by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Happy Valentine’s Day, that feast day in the early Christian calendar that originally 
celebrated two martyrs, but through mysterious processes like the medieval tradition of courtly love, has transmogrified into a festival celebrating human love and passion — and has become a boon for the greeting card, chocolate, and flower industry.
Live performances today include the Cassatt Quartet with Emely Phelps, piano (4:30 pm, Oberlin’s Kulas Hall), Stars in the Classics presents “Love Is in the Air” (6 pm, Cleveland Museum of Art Atrium), Baldwin Wallace Conservatory Opera presents Michael Ching’s humorous one-act opera Speed Dating Tonight! (7 pm in Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art), No Exit Presents John Faieta, trombone (7 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State), and Keith Lockhart leads The Cleveland Orchestra in music of John Williams (7:30 at Severance Music Center).
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Valentine’s Day deserves a celebratory playlist, and the classical repertory is rich with possibilities. We like the one proposed by The Guardian’s Tom Service more than a decade ago. Click here.
If you take my playlist as the starting point, you will wrest some small vestige of emotional truth in a day of cheapened sentimental trinketry and secondhand musical cliches of lurved-up hormones. Simply press play on the following, and let the real love and musical emotional therapy flow.
Or go for broke. Celebrate conductor Gustav Mahler’s first appearance in the U.S. on this date in 1911, when he conducted the New York Philharmonic in works by British composers Elgar and Stanford and American composers Chadwick, Hadley, Loeffler, and MacDowell (see the program here).
But for Valentine’s Day, listen to one of his own memorable pieces, the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, a love song to his wife, Alma, which took on an extra romantic dimension when Luchino Visconti used it as the soundtrack for his film Death in Venice.
Or plunge even deeper into the cauldron of romantic love with the “Prelude and ‘Liebestod’ from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (clip pictured above), performed here by Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra. The Deutsche Grammophon recording also serves as a memorial to engineer Michael Bishop and editor Thomas C. Moore.
If that’s a bit too rich, try some pieces by Catalan classical guitar composer Fernando Sor, born on this date in 1778. Listen here to Ricardo Gallén playing Sor’s Grande Sonate, Op. 22 in a live recording from Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall on one of the great romantic instruments.
