by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
This evening at 7:30 Pittsburgh’s Chatham Baroque — Andrew Fouts, Baroque violin, Patricia Halverson, viola da gamba, and Scott Pauley, theorbo & baroque guitar — will make its long overdue Cleveland debut on the Rocky River Chamber Music Society series.
For details of this and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA APPOINTMENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced five new musician appointments to its violin and viola sections.
Elizabeth Fayette joins the Orchestra as First Associate Concertmaster in May, and Philip Marten assumes the role of Associate Concertmaster in August. Zhan Shu, a first violinist with The Cleveland Orchestra since 2018, was appointed Assistant Concertmaster and began serving in the role in January. In May, Dustin Wilkes-Kim joins the second violin section, and Gabriel Napoli joins the viola section Read more here.
MEMORIAL CONCERTS AT OBERLIN:
Two concerts this weekend will memorialize longtime faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory.
On Saturday at 2:30 in Warner Concert Hall, students, friends, and colleagues of Daune Mahy will present a program honoring the voice professor who taught at the Conservatory for 39 years.
And on Sunday at 4:30 in Finney Chapel, James O’Donnell, formerly organist of London’s Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, will play a memorial tribute to David Boe, Ninth Dean of the Conservatory and Professor of Organ from 1962 to 2008.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Kurt Weill was born into the world of musical theater, subcategory political, in Dessau, Germany on March 2, 1900, and Marc Blitzstein wasn’t far behind, entering the scene in Philadelphia on March 2, 1905.
Weill, who was naturalized as a U.S. Citizen in 1943, collaborated early on with playwright Berthold Brecht, and wrote works that crossed the permeable border between opera and musical theater (his strangest collaboration just might have been with Odgen Nash for One Touch of Venus.)
Christoph von Dohnányi led a live performance of Brecht & Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins at the Salzburg Festival in 1992 with soprano Anja Silja. Listen here.
Locally, Oberlin Opera Theater devoted a whole week to Weill in 2014, centered around a production of Street Scene, and Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater and Cleveland Opera Theater created a joint production of Threepenny Opera at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in 2017.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
Finally, are any of our readers aware of Finnish composer Leif Segerstam, born in Vaasa on this date in 1944, and author — at last count — of 342 symphonies, some 100 of which have received performances? News to us, but it makes you want to look him up. Here’s No. 288, played by the Turku Philharmonic.
