by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Live music is back in a big way this weekend, beginning with Oberlin’s Opening Festival, “Music, Sports, and the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece,” the third annual cycle of themed kickoff concerts shepherded by violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson (pictured) with input from his faculty colleagues. Read an article by Erich Burnett here, and either join the four-concert festival in person or watch online Saturday and Sunday at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm. In between, the theme is developed in symposia at 4 pm each day as well as in a listening party on Saturday at 10 pm when Conservatory students and Oberlin Athletics varsity team captains share their favorite music playlists from Warner Concert Hall.

Also on Saturday evening, the Stow Symphony plays its fall concert in Tallmadge.

Also on Sunday, the Chagrin Studio Orchestra continues its run of Carousel performances at 2, At 3, you have your choice of the CIM Orchestra at Severance Music Center under new conductor Carlos Kalmar, Cleveland Composers Guild at First Baptist, the CWRU Symphonic Winds at the Maltz PAC, MusiCLE’s Porchester Concert at the Cozad-Bates House, or the Akropolis Reed Quintet from the University of Michigan in Guzzetta Hall at Akron U.

But there’s more: on Sunday at 4, the Cavani Quartet continues its Beyond Beethoven cycle at the Music Settlement, and organist-composer Mark Thewes performs at First Church in Painesville. At 7:30, the Canton Symphony breaks its long silence with a concert of music by Ibert, Stravinsky, Haydn, and Margarer Brouwer’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn.

See our Concert Listings for details and links to live streams.

INTERESTING READS:

In last weekend’s Diary, we linked to a Van Magazine article about a recent attempt to complete Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony using AI. A followup review by Jan Swafford considers the success of the undertaking.

In the end, what were the creators of the AI Tenth Symphony actually trying to do? Did they want to create a piece that would be added to the Beethoven repertoire, played by orchestras everywhere? I hope that they weren’t attempting something that futile. Were they more modestly trying, like the creators of Watson and Deep Blue, to demonstrate the potential of computers to think faster and more pointedly than humans in mimicking human endeavors? If so, I’ll concede that they more or less succeeded: After an impressive feat of programming by its human proprietors, AI produced something that sounds unquestionably like a piece of music, only a gangly and forgettable one.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Earlier this week, the Michigan Daily reported that University of Michigan composition professor Bright Sheng had been removed from teaching an undergraduate class following the screening in a composition seminar of the 1965 version of Shakespeare’s Othello where actor Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface. Read the article here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Meet, if you haven’t already, two composers with Cleveland connections who were born on October 9 in 1869 and 1922 respectively.

Hearing a performance of Tannhäuser at the age of 18 inspired Cleveland-born Henry Lawrence Freeman to compose opera, and by his death in 1954, he had written scores for at least 23 titles, 21 of which are preserved in manuscript at Columbia University. He also founded two opera companies — one at the age of 22 in Denver that bore his name, and the Negro Grand Opera in 1920 in New York. The Martyr — the first opera to be produced by an all-black company, was staged in Chicago in 1893 and in Cleveland in 1894. [Read more…]

by Mike Telin

HAPPENING TODAY:

Available beginning today: Les Délices: Song of Orpheus, Hannah De Priest, soprano, Jonathan Woody, baritone, Shelby Yamin, violin, Debra Nagy, oboe, Rebecca Reed, gamba & cello & Mark Edwards, harpsichord. Woody and De Priest recount the story of Orpheus’ descent to the underworld, his charming of Hades, and his attempt to bring Eurydice back to the land of the living in rarely-heard cantatas by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Philippe Courbois. By Much Love Betray’d, a new instrumental work by Woody, reimagines the powerful magic of Orpheus’ lyre. Online only, available for 30 days after premiere. Click here for tickets, here for an interview with Woody, and here for an advance review.

At 7:00 pm, Birch Browning leads the CSU Symphonic Wind Ensemble in concert in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, 2100 Euclid Ave. Free.

At 7:30 pm David Ellis leads the Case Camerata Chamber Orchestra in J.S. Bach’s Contrapuncti 1, 3, 5 & 11 (Art of Fugue) & Grieg’s Holberg Suite. Maltz Performing Arts Center, 1855 Ansel Road in University Circle, Cleveland. Tickets available online.

