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.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Two conservatory orchestras go head to head tonight.

At 7 pm, guest conductor JoAnn Falletta leads the CIM Orchestra and viola soloist Alyssa Warcup in Schnittke’s Viola Concerto and Zemlinski’s The Mermaid, then at 7:30 pm, the Oberlin Orchestra takes the stage for a Fridays@Finney performance of  Gity Razaz’s The Strange Highway, Michael Tilson Thomas’ Street Song for Symphonic Brass & Erwin Schulhoff’s Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra, Rafael Jiménez conducts. Both concerts are available online as well as attendable in person.

And at 7:30 pm, Maria Schneider joins the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra as guest conductor and composer in a concert featuring selections from her album Data Lords. The performance at the Maltz PAC is free and available as a live stream.

Check our Concert Listings for details.

NEWS BRIEFS;

Heads up for Saturday’s Bluewater Chamber Orchestra concert. Head over to the Breen Center at St. Ignatius High School for a 3 pm, one-hour program inspired by Cleveland sights and landmarks. Details in our Concert Listings

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1828, 31-year-old Austrian composer Franz Schubert died from typhus — even younger than Mozart when he departed this life. Among his late works are the three Opus Posthumous piano sonatas and the “Great” C-Major Symphony. The B-flat Sonata is a personal favorite that I first heard from the fingers of Leonard Shure at the dedication of a new Harvard building back in the 1960s, but fans of Mitsuko Uchida will cherish her performance here.

And the C-Major Symphony is a personal favorite of Cleveland Orchestra music director Franz Welser-Möst, as he notes in a heartfelt statement in this “On a Personal Note” episode on the Orchestra’s Adella streaming platform.

On this date in 1936, the first concert to be preserved on magnetic tape was recorded by Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic in the concert hall of the BASF Corporation in Ludwigshaven, Germany. Hostilities followed and the German technology that made tape recording viable only became available worldwide when Allied forces seized machines at the end of World War II.

Read more about the history of analog tape recording here.

And on this date in 1957, Leonard Bernstein was named Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, making him the first American-born and educated conductor named to lead a major American orchestra. His NY Phil career was summed up by Composers Datebook:

For sports fans, these were Bernstein’s “stats” as of May 17, 1969:

He had conducted 939 concerts, more than anyone else in Philharmonic history. He had given 36 world premieres, 14 U.S. premieres, 15 New York City premieres and led more than 40 works never before performed by the orchestra.

At Philharmonic concerts Bernstein conducted Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel, but also Babbitt, Cage, and Ligeti. He led the world premiere performance of the Second Symphony of Charles Ives and included other elder American composers like Carl Ruggles and Wallingford Riegger on Philharmonic programs, as well as works by his contemporaries, Ned Rorem and Lukas Foss, and his own compositions as well.

Bernstein would continue to appear with the New York Philharmonic as its Laureate Conductor, and as a popular guest conductor with major orchestras around the world. His final concerts were with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in the summer of 1990. He died in October of that year.

by Mike Telin

HAPPENING TODAY:

“Winds of Change,” the second offering in this season’s Les Délices concert series is available online today. The program features Emi Ferguson, flute, Shelby Yamin, violin, Debra Nagy, oboe, Rebecca Reed, gamba and cello, and  Sydney Guillaume, composer.

Inspired by philosophical ideals of liberty and equality and early abolitionist writing, works by Joseph Bologne Chevalier de St. Georges and Luigi Boccherini are joined by a new work by Haitian composer Sydney Guillaume. During a pre-concert talk, musicologist Claude Dauphin and scholar/baritone Jean Bernard Cerin will share their research into Haitian musical history. The online-only concert will be available on-demand through December 17. Click here for tickets and link. Read our preview article here.

At 7:30 pm at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the CWRU Collegium, Early Music Singers, Baroque Chamber Ensembles, Renaissance Violin Band and cornettist Bruce Dickey will present “Nature’s Secret Whispering.” The program includes works by Orlando di Lasso, Annibale Perini, Erasmus Widmann, Lambert de Sayve, Andrea Gabrieli, and Michael Praetorius. The concert is free.

Also at 7:30 pm in Finney Chapel, Oberlin Conservatory faculty Katherine Jolly, soprano, Jonathan Moyer, organ, and Alexa Still, flute will perform works by Arvo Pärt, Christopher Rouse, Jehan Alain, John Corigliano, William Bolcom, Dave Ragland, and William Grant Still. The event is free. Click here for live stream.

 IN THE NEWS: 

The Cleveland Classical Guitar Society has announced its International Series spring 2022 concert lineup. Duo Noire (Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett), will make their Cleveland debut on March 5. Paraguayan guitarist Berta Rojas makes her Cleveland debut on April 2, and on May 14 William Kanengiser will make a return visit to the series. All three concerts will be held at Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights. Tickets are available online.

TODAY’S ALMANAC: 

Today we celebrate the births of Carl Maria von Weber (1786), conductor Eugene Ormandy (1899), and violist/composer Lillian Fuchs (1901). As I scrolled through the list of other musical figures who were born on this day, I was curious to know who many of them were, or are. So today we celebrate the births of three people who were randomly selected from the list.

On this day in 1895, Swiss composer, pianist and conductor Ernst Levy was born in Basel, Switzerland. A noted musicologist, Levy taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and the New England Conservatory. His book, A Theory of Harmony, published in 1985, delves into his concept of harmonic “undertones.” His compositional output includes 14 works for orchestra, a cello concerto, over 30 chamber music works, and 7 piano sonatas. He retired from academia in 1966 and returned to his native Switzerland where he lived for the remainder of his life. He died in 1981 in Morges, Switzerland.

