by Daniel Hathaway
LIVE AND ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:
The Callisto Quartet — Paul Aguilar & Rachel Stenzel, violins, Eva Kennedy, viola, and Hanna Moses, cello — play Mozart and Debussy live and al fresco tonight at 7 on a baseball field at Solon Community Park, courtesy of Chagrin Arts and the City of Solon. See the Concert Listings for social distancing details.
In another plein air event, George Leggiero plays a “Lunchtime Drive-in” carillon concert from the McGaffin Tower in University Circle at 12:15.
Also at noon, WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra features music by von Suppé, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss, and tonight, the MET Opera’s Archives present a 2009 performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, starring Elina Garanča and Lawrence Brownlee.
NEW FROM THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA:
The second set of TCO Classics is now available for on-demand streaming. The new collection is centered around the Orchestra’s 2018 festival in which Music Director Franz Welser-Möst considered Beethoven’s music through the metaphor of Prometheus.
The set includes a “video overview from Cleveland Orchestra Chief Artistic Officer Mark Williams, video collaboration featuring Orchestra members and students from Cleveland School of the Arts, pieces celebrating the life of modern-day Promethean hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and audio recordings of Franz Welser-Möst leading the Orchestra in all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, four Beethoven overtures, and Beethoven’s Große Fuge at Severance Hall.”
INTERESTING READS:
A newly-posted series of New York Times articles considers issues of race in classical music.
In interviews by Zachary Woolfe and Joshua Barone, nine Black musicians — bassoonist Monica Ellis, conductors Thomas Wilkins and Roderick Cox, composers Jessie Montgomery, Terrence Blanchard, and Tania León, clarinetist Anthony McGill, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and soprano Latonia Moore — “describe the steps they recommend to begin transforming a white-dominated field.”
In Opera Can No Longer Ignore Its Race Problem, Barone writes, “As the industry rebuilds from the coronavirus pandemic, it must face long-simmering issues of representation.”
And Anthony Tommasini recommends changes to the audition process in his article, To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1937, French composer, conductor and organist Gabriel Pierné died in Ploujean, Brittany. As organist, he succeeded César Franck at the Basilica of Ste-Clotilde. As conductor, he made an early name for himself by conducting the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet with the Ballets Russes. We mostly know the ballet in the form of an orchestral suite, but here’s a 2003 performance by the National Ballet of Canada that makes use of a recording by the Kirov Theatre Orchestra led by Valery Gergiev.
And on this date in 1935, American composer Peter Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa. Schickele’s alter ego was the ill-fated composer P.D.Q. Bach (1807–1742?, the 21st of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 20 children, and his only-forgotten son). Act fast and watch this program of music by both of his personas performed yesterday evening on Chamber Music Northwest’s Virtual Summer Festival (it’s only available until 11:59 pm on Friday, July 17. Program book here).
Here’s another much earlier performance where Schickele and Itzhak Perlman meet up at a Boston Pops concert led by John Williams. A third video preserves a performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2008 featuring Eric Charnofsky (banned instruments) and Zahari Metchkov (piano) playing P.D.Q.’s Erotica Variations.