TODAY’S ALMANAC: 

Today we celebrate cellist, cultural ambassador, and humanitarian Yo-Yo Ma (pictured above), born on this date in 1955 in Paris. Since his days as a child prodigy, Ma has carved out a remarkably diverse career — one need to look no further than his expansive discography to understand why he is a household name around the world.

Ma is a person who enjoys building relationships and finding common ground with everyone he meets. Perhaps his best-known example of using music to find that common ground is The Silk Road Project, a collaborative enterprise to promote artistic exchanges between cultures, named after the 4,000-some miles of ancient trade routes that for two millennia linked parts of Asia with Europe and encouraged the trading of art, knowledge, philosophy and religion — as well as silk and other commercial goods.

Without a doubt, Ma is committed to bringing people together through music. In a 2013 interview with this publication, Ma said, “I do believe totally in what I’m trying to do, and I feel incredibly grateful — especially during these hard economic times. The world is changing so quickly and there are people left out. But we want to make sure that while things are changing, we have a sense of where we are going that we can all mutually work towards.”

He went on to say that culture and the arts are effective because as artists you are always working toward something bigger than yourself. “It’s not just about interest groups but rather that we have common interests. And sometimes the common interests get lost when we’re only saying ‘wait, you’ve got to look at me.’”

The cellist is also a firm believer in the power of education. In a 2013 interview prior to Silk Road’s appearance in Akron, Galician bagpipes player Christina Pato pointed out that the importance of education is very strong and the ensemble is constantly scheduling educational activities. “Watching Yo-Yo work has been an inspiration to all of us. He is constantly there worrying about everything,” Pato says. “Even in the middle of a long tour, he arrives at schools at 9 am to make things happen. He works with all the children and brings joy and happiness. It’s great to have a mentor like him.” [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

The afternoon opens with a Trinity Brownbag “Organ Spectacular” at 12 pm, with Todd Wilson and Nicole Keller (above) unveiling Trinity Cathedral’s new Muller Pipe organ through music by Sowerby, Hampton, Widor, Lemare, Shearing, and Soler (attend in person or via stream). And at 12:15, there’s a Dana School of Music Voice Area Recital at YSU’s Butler Institute of American Art.

The evening pairs string quartets and visual art when four CIM ensembles play works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Haydn in “Music in the Galleries” at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Details in our Concert Listings.

IN THE NEWS:

Last Thursday, Mike Telin rounded up several reviews of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer ever to be staged by the company.

Following up on the review by chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times has since sent two more critics to see the production — one specializing in classical music, the other in jazz (Blanchard is a jazz trumpeter as well as a composer). Read the post-opera discussion between Seth Colter Walls and Giovanni Russonello here.

Elsewhere in NYC, the New York Philharmonic is managing the challenge of being without a home venue this season during the renovation of David Geffen Hall. “This 2021-2022 season is shaping up as a militarylike exercise of logistics, dexterity and scheduling,” writes Adam Nagourney in the Times.

Here are the numbers: “For each move, over the course of 86 concerts in four main locations, six crew members will have to pack up to 30 cases of instruments and equipment and load them into a 24-foot-long truck for hauls that will range from five blocks (from Tully to the Rose) to three miles (Riverside Church) and later in the season to its old home, Carnegie Hall.”

And you thought you were having a hard day.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1882 in the village of Tymoszówka, now in Ukraine, one of the great Polish composers was born: Karol Szymanowski. Beloved in his home country, he has received a slew of state honors, both during his life and after it.

Among the more fun facts in that arena, a whole year was given to his name thanks to a resolution by the Polish Parliament: 2007 was decreed “The Year of Karol Szymanowski” — it was the 125th anniversary of his birth. And later that year he reached truly rarefied air among composers: he appeared on commemorative currency, pictured above.

[Read more…]

CONCERTS TODAY

Organist Jonathan Moyer plays a Noon recital on his home turf at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle featuring musical prayers by William Bolcom, César Franck & Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Moyer will use organs at both ends of the Covenant nave, and there are cookies to be had.

