by Daniel Hathaway
MISSING THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA:
This weekend, Russian-German pianist Igor Levit was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Third Concerto on The Cleveland Orchestra’s final Severance Hall concerts of the season. Instead, the outspoken winner of the Gilmore Award (sometimes dubbed the pianists’ version of the McArthur Awards) will be busy elsewhere. Playing live from Berlin on The Gilmore’s series, on Saturday at 8:00 am, Levit will begin a 20-hour marathon performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, a theme and two variations which are repeated 840 times. Watch here (probably intermittently!)
The Orchestra’s “On a Personal Note” podcast series continues with yesterday’s release of A Musician’s Journey, Part 1. Assistant Principal Second Violin Emilio Llinás, who has played an astonishing 52 seasons with The Cleveland Orchestra, talks about his journey from Cuba to Cleveland. Listen here.
Today at Noon, WCLV spends its Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra in the company of Bartók, Haydn, and Beethoven, and the weekend’s archive broadcasts on 104.9 Ideastream begin on Saturday at 8:00 pm with a May 2004 concert of Rossini’s Overture to William Tell, Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in g with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 in A. On Sunday at 4:00 pm, it’s the Verdi Requiem from June 2004, with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and soloists Twyla Robinson, soprano, Nancy Maultsby, mezzo-soprano, Piotr Beczala, tenor, and Raymond Aceto, bass. Franz Welser-Möst is on the podium for both weekend rebroadcasts.
ALSO ON THE WEB TODAY:
Piano Cleveland CEO Yaron Kohlberg appears live on the Lang Lang Foundation’s Play it Forward series, the final CIM archive performance of the season features the CIM Orchestra, soloists, and a big community chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Severance Hall led by Joel Smirnoff in 2014, the genre-bending Philharmonix from Norway’s Bergen Festival features violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley and colleagues from Berlin and Vienna, and the MET Opera’s archive performance is Bellini’s La Sonnambula, from 2009. Details here.
ALMANAC FOR MAY 29:
Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was born on this date in Camprodón. Taste just one of his iconic Iberian portraits in a 2010 performance of Sevilla by Jason Vieaux in Kulas Hall at CIM.
Born on May 29 of 1897 in Brno, Bohemia, Eric Korngold was one of several European composers who settled in Hollywood in the 1930s and contributed distinguished scores to the motion picture industry. Jinjoo Cho talks about his Violin Concerto, which she played with the Akron Symphony in March, 2019, in a 3-Questions interview here. And 16-year-old violinist Christina Nam won the 2019 Frieda Schumacher Award and the opportunity to play a concerto with the Cleveland Philharmonic. She chose the Korngold. Listen to her performance here, led by music director Victor Liva.
And in 1935, Czech composer Josef Suk died in Benesov. He wrote his Second Symphony (“Asrael”) in 1905-1906 in memoriam both to his teacher and father-in-law Antonín Dvořák, who died in 1904, and his wife, Dvořák’s daughter, who died in 1905. Guest conductor Jakub Hrůša led The Cleveland Orchestra in a performance of the work in April 2018. No recording of that is readily available, but click here to watch a video of the work by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek.