by Mike Telin

HAPPENING TODAY:

At 7:30 pm at St. Paschal Baylon in Highland Hts, Jay White will lead Quire Cleveland in the first of three concerts titled Carols for Quire XI: Mary’s Song. The program features four sixteenth-century settings of the Magnificat, the virgin Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel, by Giovanni Pierluigi di Palestrina (Italy), Tomás Luis de Victoria (Spain), and the Britons, Robert Fayrfax and Robert Parsons. Carols of the season, including Gabriel’s Message, The Cherry Tree Carol, and Silent Night, along with familiar carols inviting audience participation round out the evening. Freewill offering. Open seating, no reservations or tickets required, but masks are mandatory for all attendees, regardless of vaccination status. Read our preview article here. Check our Concert Listings for times and locations on Friday and Saturday.

Also at 7:30 pm, the Oberlin Trio — David Bowlin, violin, Dmitry Kouzov, cello and  Haewon Song, piano (pictured) — perform Haydn’s Trio in g, XV:19, Takemitsu’s Between Tides and Dvořák’s Trio No. 3 in f, Op. 65 in Oberlin’s Kulas Recital Hall. The concert is free. Click here to access the webcast.

And through December, Les Délices’ Holiday show “Noel, Noel” is available on Marquee TV. That virtual concert is a repeat from last year, when Timothy Robson described it in a review as “a highly enjoyable blend of English, French, and German carols, interspersed with Christmas-themed poetry from authors as diverse as Christina Rosetti and e.e. cummings.” Not to mention recent work by Northeast Ohio poets Dave Lucas, Diane Kendig, and Julie Warther, all read by Dee Perry. Read more about it in Mike Telin’s preview, and get tickets here.

IN THE NEWS:

We are saddened to learn that experimental composer Alvin Lucier passed away on Wednesday at his home in Middletown, Conn at the age of 90. Allan Kozinn writes in his New York Times obituary that “Unlike composers who have the goal of painting an aural picture, evoking particular emotions, creating a dramatic narrative or exploring carefully plotted rhythmic interactions, Mr. Lucier seemed to approach his works as experiments that might yield unpredictable soundscapes.

“A finished work could sound like howling feedback, electronic crackling or — in the case of his best-known piece, “I Am Sitting in a Room” (1969) — a spoken text that with repetition becomes increasingly distorted and overlaid with reverberation until it is transformed into a symphony of dancing overtones.” Read the full obituary here. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

Ignore the grinches of the world (including a certain editor of ClevelandClassical.com!) — it’s time to embrace music of the holidays, whether on the FM dial, or in concert via stream and onstage.

Les Délices kicks off December with “Noel, Noel,” available on Marquee TV beginning today through the end of the month. That virtual concert is a repeat from last year, when Timothy Robson described it in a review as “a highly enjoyable blend of English, French, and German carols, interspersed with Christmas-themed poetry from authors as diverse as Christina Rosetti and e.e. cummings.” Not to mention recent work by Northeast Ohio poets Dave Lucas, Diane Kendig, and Julie Warther, all read by Dee Perry. Read more about it in Mike Telin’s preview, and get tickets here.

This afternoon brings two more holiday-themed events. First, the noontime Trinity Brownbag “Jazzy Christmas” featuring carols performed by the Gateway Band with vocalist Jennifer Cochran (in person and streamed, freewill offering). And second, a 12:15 organ recital from Florence Mustric at Trinity Lutheran themed around “An American Christmas,” including music by Barber, Ginastera, and Virgil Fox (freewill offering).

In the hours after these events, it is encouraged — no, required — that you grate on the nerves of those around you with endless humming.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Sadly, one holiday event has been taken off the calendar. Tuesday Musical’s concert by The Rodney Marsalis Philadelphia Big Brass on Tuesday, December 7 has been canceled because of the artists’ health concerns.

If you purchased single tickets, refunds will be issued within a few days. If you’re a subscriber, you have the option of transferring tickets to another concert this season, donating the cost of tickets to Tuesday Musical, or receiving a refund. Indicate your choice by December 15 by emailing kjenkins@tuesdaymusical.org or calling 330-761-3460. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Today’s free noon concert at the Church of the Covenant features North German Advent Music of the late 17th century. Tenor Mark Laseter, violinists Jonathan Goya and Addi Liu, violist da gamba Jane Leggiero, and organist Jonathan Moyer will perform music by Dietrich Buxtehude, Nicolaus Bruhns, and Johann Adam Reincken.