This evening, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society hosts the Imani Winds, not on its home turf but in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Flutist Brandon Patrick George, oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz, clarinetist Mark Dover, hornist Kevin Newton, and bassoonist Monica Ellis will play Eugène Bozza’s Scherzo, Elliott Carter’s Quintet, Henri Tomasi’s Cinq Danses, Anders Hillborg’s Six Pieces, and former Imani flutist Valerie Coleman’s Afro-Cuban Concerto.

Check our Concert Listings for details.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Between its international competitions, which now take place every four years, PianoCleveland sponsors a series of pianocentric events to keep the buzz going. The latest is a video contest, PianoFlicks, featuring six musicians in a variety of 30-second to five-minute videos in a worldwide contest on Wednesday, October 27 at 7:00 pm.

In a press release, PianoCleveland president Yaron Kohlberg writes, “We are excited about the opportunity for musicians to express and create in ways that go beyond the boundaries of traditional piano competitions or recitals, while making music more accessible for listeners at the same time.” Viewers can cast votes for contestants during the live broadcast for an audience prize of $300. Details here.

Ahead of the arrival of the Taliban, more than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives who are affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, have fled the country,

“The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around midday Eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.” Read the New York Times article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

A death, a birth, and a premiere stand out among the events that occurred on this date in classical music history.

The death: Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas in 1940 in Mexico City. Revueltas was championed by composer Carlos Chavez, who invited him to serve as his assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico until the two had a falling out over a commissioned work. His visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, sponsored by a leftist organization, ended with the victory of Francisco Franco, as did his musical career in Mexico not long afterward. [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

ON TONIGHT:

At 5:00, the Imani Winds will give a free guest presentation and Q&A at Oberlin Conservatory’s Warner Concert Hall, a precursor to their performance tomorrow on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series.

And at 7:30, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society presents the Auryn String Quartet  in works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn as the German ensemble winds down after 40 years. It’s free in person at Lakewood Congregational Church or via live stream.  Read a preview article here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

As Vinay Parameswaran, now the associate conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, told me a couple of years ago, his favorite moments with the Orchestra have been seeing music director Franz Welser-Möst conduct opera: Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen in 2017, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 2018, and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in 2019 (photo by Roger Mastroianni below).

“He’s one of the greatest opera conductors in the world,” Parameswaran said. “Tristan was revelatory. The way he was able to shape it, capture the drama, and give the singers exactly what they needed, he just made it look so effortless. And then of course this season with Ariadne — it’s some of the most beautiful music Strauss wrote, and we had an A+ cast. I think I’ll remember that long past my time here in Cleveland.”

On that note, let’s revisit the strange history of that Strauss work, which had its revised version — the more popular one, and the one that The Cleveland Orchestra performed — premiere on this date in 1916 at the Vienna Opera.

Before that, in its original form, Ariadne auf Naxos was part of a six-hour package deal. The majority of that duration was taken up by librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of the Molière play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, including incidental music by Strauss. Only at the end came the opera, replacing the Turkish ceremony that concludes the play: here, the foolish Monsieur Jourdain calls for an after-dinner performance of Ariadne auf Naxos, and the opera thus begins. 

A complicated, even clever idea, especially given that Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was from the start a hybrid of multiple art forms: a comédie-ballet, or a play containing interludes of music and dance.

But at the premiere in 1912 in Stuttgart, the audience was not thrilled. “It was a fiasco, as could easily have been predicted,” critic and Strauss scholar Michael Kennedy writes, going on to quote the composer:

[Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Although it may look like a mistake in the Concert Listings, CityMusic Cleveland and No Exit are indeed performing the same programs on Saturday as they did on Friday, but in different venues — CityMusic at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, and No Exit at Heights Arts, both at 7 pm.

Indoors on Sunday at 3 at Youngstown’s DeYor Center, the Dana Ensemble opens its second season with William Walton’s Façade (lampooned in the photo), and Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale — two iconic 20th-century theater works, and at the same hour, pianist Jeffrey Siegel returns for another season of his long-running “Keyboard Conversations” series, but now presented at the Maltz PAC.

Unfortunately for two planned al fresco events, rain is in the forecast for Sunday afternoon. MusiCLE Yours has just informed us that the “Porchester Concert” at the Cozad-Bates House (Underground Railroad Museum) has been moved one week later to Sunday, October 10 at 3.

