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DIARY: Friday, July 16, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS AND UPDATES:

Chagrin Arts’ 7:00 pm al fresco concert by the Callisto Quartet has been moved indoors at the Solon Center for the Arts. (Picture: before last year’s concert on a baseball diamond in Solon).

Keep an eye on weather updates for the Suburban Symphony’s 7:00 pm performance at the Church of the Western Reserve.

Also at 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition broadcasts the sixth and final session of its First Round, and the Oberlin Como Piano Festival features an interview with Dang Thai Son and master class performances.

And in Wooster, Ohio Light Opera’s Musical Magic features musical theater numbers and swing tunes at City Square Steakhouse.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

This week’s WKSU Shuffle podcast with Amanda Rabinowitz features sounds and reflections from The Cleveland Orchestra’s first rehearsal since the shutdown, and a preview of the Orchestra’s summer schedule and beyond with ClevelandClassical.com founder and editor Daniel Hathaway. Listen here on Spotify.

Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács reports that his 2011 recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas has sold out and is being released with a new design by Cambria Master Recordings. Click here for more information.

Early Music America is seeking applicants for its 2021-2022 Emerging Professional Leadership Council. Students, performers, researchers and administrators under the age of 35 are invited to apply by August 9. Read the guidelines here.

And the New York Chapter of the American Guild of Organists has named Paul Jacobs as its 2021 International Performer of the Year. “The only organ soloist ever to have won a GRAMMY Award — in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering Livre du Saint-Sacrèment — Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent champion of his instrument both in the United States and around the world.” Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Scottish composer James MacMillan was born on July 16, 1959 in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. I interviewed Chanticleer’s music director Tim Keeler yesterday for a preview of their forthcoming performance on the Tuesday Musical series in Akron on July 27, and one of the works he highlighted was MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn. It figures importantly in a program titled “Awakenings” that celebrates the re-emergence of vocal music as the pandemic loosens its grip on the choral world. “It’s a prayer to beckon the new day, a prayer for light to shine in darkness.” Listen here to the brief but moving piece as performed by Britain’s Apollo 5 at the VOCES8 Foundation in London, the former St. Anne & St. Agnes Church near St. Paul’s Cathedral that was designed by Christopher Wren.

And American musician and composer Stewart Copeland came onto the scene in Alexandria, Virginia on this date in 1959. Best known as the drummer for the British rock group Police, Copeland wrote his first opera on commission from Cleveland Opera. Holy Blood and Crescent Moon received its debut in the State Theater in October of 1989, directed by David Bamberger and conducted by Imre Palló. The New York Times ran John Rockwell’s candid review of the opening performance (read it here). Later, Anne Midgette mentioned the work in a 2013 Washington Post article about rock musicians who undertake writing opera — by now Copland had finished his fourth theater piece and was working on a fifth.

Midgette quotes the composer: “I think when you do something as engrossing as opera,” says Copeland, who approached his first opera commission in 1989 as a kind of a lark, “every time you figure something out, you want to get it better next time.” Watch his 2010 chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart — based on the Edgar Allen Poe story — here.

DIARY: Thursday, July 15, 2021

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by Mike Telin

TODAY’S EVENTS:

At 7:00 pm it’s the Cleveland International Piano Competition Round 1, Session 5. Contestants perform their solo recitals of 20 minutes from around the world. Suah Ye (20, South Korea), Philipp Lynov (22, Russia), Clayton Stephenson (22, United States) and Arsenii Mun (21, Russia). Click here at start time to watch the free videos.

Want to hear the event with others? Pack a picnic and bring lawn chairs to watch performances under the stars on the big screen at the Beachwood Community Center, 25225 Fairmount Blvd., Beachwood.

Also at 7:00 pm is Day 3 of the Oberlin-Como Piano Festival: Master Classes and Interviews. The Marvel of the Baroque on the Pianoforte will feature an interview with William Grant Naboré and performances by Xiaoyu Liu, Leonardo Pierdomenico, Anastasia Vaorotnaya, and Daniela Jiménez Ochoa. The free event is part of Oberlin’s Stage Left series. View here at start time.

