by Daniel Hathaway
ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:
It’s a busy Thursday. Consult our Concert Listings for details about WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, Silvia Berry’s live noontime fortepiano recital, Oberlin’s Stage Left (subject: Broadway), Claire Chase’s four-hour live new music marathon, an all-Vivaldi Detroit Symphony Watch Party featuring Nicholas McGegan, the MET Opera’s 2008 production of Peter Grimes, and fp Creative’s third Long Distance Live concert.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona either on this date or May 15 in Cremona. Put a marker in your calendar for the release next week of the composer’s Vespers of 1610 in Apollo’s Fire’s “Music For the Soul” series. Part 1 comes out on May 19, Part 2 on May 22 (subscribe to the whole series here.)
Can’t wait until next week? Click here to watch a performance of the Vespers by the Green Mountain Project from January, 2019, led by Scott Metcalfe and featuring a number of performers whose names Cleveland audiences will recognize.
And Felix Mendelssohn’s beloved sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, died on this date in Berlin in 1847 at the age of 41 (her brother followed the following November). A museum dedicated to the two siblings opened in Hamburg two years ago this month.
Listen to a performance of Hensel’s Das Jahr (“The Year”), a month-by-month characterization of the seasons, by Olga Andryushchenko, part of a recital “Fanny & Felix.” She plays an 1840 Erard fortepiano in Rachmaninov Hall at the Moscow Conservatory.
INTERESTING READ & LISTEN:
The cancellation of the last two months of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season deprived a number of singers of debuts and other personal firsts on the big stage in Lincoln Center. In a New York Times feature, Zachary Woolfe talks with Erin Morley, Javier Camarena, Sonya Yoncheva, Jamie Barton, Brian Jagde, Ailyn Pérez, Tara Erraught, and Ana María Martínez about those missed opportunities, and offers clips suggesting what Met audiences would have heard this spring. Read and listen here.
AND JUST FOR FUN:
If some live performances in the near (and not so near) future will be performed to empty houses, we’ll miss the element of applause, but performers will probably still go through the motions of bowing to the camera. Watch a hilarious catalogue of the possibilities in “The 21 Esssential Recital Bows — (Plus a few more)” courtesy of the Blair Academy for the Arts.