We’ve been remiss in recommending Eric Charnofsky’s radio programs, “Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music,” which air from 2:00 to 4:00 pm on Mondays on Case Western Reserve University’s internet stream. Himself a composer and a collaborative pianist, Charnofsky (pictured) likes to hunt out not-so-often performed music by well-known composers. The current edition features works by Frederick Delius, Kile Smith, Julius Eastman, Paul Hindemith, Aaron Coland, Poldowski (the pseudonym for Régine Wieniawski), and Shih-Hui Chen. Need assistance connecting? Help is only a click away.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

For those who recoiled a bit last Friday morning at the all-too-early dominance of Christmas and Holiday music on the airwaves, we’ll seek out alternatives during these last weeks of 2021 and note the anniversaries of some works that received their premieres on these dates in classical music history.

On November 30, 1913 (with some wiggle room due to the conversion of Russian calendar dates), Sergei Rachmaninov conducted the first performance of his choral symphonic poem, The Bells, in St. Petersburg.

The composer, who had been seeking out a likely text to set to follow his cantata, Spring, was on holiday in Rome in 1907when he received an anonymous letter suggesting Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells, in a translation by the Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont.

The original poem, read here by Basil Rathbone with an underlay of Mahler, is highly onomatopoetic, something that doesn’t translate well. But Rachmaninoff took to it enthusiastically, regarding the finished work — along with his All-Night Vigil — as one of his two favorite compositions. Click here to listen to a 2015 live performance on AVROTROS with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus led by James Gaffigan, former assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra.

1.   Allegro ma non tanto: The Silver Sleigh Bells
2.   Lento: The Mellow Wedding Bells
3.     Presto: The Loud Alarm Bells
4.   Lento lugubre: The Mournful Iron Bells”

 

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TONIGHT:

At 7:30 pm, Debra Nagy teams up with Scott Metcalfe of Boston-based vocal ensemble Blue Heron for the latest episode of Les Délices’ SalonEra series: “Machaut Man.” (Can’t beat that title.)

The episode celebrates the forthcoming release of the ensembles’ collaborative album Le Remede de Fortune, centered around that work by Machaut — a long-form narrative poem with musical interpolations that tells the story of a young lover’s attempts to live well despite the capriciousness of Fortune.

In addition to showcasing footage from live performances and from the ensembles’ archives, tonight Nagy and Metcalfe will explore the extravagantly detailed, evocative illuminations found in MS C, one of the most richly-decorated of Machaut’s surviving manuscripts.

See the full program and register here. It’s available for a short time on-demand after the premiere.

R.I.P. SONDHEIM:

The most important piece of news in music since our last Diary entry is the passing of Stephen Sondheim, titan of American musical theater, on November 26 at the age of 91. The lyricist for West Side Story early on in his career, he went on to leave his strongest legacy as both the composer and lyricist for such musicals as Company, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods. 

Probably his most famous song is “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, sung here by Judi Dench, who received the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in a revival of the show in 1995 in London.

But as Tim Page writes in an obituary in The Washington Post, “Mr. Sondheim was less interested in creating stand-alone popular ‘hits’ than in fashioning unified works that maintained a firm, near-operatic structural integrity throughout.” To experience the song in context, as Sondheim himself felt it was most powerful, watch the full musical here in a live broadcast from New York City Opera in November of 1990.

To some critics, including Page, Sondheim’s greatest masterpiece is Sweeney Todd, a work that is interesting for many reasons aside from its unusual and dark subject matter. Those include its categorization in genre: some consider it an opera, or at least a crossover. “It has demands for specific singers that are more operatic, yet need the acting skills necessary in traditional musicals,” Michigan Opera Theater assistant music director and chorus master Suzanne Acton said in an article in Detroit Free Press.

This 2014 performance of the Johanna Quartet from Sweeney Todd provides a good example: it’s fascinating to hear bass-baritone and frequent operatic star Bryn Terfel as the title character, singing side by side with a Broadway headliner in Jay Armstrong Johnson.