IN THE NEWS:

Tuesday Musical is offering a 50% discount on tickets for groups of 6 or more for the concert by Chanticleer (pictured) on Tuesday, July 27, 7:30 pm at Akron’s EJ Thomas Hall. Stay after and celebrate during an audience reception. This offer is only available by calling 330-761-3460 by July 22 at 5 pm — it is not available online. Single tickets can be purchased here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

July 15 presents a number of noteworthy events beginning with the death of Carl Czerny in 1857 at age 66 in Vienna. For those who only know the celebrated teacher as the person who wrote the many technical studies we all had to endure as piano students, one must remember that he was also a prolific composer  with over one thousand works — sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, and choral pieces — to his credit. Click here to listen to his Variations on a Theme by Rode, Op. 33 (“La ricordanza”) played by pianist Alexis Weissenberg.

Another passing of note is that of violinist Leopold Auer in 1930 at Loschwitz, near Dresden. While he was the dedicatee of many works during his lifetime, perhaps the best known is Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Although he initially regarded the work as unplayable and refused to give the concerto’s premiere, he later — after some re-editing of the solo part — became a champion of the piece.

July 15, 1933 saw the birth of English guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream in London. With a career that spanned over a half-century, Bream is credited with transforming the classical guitar — in the eyes of the public —  into an instrument worthy of being performed in the world’s great concert halls. The list of composers who dedicated pieces to Bream include Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett, Leo Brouwer, Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Benjamin Britten. Bream plays Britten’s Nocturnal here.

One year later, English composer Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington, Lancashire. His 1986 Earth Dances have been compared to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Christoph von Dohnányi recorded the work in 1996 with The Cleveland Orchestra for Decca (listen here), but there’s also a video of a performance by Cologne’s Gürzenich Orchestra led by Marcus Stenz.

1946 saw the birth of American singer Linda Ronstadt in Tucson, Arizona. She began her prolific career as a member of The Stone Poneys — Click here to listen to their 1967 hit Different Drum. Never content to be boxed into a genre, Ronsdadt would later star in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, first with the New York Shakespeare Company, and later on Broadway and in the 1983 film version — listen to Poor Wandering One here. She also toured with The Nelson Riddle Orchestra. She sings Falling in Love Again here.

We conclude today’s list with two local connections. The first is that of Swiss American composer Ernst Bloch, who died on this date in 1959 in Portland, Oregon. Bloch served as founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1920-1925 before moving on to the San Francisco Conservatory. Among Bloch’s music based on Jewish themes is his tone poem about King Solomon, Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque. Listen here to a live Blossom Festival performance in 1980 by cellist Janós Starker with The Cleveland Orchestra, led by Eduardo Mata.

And July 15 1988 saw Robert Shannon give the premiere of John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 1 In Memoriam Roger Sessions at the Dorothy Taubman Piano Institute in Amherst, MA. The sonata was written for Shannon, a long-time faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory, and for Ursula Oppens and Alan Feinberg, on a consortium commission from the National Endowment for the Arts. Click here to listen to Shannon’s recording.

DIARY: Wednesday, July 14, 2021

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by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

At 2:00 pm, Ohio Light Opera presents an outdoor performance of The Fantasticks at Wayne Center for the Arts in Wooster.

7:00 brings two options, one in person and the other virtual: a Summer Concert from Apollo’s Fire at Akron Art Museum, and Day 2 of the Oberlin-Como Piano Festival, featuring an interview and master class with Stanislav Ioudenitch.

And at 7:30, both in person and live-streamed, the Kent Blossom Music Festival presents the opener to its Faculty Concert series: a recital from violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang. (Read Stephanie Manning’s preview article here.)

Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Three prominent composers from three different continents celebrate birthdays today.

Among the broad range of interests of Columbia University faculty member George Lewis (born in Chicago in 1952) is improvisation, particularly as a trombonist. Listen to a brilliant improv between Lewis (trombone) and Yi-Yi Wang (erhu), performed at Florida State University in 1993.

Another long-held interest: the role of computers in composition and performance. That area includes the development of his improvising software Voyager, which reacts in real time to the input of a human performer. Listen to his 2011 Interactive Trio for trombone, two pianos, and interactive music system here, in a performance by Lewis and pianist Amina Claudine Meyers. (Check out Lewis’ virtuosic improvisation around the 9:22 mark.)

