by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE & ON THE AIRWAVES TODAY:
Today’s local streaming events include
• the end result of a Baldwin Wallace Vocal Performance Class Capstone Project — a 30-minute version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel performed in English, with interactive artwork by students pre-K through Grade 5
• Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV
• and a CIM virtual concert featuring its New Music Ensemble in a performance of Keith Fitch’s Ruthless Voicings.
Tonight’s HD Archive stream from the MET Opera is a viewers’ choice: Puccini’s La Bohème from 1977 featuring Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti.
And on-demand events include a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise from December 2019 with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin from the Carnegie Hall Fridays series (available through the weekend).
See our Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S FEATURED AUDIO:
Pre-pandemic, Quire Cleveland was scheduled to present its program “Resonant Glory: Music for Grand Spaces” this weekend in Cleveland, Willoughby Hills, and Akron. Fans can revisit one of Quire’s previous concerts from November, 2018 — audio tracks from “In lux perpetuam: Journey into Eternal Light” are available here. One particular work that evokes the idea of grand spaces is William Henry Harris’s Faire is the heaven, a 1925 setting of Edmund Spenser’s An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie. Jay White conducts Quire at St. Sebastian Church in Akron.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Everybody knows the name Oscar Hammerstein II — the lyricist half of the Broadway creative team Rodgers & Hammerstein — but did you ever wonder about Oscar I? Born in Stettin, Germany on this date in 1846, Oscar II’s grandfather was an opera composer and impresario who also founded several opera houses, most notably the Manhattan Opera House in 1906, which engaged in a fierce competition with the Metropolitan Opera. Oscar I sold both the Manhattan and Philadelphia houses to the Metropolitan in 1910, agreeing not to produce grand opera in New York for the next decade. Along with Elektra, Thaïs, and Salome, he was responsible for the American premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Listen to Erich Leinsdorf’s arrangement of “Preludes and Interludes” from Debussy’s symbolist opera recorded live by The Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall in February 1945, shortly before Leinsdorf left the podium to serve in the U.S. Army. The Orchestra presented a production of Pelléas et Mélisande in 2017 staged by Yuval Sharon and conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, both of whom comment on the work in a promotional video.
INTERESTING READS:
The current pandemic has awakened interest in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. In Thursday’s New York Times, William Robin considered what the impact of that devastating, earlier contagion had on music. Surprisingly little, he concludes. Read the article here.
To read in detail how the 1918 pandemic affected the United States, visit the Influenza Encyclopedia website created by the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, where extensive articles about 50 cities explore responses to the crisis at the local and state levels. There are intriguing parallels between 1918 and 2020 — and differences.