by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine at Tri-C
•Job listing: choral management at The Cleveland Orchestra
•Interesting read: an exposé about abuse in the film scoring industry
•Almanac: Handel and Elgar, two sides of being English
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 7:00 pm at Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Auditorium, the Tri-C Classical Piano Series presents the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine in a program that includes Brahms’ Tragic Overture, Yevhen Stankovych’s Chamber Symphony No. 3, Mozart’s Concerto No. 10 in E-flat for two pianos, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. Theodore Kuchar and Carl Topilow will conduct, and pianists Emanuela Friscioni and Antonio Pompa-Baldi (pictured) will be featured in the Mozart. Read Daniel Hathaway’s preview article here, and get tickets here.
And at 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, Franz Welser-Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Mozart’s Divertimento No. 2, Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, and Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday. Tickets are available here.
JOB LISTING:
The Cleveland Orchestra has two openings in choral management. The Children’s Chorus Manager will manage the Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus and Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Preparatory Chorus (students in grades 5-8), while the Youth Chorus Manager will be responsible for the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus (students in grades 9-12). Details here.
INTERESTING READ:
An article titled “The Hollywood crisis #MeToo missed” delves into the film scoring industry, which “is largely unregulated, with few protections for assistants” — and with rampant abuse. Read the Apple News story by Andrew Gumbel here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German-British composer George Frideric Handel was born on this date in 1685 in Halle (in what was then Brandenburg-Prussia). He moved to London in his late twenties and spent the majority of his career there, becoming a British citizen fifteen years later. Naturally London was also the location of many premieres of important works, including the oratorio Esther, which was first performed on this same date in 1732 on Handel’s 47th birthday.
Click here to watch a performance of the famous aria “Tune your harps with cheerful noise” in the hands of San Francisco’s early music ensemble Voices of Music. Thomas Cooley is the tenor, and Marc Schachman is the Baroque oboist.
Handel makes an interesting counterpart to Edward Elgar, who passed away on this date in 1934. Although Elgar was English by birth, he nevertheless felt like an outsider there, being self-taught, having grown up relatively poor, and being Roman Catholic in a heavily Protestant country. Indeed there was some discomfort early on around his choral work The Dream of Gerontius (now deeply embedded in the canon) since it sets text from a poem that explores the afterlife through a Catholic lens. Getting performances was not always easy, and in some cases a revised text was used.
Click here to listen to the “Demon’s Chorus” from that work here, excerpted from a performance at the Southwell Music Festival in 2016.