He is also a highly respected scholar and musicologist. Among his many publications, his 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music — which received the American Book Award — explores the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which Lewis joined at age 19.

Weaving together portraits of many, many musicians, that book led critic Greg Tate to say to Lewis, “It’s like you wrote a Russian family novel of the A.A.C.M.” (Perhaps the rare musicological work that could translate to an audiobook for your next road trip? Voice actors galore.) Read more about the organization and the book in Lewis’ 2008 interview with The New York Times.

As a recipient of both a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowship, Lewis isn’t alone as a celebrated living composer on today’s list — he’s joined by Unsuk Chin. Born in Seoul in 1961 but by now a Berliner for over 30 years, she also boasts a bio full of prestigious awards, positions, and associations with a who’s-who of top musicians and ensembles.

Among her most acclaimed pieces are several highlighting soloists. Her 1991-93 Akrostichon–Wortspiel (“Acrostic-Wordplay”) for soprano and ensemble is considered her international breakthrough, while her Violin Concerto won the 2004 Grawemeyer Award. To top it off, her Cello Concerto was ranked by The Guardian in 2019 as the 12th greatest work of 21st-century art music.

“I’m attracted by virtuosity,” Chin said in an interview with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim for The New York Times in 2014. “This enthusiasm and virtuosity of a player trying to go beyond his or her boundaries: I like that. It’s a situation that I experience all the time as a composer: pushing the limits of your possibilities, not knowing whether you can do it — and then somehow succeeding. I ask every bit as much from a soloist.”

That article also brought a performer’s perspective to the table — in this case, those of Finnish clarinetist Kari Kriikku, who was to give the American premiere of Chin’s Clarinet Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. “A composer asks questions a musician would not think to ask,” Kriiku noted, adding that after the world premiere in Gothenburg, Sweden, Chin’s only advice was to “sound more like a bird.”

Judging by this excerpt, he succeeded.

And Gerald Finzi, born in London in 1901, is most famous for his lyrical, pastoral style, and in particular as a choral composer, a category that includes his Christmas Scene In terra pax.

Finzi blows out candles from the great beyond, where he’s been in residence since 1956 — perhaps finishing what was likely to be a piano concerto. (After his death, two movements of it were published as their own separate works, including the Eclogue for piano and strings, heard here in a performance featuring Roberto Plano.)

Then again, assuming there are no deadlines in the afterlife — and probably many better things to do than work — perhaps the concerto is still on his desk, just one thing in a stack of projects and to-do lists being happily — finally — neglected.

DIARY: Tuesday, July 13, 2021

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by Stephanie Manning

TONIGHT IN-PERSON AND ONLINE:

The Oberlin-Como Piano Festival begins tonight at 7:00, presented online as part of Oberlin’s Stage Left Series. The Day 1 program, Piano Concerti of Beethoven and Brahms, will include an interview with Yefim Bronfman followed by performances and master classes with Anastasia Vorotnaya, Xiaoyu Liu, Leonardo Pierdomenico, and Yangrui Cai. Tune in here, and learn more about the festival in this preview article.

And at 8:00 in Cleveland Heights, Apollo’s Fire will feature harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell and violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in an energetic program of Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann. Tickets are available here.

IN THE NEWS:

The Cleveland Institute of Music is welcoming three new members to the conservatory faculty (pictured). They are violinist Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quartet and two Cleveland Orchestra musicians: assistant concertmaster Jessica Lee and principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag. All are recruiting students for 2022-23, and Silberschlag will co-teach with CIM’s head of the horn department and Cleveland Orchestra principal horn emeritus, Richard King.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was obsessed with the number thirteen — notable, then, that he died on this day in 1951, a Friday the 13th, at the age of 76 (7+6 = 13). For a concise introduction to his life and works, check out this ten-minute YouTube video by Samuel Andreyev.

Schoenberg is best known for his use of a compositional technique called twelve-tone serialism, which can create a dissonant or “scary” sound. Learn more about this system and its evolution in this article in The New York Times. Even before he finalized the technique, Schoenberg embraced atonality in his earlier works, such as Pierrot Lunaire. Listen (and watch) a fantastic performance by the Israeli Chamber Project on YouTube here.

