by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Events from The Cleveland Orchestra, BW Opera, and Oberlin Opera
•The Orchestra’s return to Miami, and job postings from Apollo’s Fire and Oberlin
•R.I.P. William Kraft, hero of percussion in contemporary music
•Almanac: Bach delivers the Brandenburgs, along with an obsequious note of dedication
ON THE SCHEDULE:
It’s impossible to make it to every event today, but take solace in the fact that each one will be repeated daily through Sunday. And yet, you’ll still need to plan your calendar wisely — the weekend only gets busier, as you can see in the Concert Listings.
Two guests appear with The Cleveland Orchestra this week, beginning with tonight’s performance at 7:30 pm. At the podium will be Jane Glover, and at the piano will be Imogen Cooper to solo in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22.
Meanwhile, two area conservatories will compete for the eyes and ears of opera lovers: BW Opera with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at 7:30, and Oberlin Opera with Domenico Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto at 8:00.
Trouble deciding? Mike Telin has done you the favor of previewing each event. Read his interviews with Imogen Cooper, BW Opera director Scott Skiba, and Oberlin’s director-conductor pairing of Jonathon Field and Christopher Larkin.
NEWS BRIEFS & JOB POSTINGS:
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced details about its next residency in Miami, expanded to three weeks in the 2022-23 season. Read Zachary Lewis’ article for Cleveland.com here.
Apollo’s Fire is looking for a General Manager, and Oberlin seeks an Assistant Director of Conservatory Communications. Those links will carry you to Musical America’s Career Center listings.
R.I.P. WILLIAM KRAFT:
“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Chicago-born composer, conductor, and percussionist William Kraft once wrote. Kraft passed away last month at age 98 following a career in which he “became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism,” as Javier C. Hernández writes in an obituary for The New York Times.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1721, J.S. Bach dedicated his Six Concerts à plusieurs instruments to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. That set of concerti grossi (yes, I also hate myself for using the plural that way) have since become known as the Brandenburg Concertos, hailed as some of the greatest works of the Baroque era.
With a performance in 1719, Bach had impressed the music-loving Christian Ludwig, who then commissioned several works. But when the margrave received the Brandenburgs in 1721, he was looking at music that had not all been composed in the prior two years — some of these concertos may have dated as far back as a decade or more, selected and revised for the occasion.
Did the margrave know this? We can’t be sure. But we do know that the compensation was not lucrative: Bach went unpaid.
Royal dedications from centuries gone by can be hilarious, obsequious to the max. (Modern-day suck-ups, get back to work.) In this case, it’s fun to imagine that Bach may have been compensating for delivering leftovers, even really good ones. Either way, here’s the first sentence alone from the composer’s March 24 dedication, translated from the French:
As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness’s most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigour of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.
You can watch Apollo’s Fire in a live performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Mvt. 1 at Tanglewood Music Festival in 2015 here, with Jeannette Sorrell at the harpsichord, Olivier Brault at the violin, and Kathie Stewart at the flute.
Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra also collected all the Brandenburgs — plus harpsichord and violin concertos — in an album from 2010 that you can purchase here.