Finally, as evidence of just how strongly Sondheim’s passing has been felt in the musical community, watch here as a large group of Broadway artists — including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Josh Groban, and Sara Bareilles — gather in Times Square this past Sunday, November 28, to sing “Sunday” from Sunday In The Park With George.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Organist Michael Peters will give a free noontime concert today on the Tuesday series at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. Peters will play J.S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue on the gallery organ, then moves to the chancel organ for two popular warhorses: Léon Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, Op. 25, and Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s Nun danket alle Gott.

INTERESTING READ:

British pianist and polymath Stephen Hough (photo: Antonio Olmos) covers a number of topics in an interview with Fiona Maddox of The Guardian: the primacy of music in life, his first live concert since the lockdown when he played to an empty Wigmore Hall, his novel The Final Retreat, his solitary childhood, the effects of Brexit on touring artists, his love of puddings, and how it feels to turn 60.

Oregon Artswatch profiles Pat Zagelow on her 30 eventful years as executive director of Portland’s Friends of Chamber Music (she’s also a pianist);. The organization recently gave her a surprise party attended by more than a hundred guests who managed to keep the event a closely-guarded secret. Read the article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1585, English composer Thomas Tallis died in Greenwich, having successfully weathered the back-and-forth religious machinations of monarchs and the stylistic changes that shifts between Catholic loyalists and Protestant reformers brought to the music of the Church of England. As his epitaph notes,

He serv’d long tyme in chappel with grete prayse
Fower sovereygnes reygnes (a thing not often seen);
I meane Kyng Henry and Prynce Edward’s dayes,
Quene Mary, and Elizabeth oure Quene

Tallis’ colleague William Byrd marked his passing in the elegy, Ye Sacred Muses, sung here by countertenor Daniel Elgersma to the accompaniment of a Viola Organistica, one of several such instruments invented by Leonardo da Vinci.

The extremes of musical style during Tallis’ career are captured in the recording Thomas Tallis: Lamentations, Motets, music for strings, performed on period instruments by Theatre of Voices (directed by Paul Hillier) and The King’s Noyse (directed by Daviv Douglass).

But today’s widest audience probably knows Tallis’ name from the simple psalm tune on which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra and string quartet. The BBC Symphony Orchestra plays it here in an atmospheric performance under Andrew Davis at Gloucester Cathedral, where the work premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1910.

On November 23, 1878, French composer André Caplet was born on a boat off the coast of Le Havre, eventually perishing in 1925 from the effects of poison gas in World War I. A friend of Debussy, he’s mostly remembered for his orchestrations of that composer’s piano works.

That Caplet also spoke with his own voice is evident in such works as his Légende (suite symphonique pour harpe chromatique, saxophone et instruments à cordes), performed here at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2017, featuring saxophonist Om Srivastava, and in his Messe à trois voix, from which a female chorus at the Utrecht Conservatory sings the “O salutaris hostia” movement.

Finally, composer Krzysztof Penderecki first saw the light of day on this date in 1933 in Debica, Poland. Among his best-known works are the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and the Passion According to St. Luke. He died on March 29, 2020, and in his honor, Cleveland Orchestra first associate concertmaster Peter Otto recorded Penderecki’s La Follia in a June, 2020 living room concert.

by Jarrett Hoffman

NOW AVAILABLE:

A Canton Symphony Young People’s Concert is up online until the end of the year. Made with the help of the McKinley Presidential Library and Museum, and including music specifically written for the orchestra, the program focuses on “communities throughout history in America and what has led to the cultural makeup we see in our country today.” Register here to access the video, and check out the Learning Materials here to get your brain humming in preparation for the concert.

SAVE THE DATE:

A new event from the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project has been announced for Thanksgiving weekend. The live-streamed concert on Sunday, November 28 at 6:00 pm will include solo performances by saxophonists Nick Zoulek and Andrew Hosler, as well as harpist Stephan Haluska. Watch on CUSP’s Facebook page.

INTERESTING READ:

Ahead of the release this week of his three-part series The Beatles: Get Back, director Peter Jackson discusses sifting through 60 hours of unseen footage, and how what he saw pushes back against notions of the band’s final days together. “I was amazed,” Jackson said in an interview with Andy Welch of The Guardian. “I was waiting for it to get really bad but it didn’t. It actually gets happier and happier as it goes.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On her designated feast day, pour one out for St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians. Among those musicians born on this date in history is Benjamin Britten (1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England), who wrote a piece of music in honor of that figure: his 1942 Hymn to St. Cecilia (sung here by the ensemble VOCES8) on a text by W. H. Auden, who was for a time a frequent collaborator and important influence — artistically, intellectually, and as a fellow gay man.