Despite Schoenberg’s lasting association with serialism, many of his works also incorporated classical forms and techniques. A great example is his Piano Concerto, which soloist Kirill Gerstein performed with The Cleveland Orchestra in 2017. In our preview for that performance, we interviewed Gerstein, who explained that “there’s a lot of dance in the concerto. There’re some waltzes, some gavottes, and some marches — really traditional musical references.”

The Cleveland Orchestra will perform Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto again on February 24-26, 2022 — this time with pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Franz Welser-Möst will conduct the program, which also includes Brucker’s Symphony No. 9.

Just like Schoenberg’s music itself, the story behind the Piano Concerto is complicated. He was commissioned to write it by one of his students at UCLA, Oscar Levant, who thought it would be a short composition — but Schoenberg fleshed it out into four movements, charging Levant an exorbitant sum which he then refused to pay. Though Levant eventually relented, it was another student of Schoenburg, Eduard Steuermann, who premiered the work in 1944.

Photo of glass armonica

And on this date in 1762, Benjamin Franklin announced the creation of a new instrument (pictured). Inspired by the sounds produced by swirling a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, Franklin worked with a glassmaker to create a series of spinning glass bowls he named the armonica. The instrument became so popular that it was featured in compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, and Donizetti, but it was largely forgotten by the 1820s.

Franklin ultimately made no money from the construction of more than 5,000 armonicas, because he refused to patent or copyright any of his inventions. He explained the reason why in his autobiography:

“As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

DIARY: Monday, July 12, 2021

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by Jarrett Hoffman

GUITAR SOCIETY NEWS:

As we wait for the organization’s final three Creative Fusion videos to emerge in the last week of July and first week of August, the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society has made an announcement to tide us over: the lineup for this fall’s International Series, set to be presented in person.

The season opens with the free Showcase Concert on September 18 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, featuring a triple billing of artists from around the region: the Gruca White Ensemble (guitarist Robert Gruca and flutist Linda White), guitarist Andy Poxon with violinist Jeanelle Brierley, and Cincinnati composer and guitarist Jeremy Collins.

That will be followed by solo recitals from Celil Refik Kaya (October 23) and Andrea González Caballero (November 20) at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. Tickets for those two events are available here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Russian composer Anton Arensky, German flutist and composer Johann Quantz, and English composer and folksong collector George Butterworth turned up in the calendar last year on July 12. This year we’ll turn our attention to American clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, born on this date in 1942 in Omaha.

A two-time Grammy winner, Stoltzman has also achieved some important firsts among the woodwind family, and of his instrument in particular. He was the first wind player to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, and he gave the first clarinet recitals in the history of Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. He’s also a rare breed as a solo clarinetist rather than an orchestral player.

Acclaimed in both the classical and jazz realms, for a long time Stoltzman struggled with being musically categorized. As he told Kathy Wilson of Cincinnati-based publication CityBeat in 2000, “When I was younger, RCA would say, ‘We have to figure out what bin you’re in.’”

Musicians who occupy multiple genres are often asked how they change gears when the time calls for it. “What I like to feel is that I don’t switch from a so-called Classical person to a Jazz person, but that I listen to what the composer is saying,” he told Wilson in that same interview.

On that occasion, Stoltzman was returning to Cincinnati, the city where he graduated high school (one of two significant regional connections — he’s also an Ohio State grad), to join the Cincinnati Symphony for Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, which moves from a smooth, elegant, and beautiful first movement to a jaunty, modernist, and jazz-influenced second, with a fascinating cadenza bridging the gap stylistically.

About that cadenza, he said, “…you turn around the corner, and that’s where Copland basically says, ‘Kick it up a notch.’ That changes how you’re going to play…how you’re going to use your tongue, your breath, your bravado.” Listening to the composer — and responding.

Click here to watch him perform that work with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony in 1993, in a recording full of incredible playing, engaging videography, and old-fashioned hairdos. (The cadenza begins at 6:25.)

