by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Three multi-concert series will launch tonight.
At 7:30, pianist Garrick Ohlsson, replacing Igor Levit, joins Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, and the Orchestra fills out the program with Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, “Romantic” (repeated through Sunday afternoon).
At the same hour, Annunziata Tomaro leads CityMusic Cleveland in Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed (after A. Vivaldi) with violin soloist Laura Hamilton at Fairmount Presbyterian (repeated in different venues through Sunday afternoon.
And at 8 pm, Oberlin Opera Theater stages Claudio Monteverdi’s 1605 L’Orfeo in Hall Auditorium, directed by Stephanie Havey with an orchestra of period instruments led by Christian Capocaccia. There are four performances through Sunday afternoon.
For details, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Cleveland Orchestra reports that concertmaster David Radzynski has stepped down “by mutual decision” effective March 3. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
At a certain point in music history, you have to come to grips with the replacement of the old Julian with the new Gregorian calendar — a switch intended to bring the calendar in line with the actual solar year of 365 ½ days that took effect at different times in different places and was often fraught with political and religious issues. As a result, today’s principal birthday celebrity, Georg Philipp Telemann, seemingly entered the world twice in 1681: on March 14 (Julian date) or March 24 (Gregorian). We’ll choose to light his candles today.
Telemann is an example of the wisdom of always having a good second and third candidate waiting in the wings when hiring. Faced with selecting a successor to Johann Kuhnau as Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the town council chose Telemann, only to be rebuffed by the composer, who used their invitation to wangle a better deal in Hamburg. After Christoph Graupner also turned them down, the job, not without some misgivings, went to Johann Sebastian Bach. No hard feelings there: Bach chose Telemann to be godfather to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel.
There’s no lack of material to suggest for a Telemann Birthday listen — he wrote over a thousand sacred cantatas alone. Here are a few performances by Northeast Ohio musicians to cock an ear to.
Click here to watch Apollo’s Fire play excerpts from his Don Quixote suite at Tanglewood in July of 2015, here to hark back to a performance of his funeral cantata, Du aber, Daniel, gehe hin by an Oberlin ensemble as part of Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival on June 17, 2011, and here to watch a more recent Oberlin group perform his Concerto in b minor (at 52:00) at the Bloomington Early Music Festival in May, 2018.
And fans of the choir of King’s College Cambridge will already know the setting of In dulci jubilo by Robert Lucas Pearsall, born on this date in 1795, an interesting 19th-century amateur composer who left England with his family, first to live in Germany, then to renovate a castle in Switzerland. Pearsall’s heart was in earlier times, and he delighted in writing mostly choral music with antique flavors. For a single example (and there are many videos of this piece) click here to watch Voces8 perform his madrigal Lay a Garland.
Lay a garland on her hearse of dismal yew.
Maidens, willow branches wear, say she died true.
Her love was false, but she was firm
Upon her buried body lie lightly, thou gentle earth.
Finally, in the department of almost totally forgotten composers, have a listen to some of the 70 songs written between 1908 and 1924 by Cincinnati-born composer Wintter Watts, who entered the world on this date in 1884. Much performed by well-known artists during his lifetime, much of his music went unpublished, and all of it fell out of favor. Looking for unusual material for a vocal recital? Look no further.