Several pieces written in honor of that patron saint have been premiered on this date in history. Henry Purcell’s 1683 Welcome to all the pleasures (performed here by the Bach Collegium San Diego) was the first in a series of works by the composer taking that figure as inspiration.

From the pen of G. F. Handel we have the 1739 Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (played here by the ​​Dunedin Consort led by John Butt), and from Charles Gounod the 1855 St. Cecilia Mass (follow the score here alongside a performance by Barbara Hendricks, Jean-Philippe Lafont, and Laurence Dale with the Choeurs de Radio-France and Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique, led by Georges Pretre).

The parents of folk-song collector Cecil James Sharp — both of them music lovers — seemingly took things to another level when they decided on his name (he was born on this date in 1859). A clear bonus: the opportunity to nickname him C-sharp.

Moving into different territory, some have wondered whether the famous Simon & Garfunkel song Cecilia is a reference to the saint — the lyrics a metaphor for the fleeting nature of inspiration in songwriting. (The more obvious take is that Cecilia is an unreliable lover.) Then again, others claim that it’s merely about Paul Simon’s dog Cecilia.

And when you get that deep into parsing out the meaning of a song, you know it’s time to move on.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Two events on Saturday include a 3:00 pm, hour-long concert by BlueWater Chamber Orchestra at the Breen Center “celebrating what makes Cleveland so special,” and a 7:30 pm recital by Spanish guitarist Andrea González Caballero on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series at Plymouth Church.

On Sunday, the Cavani Quartet assumes artistic directorship of the Art Renaissance Tremont series as well as continuing their “Beethoven and Beyond” project with a 4:00 pm recital at St. Wendelin Church, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra returns to Mandel Hall at Severance after a long intermission for a 3:00 pm performance led by Vinay Parameswaren (pictured), and David Gilson guest conducts Choral Arts Cleveland in a 3:30 pm concert at Forest Hills Church.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

In an extraordinary exit ahead of the arrival of the Taliban, faculty and students of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and their families have fled to Qatar enroute to Portugal. Read the New York Times article 1,200 Miles From Kabul, a Celebrated Music School Reunites here.

Kathie Stewart has been named Curator of Historical Keyboards at Indiana University beginning in January. Stewart, who plays Baroque flute with Apollo’s Fire, has served as curator of harpsichords at Oberlin (read our Baroque Performance Institute interview here), and most recently as a keyboard technician at CIM.

Akron pianist and organist Daniel Colaner, 16, the winner of the Euclid Symphony’s 2021-2022 Tom Baker Young Artists Competition, will play Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto with Matthew Salvaggio and the orchestra on April 24. A piano student of Sean Schultze at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Colander also studies organ with David Higgs at Eastman. He’ll share the April program with saxophonist Samuel Dishon, winner of the 2020 competition, who will solo in Glazunov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On November 20, pianist Ruth Laredo made her life debut in Detroit in 1937 as Ruth Meckler, and American composer Orianna Webb was born in Akron in 1974.

Laredo’s musical future was established at the age of eight when her mother took her to hear Horowitz play Scriabin in Detroit. That began a lifelong interest in Scriabin and his contemporary, Rachmaninoff, and eventually to her recordings of the complete Scriabin cycle. Click here for her performance of the Sonata No. 9, “Black Mass.” She toured with violinist Jaime Laredo during their marriage (1960-1974), but made an auspicious solo debut with Pierre Boulez and the N.Y. Philharmonic in Ravel’s G-Major Concerto in 1974. She taught at Kent State University from 1968-1971.

Listen to an episode in David Dubal’s radio series “For the Love of Music” broadcast in April, 1980 featuring a conversation with Ruth Laredo (due to copyright issues, the musical selections have been removed!)

Orianna Webb’s collaboration with guitarist Daniel Lippel was broadcast on the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Virtual Festival on May 28, 2021. Her bio on the festival website makes for an interesting read, as does her works list.

Henry Purcell neatly timed his all-too-early demise — he was 36 — for the eve of the Patron Saint of Music’s feast day on November 21, 1695. That makes this an appropriate time to listen to one of the composer’s Odes written in her honor. Here’s a performance of Hail, Bright Cecelia by the Dunedin Consort led by John Butt.