Rain may dampen the spirits but won’t stop the bells of the McGaffin Carillon from ringing out over University Circle. The 4pm “Healing Bells” guest concert by Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra will go on as scheduled, and can be enjoyed under an umbrella, from your car, or via live stream. Read more about the program here.

INTERESTING READS:

Attempts to use technology to complete unfinished classical music works usually prove to be misguided and futile, but a recent experiment using artificial intelligence to bring Beethoven’s tenth symphony to life piqued our interest because of the involvement of pianist Robert Levin, who has applied his own impressive human intelligence to improvising cadenzas in the style of Mozart and Beethoven. Click here to read “How a Team of Musicologists and Computer Scientists Completed Beethoven’s Unfinished 10th Symphony” in The Conversation.

With reference to the Boston Pops and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette classical music critic Jeremy Reynolds considers how orchestral pops programming has evolved since 1885, when symphony orchestras in Boston began venturing outside standard symphonic repertoire.

He writes, “The classical canon has grown at tortoise speed, while rock, hip-hop and other genres have proliferated faster than rabbits — a trend that has continued to accelerate in the digital age. Orchestral pops programming now ranges from film scores, cartoon medleys and video game music to rap artists and jazz and circus acts. It’s whatever fusion of orchestral music and flavor-of-the-day entertainment the ensemble selects.”

Click here to read “America’s classical pops tradition is evolving, and PSO’s Byron Stripling has a new vision for it.”

NEWS BRIEFS:

This week, classical music media are reporting the deaths of Opera composer Carlysle Floyd, 95, on September 30 in Tallahassee, Florida, and of concert violinist James Buswell, 74, in Boston (no date given). Read obituaries here for Floyd in Opera News, and here for Buswell in The Strad.

WEEKEND ALMANAC:

Two prominent Black composers appear in this weekend’s honors list: R. Nathaniel Dett, who died on tour in Battle Creek, Michigan on October 2, 1943, and Zenobia Powell Perry, born in Boley, Oklahoma on October 3, 1908. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

The new month begins with concerts by two university orchestras — interim director David Becker and student conductor Jacob Kaminsky lead the BW Symphony in Brahms, Dvořák, and Saint-Saëns with faculty soloists Khari Joyner, cello, and Nicole Keller, organ. And Victor Liva and student conductor Jimmie Parker preside over the CSU Symphony for works by Haydn, Saint-Saëns and Fauré, featuring cello soloist Ovidiu Marinescu.

Meanwhile, CityMusic Cleveland plays Bruch, Kotoka Suzuki, Paul Schoenfeld, and Mozart at St. Noel in Willoughby Hills, and No Exit new music ensemble debuts works by Derrik Balogh, Giuseppe Desiato, and Jiří Trtík (pictured), along with pieces by Timothy Beyer and Agata Zubel, at SPACES Gallery.

Details in our Concert Listings.

MANDELS MAKE STUNNING GIFT TO THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA:

Cleveland Orchestra president and CEO André Gremillet announced on Thursday that the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation has bestowed a $50 million gift on the Orchestra — the largest in the ensemble’s 103-year history, as well as the largest in the 68-year history of the Foundation. $31.5 million of that will go to endowment funds that will support an annual Mandel Opera Festival, the Orchestra’s global digital offerings, and local programs and partnerships.

Gremillet added that “In recognition of the historic impact of this grant, we are naming our main performance space the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall.” The building, which also houses the Reinberger Chamber Hall, will henceforth be referred to as Severance Music Center, “or simply Severance.” Read the press release here. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni.)

NEWS BRIEFS:

Violinist Philip Setzer, already a  member of the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music, has been named Artistic Director of String Chamber Music at CIM, a capacity in which he will work with Si-Yan Darren Li, now promoted to Program Director. Setzer, a native Clevelander both of whose parents played in The Cleveland Orchestra, is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, which will disband at the end of the current season, and a longtime collaborator with cellist David Finckel and Wu Han in the piano trio that bears all three of their names.

VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH MARGARET BROUWER:

The Canton Symphony returns to live, in-person performances on October 10 with a program led by Gerhardt Zimmerman that includes Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn. Click here to watch a 25-minute interview in which associate conductor Matthew Jaroszewicz asks the composer about her life, career, and the inspiration behind her work.