Click here to listen to his live performance of Brahms’ Intermezzo in A, Op.118, No.2. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

At noon, both in-person and live-streamed, enjoy a Trinity Brownbag “Organ and Brass Extravaganza” featuring organists Todd Wilson and Nicole Keller, and members of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra. Starting fifteen minutes later, over at Trinity Lutheran, organist Robert Myers gives “Praise and thanksgiving.” And at 7:30, CWRU Historical Performance faculty and friends, including cornettist Bruce Dickey, perform “Across the Alps.”

Details in our Concert Listings.

TWO ANGLES ON BIG CROWDS:

There is still plenty of uncertainty for cultural institutions at this point in the pandemic, including the willingness of audiences to return to in-person experiences. That question is magnified in San Francisco. “Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown,” writes Adam Nagourney in The New York Times.

A more light-hearted question regarding large gatherings: did a group of El Sistema  musicians — fingers crossed that it was more than 8,097 of them — break the world record for largest orchestra this past weekend? The Washington Post shares Regina Garcia Cano’s story for the Associated Press.

TODAY’S ALMANAC — LINCOLN IN GETTYSBURG:

According to some sources, Abraham Lincoln began his first draft of the Gettysburg Address on this date in 1863. He would go on to deliver that famous speech (“Four score and seven years ago…”) two days later during the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Of course, months earlier the city and its surroundings had been the site of the Battle of Gettysburg — a conflict horrific in its casualties but ultimately pivotal in the Union Army’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Moving forward to the 20th century, two pieces of music referencing that president or that speech had their premieres on this date. We begin with Daniel Gregory Mason’s Lincoln Symphony, which was first heard at Carnegie Hall on November 17, 1937 in the hands of John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic.

In the opinion of Olin Downes, who reviewed the premiere for The New York Times, the more heavily programmatic movements were less successful, not to mention that “accents of other composers” such as Brahms, Franck, and Elgar made it feel not entirely fresh. However, he went on, a convincing and eloquent originality could be seen in the last movement, “where the suggestion is of mood rather than events or external characteristics…”

Listen to the symphony here (cued up to the finale) from Barbirolli and New York in a recording taken from airchecks, only intended for documentation.

The other premiere belongs to David Diamond (above), whose work This Sacred Ground — commemorating the centennial of the Gettysburg Address, and the first large-scale setting of the speech — was first performed on this date in 1963 by the Buffalo Schola Cantorum, the Fredonia Choir, the St. Paul’s Cathedral Boy Choir, bass-baritone George Hoffmann, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and conductor Lukas Foss.

Again The New York Times documented the premiere. Raymond Ericson described the work as “dignified and effective — a noncontroversial, useful piece for patriotic concerts.”

Perhaps its text setting deserves a special plaudit. In program notes for a recording by the Seattle Symphony, Steven Lowe writes, “It is always a challenge for a composer to set prose, rather than the customary poetry, in a song cycle, and Diamond’s imaginative setting balances the rhythmic freedom of recitative with the structured cadence of an aria.”

Click here to listen to that recording from Seattle. The orchestra is led by Gerard Schwarz, and is joined by the Seattle Symphony Chorale, the Seattle Girls’ Choir, the Northwest Boychoir, and baritone Erich Parce.

Back to Gettysburg and the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, it’s interesting to note that Lincoln’s address was not at all slated to be the main feature of the event.

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S CONCERT AGENDA:

The Tuesday noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature organist William Rehwinkel in music by Jeanne Demessieux, Jehan Alain, and himself.

Tonight’s Tuesday Musical program at 7:30 pm in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the annual Margaret Baxtresser Concert, features identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton (pictured), performing Copland’s Simple Gifts, Bernstein’s Candide for Four Hands, Paul Schoenfield’s Five Days in the life of a Manic Depressive, and John Adams’ Roll Over Beethoven.

Details in our Concert Listings.

IN THE NEWS:

In a Cleveland.com article published on Monday, Cleveland Orchestra President and CEO André Gremillet commented on the cancellation of its November 13 and 14 performances due to a suspected COVID case in the wind section. Read the article here.

INTERESTING READS:

Today’s Harvard Gazette features an interview with jazz legend Wayne Shorter ,and bassist, vocalist, and Harvard faculty professor Esperanza Spalding about their new opera, Iphigenia.

The work, “a project Shorter began thinking about in the 1950s, is a bold reimagining of the classical figure, daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. Spalding wrote the libretto for the show and is performing in it. The renowned architect Frank Gehry, who has studied and taught at Harvard, designed the sets. Eight years in the making, the opera made its worldwide debut Nov. 12 in Boston.” Read the interview here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1895, German-born American composer, violist, and educator Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau. His music having been condemned by the Nazis in 1936, Hindemith spent some time in Turkey during that decade, setting up a national music school, then making tours of the U.S. as a solo violist and performer on the viola d’amore.

He ended up teaching at Yale, where he formed the Yale Collegium Musicum, and also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later collected in the book A Composer’s World.

One of Hindemith’s most popular works, the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, was recorded twice by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here to the 1947 performance, and here to a studio recording made in 1964. Discuss!

On November 16, 1904, in his first American tour concert, English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted his choral trilogy Hiawatha in Washington, DC. The composer, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, had already debuted the first of his three cantatas on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Song of Hiawatha in 1898 at the age of 22.

Coleridge-Taylor’s music was championed in England by Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during his American tour in 1904.

Click here to watch the documentary Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912.

And on November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music. Thirty-four years later, on November 16, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the ensemble in that hall for the premiere of William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Click here for a recent performance at Bard College led by Leon Botstein.