Chamber music is what won Stoltzman both of his Grammys — in 1983, Brahms’ Clarinet Sonatas with pianist Richard Goode (listen to the first movement of No. 2 here), and in 1996, the Clarinet Trios of Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart with pianist Emanuel Ax and cellist Yo-Yo Ma (first movement of the Brahms here).

And for something jazzy, check out Chick Corea’s Marika Groove, written in 2012 for Stolzman and virtuoso marimbist Mika Yoshida (now his wife, Mika Stoltzman). In this live recording, they’re joined by drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Eddie Gomez, percussionist Duke Gadd, and guitarist John Tropea.

DIARY: Weekend, July 10-11, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:

On Saturday, Ohio Light Opera presents a cabaret of songs from musicals the company has produced since 1979 (outdoors in Wooster’s Public Square), Cleveland International Piano Competition releases the Round 1, Session 3 videos of performances by Vitaly Starikov (25, Russia), Anastasiya Magamedova (23, United States/Tajikistan), Ziyu Liu (22, China), Daria Parkhomenko (29, Russia), and Rafael Skorka (32, Israel), and Apollo’s Fire features violinists Olivier Brault, Alan Choo, and Emi Tanabe in showpieces by Telemann and J.S. Bach in Avon Lake.

On Sunday, Cleveland International Piano Competition contestants Bowen Li (24, China), Roman Lopatynskyi (27, Ukraine), Martín García García (24, Spain), Svetlana Andreeva (32, Russia), and Byeol Kim (31, South Korea) perform via video in Round 1, Session 4, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute wraps up its concert series in Gates Mills with a program sparked by young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, The Cleveland Orchestra welcomes guests — conductor Dame Jane Glover and pianist Conrad Tao (pictured) — in its second Blossom weekend, and two orchestras perform al fresco: the Suburban Symphony in Shaker Heights, and the Akron Symphony at Hale Farm.

Details in our Concert Listings.

Just a reminder that we’ll be posting mini-reviews of the piano competition rounds soon after each session in the special CIPC section of our front page, and that once the individual round videos have debuted, they’ll remain available for viewing on the PianoCleveland website.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

On this weekend’s list of commemorations: conductor Herbert Blomstedt (born on July 11, 1927), who will conduct Beethoven at Blossom on August 1, Jerry Herman (born on July 10, 1933), composer of such Broadway hits as Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles, pianist Ferdinand Joseph Morton (a.k.a. Jelly Roll), who claimed to have invented jazz, a boast about which Gunther Schuller wrote there is “no proof to the contrary,” and Arthur Fiedler, longtime Boston Pops conductor (who died at the age of 84 on June 10, 1979). Here is some rare footage of the Boston Pops July 4, 1976 concert at the Esplanade that drew more than 600,000 people. [Read more…]

DIARY: Friday, July 9, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

NEWS AND UPDATES:

We’ve just received news of the death of Kathleen Shamp (pictured, right) on June 10 at the age of 93. The Wooster native served as music librarian at the Cleveland Public Library for 50 years (1950-2000), sang with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under George Szell and Robert Shaw (1954-1974), and served on the music staffs of Epworth-Euclid (now University Circle) United Methodist and Plymouth churches. A Memorial Service will be held at 11:00 am on Saturday, July 24 at the University Circle United Methodist Church, 1919 E. 107th Street. Read an obituary here.

Pianist Conrad Tao will replace Benjamin Grosvenor with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra on Sunday evening, July 11 at Blossom, and the Mozart concerto has been changed to No. 23 in A, K. 488.

The Cleveland Philharmonic announces auditions for the new season under music director Victor Liva. Openings are available in all string sections as well as percussion and oboe. Details here.

The Cleveland Institute of Music has named Alison King as its first-ever Director of Digital Media. She comes to CIM from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she served as director of marketing and business development.

HAPPENING TODAY:

Round One, Session Two of the Cleveland International Piano Competition will be conducted via pre-recorded videos made from around the world. Tune in at 7:00 pm to hear Lucas Thomazinho (25, Brazil), Zhi Chao Juli Jia (29, China), Jiarui Cheng (22, China), and Yedam Kim (32, South Korea). It’s free.

