by Daniel Hathaway
MISSING THE ART SONG FESTIVAL:
This would have been an “on” year for the biennial Cleveland Art Song Festival at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and its cancellation has been made more poignant because of the passing earlier this year of its founder, George Vassos (read a remembrance here).
One of the featured artists who would have given master classes and a recital this week is countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Watch his interview in Episode 43 of Cleveland pianist and host Zsolt Bognár’s Living the Classical Life series. Costanzo describes “how he stumbled into singing and acting, what is unusual and powerful about falsetto singing, and what it feels like to be naked on stage, literally and figuratively.” And catch him in action here in a masterclass last February at the Manhattan School of Music, of which he’s an alumnus.
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
The Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s final concert of the season will be live streamed without audience from West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church tonight. Earlier, WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra features works by Mozart, Sibelius, and Dvořák, and CIM’s archives yield a performance by cellist Justin Hall and harpist Rachel Hall. Details in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this day in 1911, Gustav Mahler died in Vienna at the age of 50, shortly after returning from a few years in New York leading the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. His nine symphonies were all but forgotten until their gradual revival in the 1950s by Leopold Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, John Barbirolli, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein — assisted by the invention of the Long Playing phonograph record. Listen here to a performance of his Symphony No. 9 in D with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, recorded live in Severance Hall the weekend of January 30—February 1, 1969. Mahler left a tenth symphony unfinished. Here’s a video of Pierre Boulez leading its Adagio with the Cleveland Orchestra.
And on May 18, 1925, Leoš Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen was first performed in Prague. In May of 2014, The Cleveland Orchestra gave memorable performances of the opera, staged by Yuval Sharon, that preserved the original comic-strip inspiration for the work, and revived the production in the fall of 2017. Before that first set of performances, Cleveland Orchestra personalities shared their thoughts about the work and talked about their preparations for opening night. Watch the video here.
