING READS:

An article in The Times of London describes the struggle to save Britain’s cathedral choirs during the pandemic, largely through the reorganization of the former Friends of Cathedral Music into the Cathedral Music Trust, which is now led by Harry Christophers of “The Sixteen.”

And an article from Boston Public Radio’s WBUR asks why it took 80 years for acclaimed Black composer Ulysses Kay’s Sonatine for viola and piano to receive its first performance.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

American composer, educator, and administrator William Schuman was born on this date in 1910 in New York. He served as president of the Juilliard School and of the new arts complex, Lincoln Center, while writing a large catalogue of music in all classical genres. That includes ten symphonies and the 1953 opera The Mighty Casey, based on Ernest Thayer’s poem, Casey at the Bat (Schuman was a lifelong baseball fan).

George Szell recorded his A Song of Orpheus — Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra in 1964 with Leonard Rose and The Cleveland Orchestra (listen here). In a lecture co-sponsored by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Dartmouth professor Steven Swayne discusses Schuman’s Seventh Symphony.

by Daniel Hathaway

IN MEMORIAM LEON FLEISHER:

Pianist Leon Fleisher died in hospice in Baltimore on Sunday at the age of 92. Read a New York Times obituary by Allan Kozinn here, and a Washington Post obituary by Anne Midgette — who co-authored Fleisher’s 2010 autobiography, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music — here.

As Midgette notes, “He performed in leading concert halls and became the preferred soloist of George Szell, the formidable conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recordings with Szell remain benchmarks for their clarity, precision and sheer expressive musicality; Brahms’s first piano concerto was a touchstone.” Listen to that 1958 recording here, which Fleisher made at the age of 30.

In 2010, Fleisher led 16 young musicians in a weeklong series of master classes at Carnegie Hall with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Pamela Frank. In this short video, Ma invited Fleisher to play an excerpt from the Concerto “to demonstrate rhythmic freedom within a measure of music.”

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

This evening, Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso competition continues with the fifth session of the first round. Five contestants — Andrei Iliushkin, Lorenzo Adamo, Byeol Kim, Jonas Aumiller, and Priscila Navarro — play 20-minute programs. Click the links to read our interviews with Aumiller and Navarro.

Also this evening, Bop Stop at The Music Settlement presents Christopher Jenkins (violin/viola), Dianna White-Gould (piano), and Matthew Jones (tenor) in an evening of inspirational music, featuring the music of local Cleveland composers H. Leslie Adams, Hale Smith, and George Walker.

There’s more, too. Consult our Concert Listings and scroll down to the bottom for the latest list of international live streams compiled by Musical America.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

English baritone Simon Keenlyside was born on this date in 1959 in London. Cleveland audiences will remember his appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra  in the title role of Don Giovanni in March, 2011, in Sibelius songs in May, 2019, and in that same week, his performance of Schubert’s Winterreise in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance with pianist Natalia Katyukova. (Read our review of the 2019 performances here.)

And in 1998, Russian composer Alfred Schnittke died of a stroke (the last of several that plagued him late in his career) in Hamburg at the age of 63. Watch a 1990 BBC documentary, The Unreal World of Alfred Schnittke here.

ChamberFest Cleveland included his Piano Quartet after Mahler on its WCLV program yesterday, Click here to watch ChamberFest violinists Yehonatan Berick and David Bowlin play his Prelude in Memoriam Dmitri Shostakovich at Harkness Chapel on June 26, 2015. [Read more…]

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

TODAY’S EVENTS ONLINE AND ON THE AIRWAVES:

This evening at 7, cellist Mark Kosower goes live online from Trinity Cathedral with his second concert of Bach solo suites. It’s free, but donations during the performance benefit COVID-19 musicians’ relief.

Also at 7, the second session in Round One of Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso competition features 20-minute performances by Lin Ye, Kevin Ahfat, Julian Miles Trevelyan, Francesco Granata, and Kiron Atom Tellian, pre-recorded at Steinway Galleries in the U.S., Europe, and China.

At noon, WCLV’s hour-long Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra includes Smetana’s The Moldau, Johann Christian Bach’s Symphony for Double Orchestra, and Stravinsky’s Suite from Pulcinella. And at 12:15, Cleveland Opera Theater’s Domenico Boyagian hosts “Maestro’s Corner Interactive.”

The MET’s free opera stream tonight at 7:30 offers a 2017 performance of Dvořák’s Rusalka.

Check the Concert Listings for details.

CONCERT SERIES UPDATES:

Apollo’s Fire has added two more outdoor performances to its “Tuscan Sun” and “Drive-In Parking Lot” concerts in August. Details here.

Cleveland Classical Guitar Society announced this morning that its entire 2020 fall International Series will be presented online, beginning with a concert by Berta Rojas on August 15. Its annual Showcase Concert will be live-streamed from the Maltz Performing Arts Center on September 12, as will performances on October 17 and November 21. The Society’s season announcement will also be made online this Saturday at 7:30 pm in a 20-minute video, followed by a 9:00 pm EDT live stream performance by Thomas Flippin in partnership with Austin Classical Guitar. Registration for the free stream from Austin is required. [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.

NEWS BRIEFS: [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1741, Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi died in Vienna. He made his reputation in Venice, especially as music director for 30 years of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for young women. He continued his career in Mantua, eventually migrating to Vienna in hopes of advancing his fortunes as an opera composer.

Of course, Vivaldi’s best known for his hundreds of orchestral concertos, including The Four Seasons, which have provided a central stream of music for Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire. Click here to watch a performance of his Concerto for Two Cellos (René Schiffer and Mimé Brinkmann), and here to witness Jeannette Sorrell’s infectious arrangement of his La Folia, both from concerts at Tanglewood.

And on July 27, 1924, Italian-German composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni died in Berlin. Known for his Romantic piano elaborations of Bach chorales, Busoni crowned his keyboard works with his immense Piano Concerto. Pianist Garrick Ohsson recorded it in the late 1980s with Christoph von Dohnányi, The Cleveland Orchestra and the men of the Orchestra Chorus. Thirty years later, Ohlsson revisited the piece with the Orchestra in February, 2019, and prefaced the performance with some of his thoughts. [Read more…]