The next-to-last ENCORE Chamber Music Institute Concert of the season features guitarist JIJI, with Jinjoo Cho, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Minhye Choi, violins, Stephen Wyrczynski, viola, and Max Geissler, cello in “Sparked by Frida [Kahlo].” Music by Albeniz,  Ponce, Isabella Leonarda, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla, Frantz Casseus, Boccherini, and Roland Dyens. The in-person event begins at 7 pm in the Dodero Center for the Performing Arts at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills. [Read more…]

DIARY: Thursday, July 8, 2021

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by Mike Telin

TODAY’S EVENTS:

At 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition gets underway with Round 1, Session 1. Four of the 26 contestants perform 20-minute solo recitals, pre-recorded from around the world. Today’s lineup: Lin Ye (28, China), Stefano Andreatta (29, Italy), Ying Li (23, China) & Honggi Kim (29, South Korea). Click here at start time. Free. Click here to read a preview article.

IN THE NEWS:

When Jeanne Lamon (pictured), founder and longtime artistic director of Tafelmusik, the Toronto Baroque orchestra, passed away on June 20 at the age of 71, she left the world with many exceptional recordings she had made with that stellar ensemble. Writing in the July 6 edition of San Francisco Classical Voice, Nicholas Jones has assembled an annotated playlist in tribute to the violinist who led the ensemble for 33 years. Click here to read “The Essential Jeanne Lamon.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1883, Australian American pianist, composer, and folk tune arranger Percy Grainger was born in Melbourne — he became a U.S. Citizen in 1919. Click here to listen to a selection of piano rolls that preserve his performances of his popular works. And in 1939, Spanish composer Fernando Sor died in Paris.

July 8 also marks the world debut of American avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil in 1900 in Trenton, New Jersey. The young George began learning piano at the age of six. In 1916, he began studying composition with Constantine von Sternberg in Philadelphia. It was there that he was exposed to conceptual art, including Dadaism.  Anthiel would later become a pupil of Ernest Bloch. Although Bloch was initially skeptical of Antheil’s talents, calling his compositions “empty” and “pretentious,” his teacher was eventually won over by the young composer’s enthusiasm and energy.

During his lifetime, Antheil composed symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. In addition to music, his interests included endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history, and he was co-holder (with actress Hedy Lamarr) of a patent for what today is known as “spread-spectrum technology.”

An excellent writer, at the age of sixteen, Antheil wrote an essay for the Trenton High School Spector titled “A Madman’s Narrative,” which begins “I am not mad. They are all maniacs here; all but me. I, alone am sane; a great composer, yet they tell me I am also mad. Surely, sir, you will not make that mistake. See how calm I am, how measured I talk.” Click here to continue reading. He would pen many articles during his life including his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music.

Although Antheil composed over 300 works, his Ballet mécanique is the most famous. Written in 1924 the work is scored for 16 player pianos playing four separate parts, four bass drums, three xylophones, a tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three different-sized airplane propellers (high wood, low wood, and metal), as well as two human-played pianos. Click here to read more about that notorious composition and here for a performance by Ensemble Modern, led by Peter Rundel.

 

DIARY: Wednesday, July 7, 2021

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by Jarrett Hoffman

SALONERA SEASON 2:

In the language of the television industry — not a strange comparison considering the pandemic-era broadcasts of classical music organizations — there is reason to celebrate, because Les Délices has picked up SalonEra for a second season.

From September to April, Les Délices will release twelve episodes that, in trademark form, will bring together conversation, performance, and a diverse slate of emerging and established musicians.

Among the eclectic themes and repertoire set to be covered: “insights from living composers who take cues from their Baroque Era forebears, an homage to 17th-cent. Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a deep-dive into the technological shifts of the turn of the 16th century, and much more.” Read the press release here.

TONIGHT IN PERSON & ONLINE:

The Cleveland International Piano Competition kicks off at 7pm with its free Opening Ceremony hosted by Yaron Kohlberg and Zsolt Bognár, allowing you to meet the 26 contestants and hear a performance by 2016 First Prize winner Nikita Mndoyants.

And the Verona Quartet and pianist Scott Cuellar will have the honor of giving Oberlin’s first in-person concert in nearly 16 months. Their 7:30 program in Stull Recital Hall — which will also be streamed — includes music by Puccini, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, and Grażyna Bacewicz.

