by Daniel Hathaway
In today’s entries:
• the British invasion at Severance features two recently appointed Dames
• choral concerts return to Gartner Auditorium & St. John’s Cathedral
• BW and Oberlin continue their opera runs with Mozart and Cimarosa
• Composers Guild repackages new music in old containers
TODAY’S EVENTS:
Two Englishwomen recently named dames of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire are in charge of The Cleveland Orchestra concert tonight at Severance Music Center. Dame Jane Glover will lead works by Mozart (the 22nd Piano Concerto), Vaughan Williams (the Tallis Fantasia) & Britten (the Suite on English folk tunes), and Dame Imogen Cooper will be featured in the concerto.
Visiting choirs from South Carolina and Philadelphia will go head-to-head tonight. At 7:30, The Crossing, a professional ensemble led by Donald Nally which specializes in new music, will premiere Stacy Garrop’s In a House Besieged in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with Scott Detra at the Holtkamp organ. The work is a commission from the Musart Society in memory of Robert G. Schneider, who chaired the music department and directed the Shaker Heights High School choirs for over 30 years before a tragic road accident in Italy took his life in 2018.
At the same hour, two vocal ensembles led by English-born countertenor David Acres will come together for “Lenten Reflections” in St John’s Cathedral. Contrapunctus Early Music (based in Cleveland) and King’s Counterpoint (from Charleston, S.C.), will end the de facto ban on choral singing during the pandemic with sacred choral music from six centuries.
Flip a coin if you’re a comic opera fan who can’t decide between two competing collegiate productions this weekend — The Marriage of Figaro (score by Mozart, libretto by da Ponte) at Baldwin Wallace University, and The Secret Marriage (music by Domenico Cimarosa, to a libretto by Giovanni Bertati) at Oberlin Conservatory.
And at the same hour in another space at Baldwin Wallace, Cleveland Composers Guild presents “Old Wine in New Bottles,” modern music poured into classic forms by Ryan Ramer, Margi Griebling Haigh, Jeffrey Quick, Bill Rayer, Lorenzo Salvagni, Sebastian Birch, Jennifer Conner, and Karen Griebling.
Check our Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
We’ll start by reminding the Faithful (and informing the Unchurched) that today is the Christian Feast of The Annunciation that celebrates the visit of the Archangel Gabriel to young Mary of Nazareth to deliver a surprising birth announcement exactly nine months before Christmas.
That event is richly celebrated in art, but perhaps most beautifully in music by Bavarian composer Franz Biebl in his Ave Maria, popularized in the U.S. by Chanticleer. Listen here to a COVID-era joint performance by Chanticleer and the male voice choir Cantus in Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis last January.
And to celebrate the premiere of one of the rare 15th-century works for which we know the exact date, here’s a stunning performance of Guillaume DuFay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores, written for the consecration of the Cathedral of Florence on this date in 1436 (notes and translations appear in the comments).
The following tribute to Béla Bartók by Mike Telin was published in this Diary one year ago.
On March 25, 1881 composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and teacher Béla Viktor János Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania.
Bartók began studying piano with his mother, and at age nine started composing dance pieces. From 1899 to 1903, he studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. It was there that he met Zoltán Kodály and the two became lifelong friends and colleagues — they both shared an interest in folk music.
In 1908 Bartók and Kodály traveled into the farthest regions of the country to collect folk tunes, but what they discovered was that the Maygar folk melodies popularized by Franz Liszt they had previously thought of as Gypsy music were based on a pentatonic scale similar to that found in Asian folk melodies.
Although one doesn’t need to be an expert on all of this to enjoy Bartók’s music, here are a couple important things to remember:
- Bartók catalogued more than 9,600 melodies of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian origin.
- Bartók incorporated these melodies into his compositions, often quoting them note for note.
- Bartók’s musical style is a mixture of folk music, classicism, and modernism.
If you’re so inclined, click here to listen to Thomas Little (AKA The Classical Nerd) explain all you need to know about the composer in seven and a half minutes.
If you’re looking for something a little more in-depth, click here to watch A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts’ beautiful documentary about the composer.
If you want to know more about the theory behind Bartók’s musical practices, click here to watch Axis Theory make the complicated simple — it really is quite fun.
On a personal note, my introduction to Bartók’s music came early in my teens when my junior high school band director gifted me an LP of George Szell conducting The Cleveland Orchestra in a performance of the Concerto for Orchestra. From then on I was seriously hooked.
Click here to listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky give the Broadcast premiere of the piece (with its original ending) on December 30, 1944.
If you’re looking for something special to do on that first Zoom date, click here to enjoy Bluebeard’s Castle (you’ll need to scroll down a bit).
Click here to listen to Pierre Boulez and the Philharmonia Orchestra play The Miraculous Mandarin (you can follow along with the score).
Click here to get a bird’s-eye view of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.
And finally, click here for a performance of the Sixth Quartet played by the Hungarian String Quartet (again, you can follow along with the score).
