DIARY: Monday, September 28, 2026

September 28, 2026 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

BREAKING NEWS:

The Musical Arts Association and musicians’ union of The Cleveland Orchestra agree to new three-year contract

Read the Orchestra’s announcement released on Sunday at 5:26 pm.

Cleveland Orchestra musicians agree to new contract, ending strike

Read the Sept. 27 article by Kabir Bhatia on Ideastream.

HAPPENING TODAY:

Tonight at 7:30, the LCCC Signature Recital Series will present the Antigone Music Collective in the Cirigliano Studio Theatre at Lorain County Community College in Elyria.

For Details of this and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date, two American musical scholars and a British musical humorist bade adieu to the world of classical music, leaving it a bit less serious about itself than before.

Donald J. Grout, born in 1902 in Rock Rapids, Iowa, and H. Wiley Hitchcock, who wrote the first entry in his own bio in 1923 in Detroit, left indelible marks on classical music as author and editor, respectively, of A History of Western Music (known to generations of students simply as “Grout”), and The New Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Then we can mark the finale of English humorist, musician (he played tuba), and cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung in London on this date in 1959.

Who can forget the several iterations of the Hoffnung Festival — evenings of musical parody — at the Royal Festival Hall in the 1950s? Click here to visit Hoffnung: A Last Encore, a 1973 double album of excerpts of Hoffnung’s humorous speeches and interviews. “This album brings together all of the BBC Archive material in existence, much less, alas, than one would have wished due to Gerard Hoffnung’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1959.” And click here to watch how excerpts from the Hoffnung Festivals translate to an audience in Prague (or do they?)

About Daniel Hathaway

Daniel Hathaway founded ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008, after a thirty-one year tenure as music director of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, where he founded the Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert Series and Trinity Chamber Orchestra. A graduate of Harvard College and the Episcopal Divinity School, he also studied historical musicology at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Before coming to Cleveland in 1977, he served as head of humanities at the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City and as head of arts at Groton School in Massachusetts. In Cleveland, he has served on the music staff of Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the faculty of Laurel School. As an organist, Hathaway has played recitals in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and Austria. He team-teaches Music Journalism at Oberlin College and Conservatory and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.

Verona Quartet: American dialects at Federated Church (Oct. 3)

by Kevin McLaughlin

In a program titled “American,” the Verona Quartet — Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violins, Abigail Rojansky, viola, and Jonathan Dormand, cello — spent much of their concert at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls on Saturday, October 3 moving among American musical dialects: Philip Glass’s minimalism, Samuel Barber’s lyricism, along with early jazz and popular song.

Antonín Dvořák was the outlier, though his American years supplied a plausible connection, and his final quartet gave each member of the ensemble (who are quartet-in-residence at the Oberlin Conservatory) more room to speak.

Philip Glass’s Company began as four musical interludes for a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s prose work. Glass later wrote that he chose the string quartet for its ability to be both “introspective and passionate.” The Verona treated repetition as something active rather than static. [Read on…]

Relic journeys with Venus and Adonis in “The Blood of the Rose” (Sept. 30)

by Stephanie Manning

For the New York-based Baroque chamber orchestra Relic, a program themed around an opera requires a deliberately operatic presentation.

Although there were no singers, sets, or costumes present in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on September 30, Relic combined an intriguing collection of music with a suggestion of scenes and characters, topped off with a few dramatic readings. This curated experience told a short, cohesive story in a little over an hour.

“The Blood of the Rose,” the ensemble’s latest program, is based on La púrpura de la rosa by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco. The first opera ever to be performed in the Americas, it tells the mythological story of Venus and Adonis, whose romance ends in a tragic demise engineered by Mars. [Read on…]

Cleveland Chamber Choir makes pilgrimage along the “Path of Miracles” (Sept. 26)

by Stephanie Manning

In the hands (and voices) of the Cleveland Chamber Choir, Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles became both a piece about a pilgrimage and a piece that felt like one.

As it happens, those two activities — concert and pilgrimage — share more common qualities than not. Even without a religious element, each provides an opportunity for people to participate in a shared experience, go on a journey (physical and/or emotional), and arrive at a destination before going their separate ways.

The specific pilgrimage that inspired Talbot was the Camino Frances, part of a network of pilgrimages called the Camino de Santiago, which lead travelers to the city Santiago de Compostela in western Spain. The choir’s September 26 performance brought the composer’s hour-long work to Trinity Cathedral, perhaps the perfect venue to hear this music. [Read on…]

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