Links and details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC, WITH SHERLOCK HOLMES:

On this day last year, we honored several noted classical musicians who were born or died on July 7th in history, including Gustav Mahler, Giovanni Bottesini, Gian-Carlo Menotti, and Leo Sowerby.

This time around, we’ll step into another artistic discipline for a moment, as a gateway into film and television music. The starting point is British writer (and physician) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who died on July 7, 1930, and who is best known for dreaming up the character of that detective known for his wonderfully ridiculous abilities of logic and deduction.

Sherlock Holmes inspired a large output from Conan Doyle — 4 novels and 56 short stories — and still much more from the hands of other creative people ever since, spanning several media. In fact, the Guinness World Records announced in 2012 that Holmes had achieved — yes — a world record, having been depicted in film and television 254 times (besting Shakespeare’s Hamlet by 48).

That also means an astounding amount of music inspired by the prickly yet delightful character of Holmes and his adventures that never fail to sink their teeth into you, derailing whatever else you might have planned to do with your day.

On that note, the aptly named publication Den of Geek has done the world a favor by rounding up a long list of YouTube videos with music from the many, many Sherlock films and TV shows.

Some highlights? The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) has to be included, thanks to its unique scoring by Miklós Rózsa, that great composer of both film and concert music. The extended violin solo a couple of minutes in is a particular treat — and is of course fitting for the Stradivarius-playing detective.

Patrick Gowers is responsible for the excellent theme to the TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (starring the celebrated Jeremy Brett), which ran from the mid-‘80s to mid-‘90s. Gowers captures a keen sense of intrigue that now feels very Holmes, and that has inspired the music of some of the more contemporary screen adaptations, including the spectacular BBC series Sherlock (2010-2017).

In the theme to that recent show — its earworm of a main melody coming in at the 1:49 mark — composers David Arnold and Michael Price hone in not only on mystery, but also on the humorous flavor of Holmes’ (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson’s (Martin Freeman) gallivanting adventures around modern-day London in this take on the story.

Finally, who doesn’t like some good, fun camp? Check out 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, where composer James Bernard embraces horror in a way that should make you smile.

DIARY: Tuesday, July 6, 2021

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by Daniel Hathaway

VOTE FOR YOUR LOCAL ORCHESTRA

For the fourth year in a row, Gramophone magazine will be naming an Orchestra of the Year by public vote. The Cleveland Orchestra is among the ten worldwide ensembles to be nominated for 2021, based on the quality of their recordings. The other nine are the Academy of Ancient Music (UK), Accademia Bizantina (Italy), Bamberger Symphoniker (Germany), Berliner Philharmoniker (Germany), Philharmonia Orchestra (UK), Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (Canada), Minnesota Orchestra (USA), Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Singapore), and Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich (Switzerland).

Gramophone has created Apple Music playlists in lossless audio for each ensemble, as well as a dynamic playlist that will be updated throughout the summer. Listen HERE.

Voting opened at noon on July 1 and remains live until 8 am (BST) on Monday, September 13. Votes can be cast on Gramophone’s website ,. The Orchestra of the Year will be revealed on October 5 at the 2021 Gramophone Classical Music Awards.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Considering the withering heat and humidity of the past few days, doesn’t an afternoon in a cool, dark movie theater sound enticing? Or perhaps just a couple of hours on the couch in the A/C enjoying the music of one of the world’s premier film composers — Ennio Morricone, who died on July 6, 2020 at the age of 91.

Although Morricone never left Rome and never learned to speak English, he created some 400 film scores and a hundred classical compositions. Click here to listen to 39 excerpts from his oeuvre.

Among the other aspects of his intriguing life, Morricone was a skillful chess player who once held grand master Boris Spassky to a draw in a simultaneous competition involving 27 players, of which he was the last man standing.

Morricone’s instrument was the trumpet, and we can honor him as well as the memory of Ryan Anthony, who studied at CIM, taught at Oberlin, played with the Canadian Brass, and who performed “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission with members of the Dallas Symphony at a Cancer Blows benefit on March 4, 2015, before Anthony’s untimely death just a year ago. Listen here.

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