by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša, a frequent guest, returns to the Mandel Concert Hall podium at Severance Music Center to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 3, Bohuslav Martinů’s Symphony No. 3, and Vítĕzslava Kaprálová’s Military Sinfonietta. Repeated Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3.
Tonight at 7:30, concertmaster Alan Choo takes Apollo’s Fire to Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles for works written for the court of the Sun King by Lully, Marais, and Rameau. The first of four performances is at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron, repeated on Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Hts., and Sunday at 4 at Rocky River Presbyterian Church..
And tonight at 8 in Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater raises the curtain on two one-act operas by John Musto, directed by Scott Skiba and conducted by Timothy Weiss. Later the Same Evening is set in a single evening in 1932 Manhattan and brings to life the characters and scenes from five Edward Hopper paintings. Bastianello wraps itself around an amusing series of encounters derived from several versions of an old Italian folk tale. Repeated Friday & Saturday at 8 & Sunday at 2.
For details of these and other performances, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will release a new spatial audio recording on April 17 celebrating their creative partnership with composer and flutist Allison Loggins-Hull.
Allison Loggins-Hull: The Cleveland Residency will be available on all major platforms for digital streaming and download. A preview track will be released on March 27. The recording features three works composed by Loggins-Hull during her three-year tenure as the Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow: Legacy, Can You See? (Orchestral Version), and Grit. Grace. Glory.
Conducted by Welser-Möst and recorded live at Severance Music Center, these compositions exemplify the fellowship’s spirit of developing new music and artistic collaborations, while drawing on deep community connections.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
March 5 marks the birthdates of American composer Arthur Foote (1853 in Salem, MA), Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 in Rio de Janeiro), and Australian conductor and virtuoso hornist Barry Tuckwell (1931, in Melbourne). And the departure of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1953 in Moscow, notably upstaged by Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, who died on the same day).
And before jazz pianist Dan Tepfer was experimenting with online rehearsals in 2021, Lee De Forest became the first DeeJay on this date in 1907 when he successfully transmitted Rossini’s William Tell Overture on a radio signal from Telharmonic Hall at Broadway and 40th Street in New York City, to a the receiver at the US Naval Yard — less than eight miles away.
Lots to choose from to celebrate Prokofiev. Let’s start with his Symphony No. 1, nicknamed “Classical,” in a live performance by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra in 1968. It’s either amusing or maddening to read YouTube comments, but in this case there are only two: “Best I’ve ever heard of the piece!” and “The forces were too large, the tempo too fast. It’s sloppy, by Szell’s standard.” Your thoughts?
