by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, guest conductor Klaus Mäkelä begins his second week of Cleveland Orchestra performances featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in George Gershwin’s Concerto in F. Mäkelä begins the program with Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit, and ends with Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (program repeated Friday at 7:30 and Saturday at 8).
And tonight at 7, the Avon High School Chamber Orchestra will present Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons featuring professional soloists Mary Beth Ions, Victor Beyans, Samuel Rotberg and Carrie Singler. Proceeds benefit the student musicians and the Avon Local School District music program.
For other forthcoming performances, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
On Wednesday, The Cleveland Orchestra announced details of its 80th international tour. “Over the course of two weeks from August 26 to September 7, the Orchestra will travel to Berlin, Helsinki, Lucerne, Ansfelden, Bratislava, and Vienna, and will be joined by Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto for four of the performances.” Download a press release here.
Violinist Jinjoo Cho has been appointed to the faculty of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL beginning in September.
The founder and director of ENCORE Summer Academy in Gates Mills, Cho has taught for the past five years at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Birthdays to celebrate on April 18 in music history include those of British conductor Leopold Stokowski (born in 1882), and among those who have passed away on this date is British composer Harrison Birtwistle, who died on April 18, 2022 in Mere, Wiltshire at the age of 87 following a stroke he suffered the previous year.
His “uncompromising modernism,” as The Guardian put it in Birtwistle’s obituary, is evident throughout his output, from his operas to his orchestral works, his chamber music, and his vocal music. But it is his operas — often based on myth and folklore — that have had the most enduring impact.
In 2019, The Minotaur was ranked third by The Guardian in a list of the best pieces of the 21st century. As Andrew Clements wrote in that article, “…the eruptions of orchestral violence are offset by music of lyrical beauty and pungent transparency” — fitting qualities to match this story.
The opera tells of the Minotaur — that Greek mythological figure who is part man, part bull, and unable to speak — from the Innocents who are sacrificed to him, to the Keres who feed on the dead, to his dreams in which he acquires the ability to speak, to his death at the hands of Theseus, ending ultimately with a Ker feeding on the Minotaur himself.
The Keres — those nightmarish “death spirits” — can be seen, and heard, in this excerpt from a production at London’s Royal Opera House. “Bloodshed fetches us, slaughter fetches us,” they shout out rhythmically, in fragments, before the voice of soprano Amanda Echalaz enters the scene. Watch here.
Stokowski, who made the Philadelphia Orchestra world-famous, began his career as an organist — his first American post was at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York — before deciding to devote himself to orchestral conducting. The organ continued to figure in his programming through his Romantic transcriptions of Bach that became popular when he collaborated with the Disney Studios on the Fantasia movies.
Click here to watch him conduct the Czech Philharmonic in Bach’s great d-minor Toccata and Fugue in Prague at the age of 90. And click here to watch an interview with composer Morton Gould where Stowkowski talks about playing the works of young composers. He died in the charmingly-named Hampshire village of Nether Wallop in 1977 (its sister villages, Over Wallop, and Middle Wallop, are nearby).
