by Mike Telin
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight it appears that everything is scheduled to begin at 7:30 pm. That said, there are four intriguing concerts on our calendar.
Guest conductor Nic McGegan leads Apollo’s Fire & Apollo’s Singers, and soloists Erica Schuller, soprano, Daniel Moody, countertenor, Thomas Cooley, tenor and Hadleigh Adams, baritone in Handel’s Messiah at the Federated Church in Chagrin Falls. Performances run through December Sunday, 12. See our Concert Listings page for locations and times. Click here to read a preview article. Tickets available online.
As part of the Cleveland Art Song Festival Winter Mini-Festival: collaborative pianist Bryan Wagorn, will present a master class in Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall. Participants and repertoire to be announced. The event is free, but registration is required.
It’s opening night for The Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concerts, with Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under the direction of conductors Brett Mitchell and Lisa Wong at the Mandel Concert Hall at Severance. Vocalist Capathia Jenkins is the special gues. Performances run through December 19. See our Concert Listings page for dates, times, and guest choirs. Click here to read a preview article. Tickets available online.
Rounding out tonight’s calendar is an Oberlin Guest/Alumni Recital featuring Mark Sparks, flute and Robert Spano, piano (pictured) in the Conservatory’s Kulas Recital Hall. The playlist includes Respighi’s Suite No. 1 and Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 in f, Op. 120, No. 1. The event is Free.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
One year ago Jarrett Hoffman wrote that: Two of the foremost performers of their time were born on this date in history: American violinist Joshua Bell in 1967, and German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in 1915.
Bell turns 54 today — four decades after his orchestral debut at 14 with The Philadelphia Orchestra. In that time he’s won an Avery Fisher Prize, a Grammy for his recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto (written for him — listen here), has made his mark in the world of film with his solo playing in The Red Violin (music by John Corigliano), and has stepped in front of an orchestra in a different way: as artistic director of The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a post he’s held since 2011. He’s also performed incognito at a subway station in Washington, D.C.
On Tuesday, February 8, at 7:30 pm, Bell and soprano Larisa Martinez, will perform in recital as part of the Tuesday Musical series. Together they are coming to Akron as one of the first stops on their first tour as a married couple. Tickets are available online.
Schwarzkopf passed away in her sleep at age 90 in 2006. She was most celebrated for performing Lieder, and in that arena, she helped inaugurate Blossom Music Center — listen here to Strauss’s Four Last Songs performed live by Schwarzkopf, George Szell, and The Cleveland Orchestra in a radio broadcast from the venue’s first season. (Read more about the first season of Blossom here.) Or head to Spotify for those Strauss works in another Schwarzkopf-Szell pairing, this time in a recording with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin.
Complicating Schwarzkopf’s legacy is her involvement with the Nazi Party, including in ways that were far from routine at the time, as Michael H. Kater wrote in The Guardian in the weeks after the soprano’s death.