by Mike Telin
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.— Charles Mingus
IN TODAY’S ISSUE:
• Concerts by Carillonneur George Leggiero, pianist Caroline Oltmanns, the Krantz/Carlock/Lefebvre trio, The Cleveland Orchestra, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Les Délices.
• Ian Pomerantz says that it’s time to talk about antisemitism in the early music field.
• The Cleveland Cello Society has rescheduled their annual fundraiser, i Cellisti, And Valery Gergiev will not conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in concerts at Carnegie Hall.
• Almanac: the births of Dame Myra Hess (pictured) and Maryanne Amacher.
FRIDAY’S CONCERTS:
At 12:15 pm it’s the McGaffin Carillon Concert in University Circle. Carillonneur George Leggiero performs music by Matthias van den Gheyn, Géo Clément, Mendelssohn, and Purcell.
At 7:00 pm pianist Caroline Oltmanns performs works by Couperin, Schubert, Wilding Debussy and Beethoven at the Church of the Western Reserve. Also at 7:00, guitarist Wayne Krantz, drummer Keith Carlock, and bassist Tim Lefebvre play at the Bop Stop. A second show begins at 9:30.
There are three concerts beginning at 7:30 pm. Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra and Mitsuko Uchida in Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 in d rounds out the Severance Music Center program. Fridays @ Finney features the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Timothy Weiss, conducting, in works by Jesse Jones and Michael Frazier. And Les Délices returns to presenting live performances with the ensemble’s new program “Gods & Heroes” at Plymouth Church. Details in our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
In an opinion article for Early Music America, Ian Pomerantz says that it’s “Time to Talk about Antisemitism in Our field.” The bass-baritone says that he “Was once told by a Baroque opera director that he could not cast me in main roles because of my ‘exotic looks’ and that my ‘prominent nose’ could be distracting. But, he added, he would be fine casting me as a foreigner or something otherwise monstrous. Read the article here.
IN THE NEWS:
The Cleveland Cello Society has announced that i Cellisti, its annual extravaganza and fundraiser that was postponed due to a February snowstorm, has been rescheduled for Friday, April 8 at 7:30 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. Click here for more information.
Carnegie Hall has announced that this weekend’s Vienna Philharmonic concerts will not be led by the controversial conductor Valery Gergiev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pianist Denis Matsuev, an associate of Putin, also will not appear. Read the New York Times article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On February 25, 1890, English pianist Dame Myra Hess was born in South Hampstead, London. She made her professional debut in 1907 playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham. Hess toured extensively throughout Britain, the Netherlands, and France and made her U.S. debut in New York City in 1922.
The pianist may be most remembered for her performances during The Blitz in World War II. During that time Hess organized nearly 2,000 lunchtime concerts in Trafalgar Square’s National Gallery. The concerts were held every Monday and Friday for six-and-a-half years, and every performer was paid five guineas for their services. In 1941 King George VI made Hess a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In addition to an active performing career, Hess was a dedicated teacher. One of her students was Clive Lythgoe, the long-time Dean of Faculty at Cleveland’s Music School Settlement.
Hess’s legacy lives on at the Chicago Cultural Center with its Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts. The free lunchtime series is produced by Chicago’s International Music Foundation and broadcast live on WFMT and streamed on WFMT.com.
Click here to listen to an interview with Hess, and here for her performance of Chopin’s Waltz No. 1 in E flat Op. 18.
We also celebrate the birth of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher, who entered this world in 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania. Amacher is best known for her work in the phenomenon known as auditory distortion products.
Amacher attended the University of Pennsylvania where one of her teachers was Karlheinz Stockhausen. She continued her composition studies in Salzburg, Austria, and Dartington, England, and graduate work in computer studies and acoustics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During a fellowship at Harvard and MIT, Amacher was recruited by John Cage to collaborate on several projects including a soundtrack for his 1975 multimedia piece Lecture in the Weather. The recipient of major commissions around the globe, in 2005 she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica in the “Digital Musics” category for her project TEO! A sonic sculpture. Click here to listen to Living Sound, for “Sound-joined Rooms” series (1980).