TODAY’S ALMANAC

Last year on this date, we noted the births of French composer Paul Dukas and Russian American pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and the departures of Austrian American composer Ernst Toch and American composer Roy Harris. If you missed that diary, you can still read those entries here.

This October 1st we remember the launching of two American institutions.

On the first day of the tenth month of 1921, American choral conductor Margaret Hillis was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and three years later, the Curtis Institute of Music opened its doors in Philadelphia. [Read more…]

by Mike Telin

NEWS BRIEFS:

The biggest news in American music occurred this past Monday with the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Terrance Blanchard’s Fire Shot Up in My Bones (above, New York Times photo of Blanchard on the Met stage by Wayne Lawrence as published on The Hub (League of American Orchestras).

Yes it was the first performance on the Met stage in 18-months, but more importantly it was the first time the company has staged an opera by a Black composer (Blanchard), a Black librettist (Kasi Lemmons), a Black co-director for a main-stage production (Camille A. Brown), as well as an almost entirely Black cast, chorus and dance troupe. The Opera is based on a 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, recounting his turbulent upbringing in rural Louisiana.

Writing for NPR, Nate Chinen says that “Blanchard’s music for Fire is glowingly consonant but full of subtle harmonic and timbral surprises (along with strategic flickers of dissonance). He goes on to say: “Strikingly, given Blanchard’s profile as a jazz artist, Fire eludes description as a ‘jazz opera.’ Its language is avowedly classical, with elements drawn from the canonical composers, like Puccini, that defined Blanchard’s early exposure to the art form.” [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

ON TONIGHT:

7:00 brings a free CIM Faculty Recital at Mixon Hall, both in-person and online. In “Carolyn Warner & Friends XVIII” the pianist will be joined by Stephen Rose & Philip Setzer, violins, Stanley Konopka, viola, and Dane Johansen and Si-Yan Darren Li, cellos, in music by Haydn, Mahler, Schubert, and Dvořák. It’s free, but reservations are required to attend in person, though seats appear to be sold-out, or at least very limited. Fortunately, it will also be streamed.

And 8:00 brings ChamberFest Cleveland on WCLV’s Ovations, including Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 4 and Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1. Listen on WCLV, 104.9 FM or online. Free.

IN THE NEWS:

Single tickets for the Akron Symphony’s 2021-22 season will go on sale Friday, October 1 on the Orchestra’s website. Programming ranges from classics such as Beethoven’s Fifth to Handel’s Water Music to jazz-influenced works by Duke Ellington and Aldemaro Romero, works involving Korean dance, a collaboration with Akron-based EarthQuaker Devices, and a spotlight on composers who deserve greater recognition, like Florence Price, Julia Perry, and William Dawson.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Let’s revisit Daniel Hathaway’s entry from last year devoted to the Christian festival of Michaelmas, or the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, which falls on this date each year and marks the beginning of autumn. Now, take it away, Dan:

It lends its name to the fall term in British universities, and gives rise to a number of folk customs, including making Michaelmas Bannock on the eve of the Feast of Saint Michael from equal parts of barley, oats, and rye without employing any metal implements. And Michaelmas draws the line after which you should stop picking blackberries. That last piece of advice derives from the legend that when the Archangel Michael expelled the rebellious Lucifer from heaven, he landed in a blackberry bush (ouch!), which he cursed and defiled in a special way. Don’t eat the berries.

Angels — divine messengers charged with delivering news good and bad to humans — are part of the rich mythology of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam alike. The archangels Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel join a trio in “The Heavens are telling” in Haydn’s The Creation (sung here by the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under Robert Shaw). Later, Gabriel returns to the story to bring surprising news to Mary of Nazareth (listen to Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria sung by Chanticleer). He’s also likely to have been part of the heavenly host that sends the shepherds to the stable in Bethlehem (as re-enacted by Kiera Duffy and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Chorale). And Gabriel may even have taken up a viol to entertain the bystanders as in Matthias Grünewald’s altarpiece that Hindemith turned into “The Angel Concert” in Mathis der Maler (here played by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt).

[Read more…]