by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 pm on the Waterloo Arts series, No Exit hosts soprano Anika Kildegaard (pictured) in a program including three pieces for voice and ensemble (repeated on Friday at the Bop Stop and Saturday at Heights Arts).
And at 7:30 at Heights Theater, Renovare Music presents Journeys of Home, featuring original songs written collaboratively with refugee & immigrant storytellers from Syria, South Africa, and Peru, and instrumentals by Afghani composer Babrak Wassa, Layale Chaker, and South African traditionals.
For details of these and other classical music performances, please visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1805, Italian composer Luigi Boccherini died in Madrid, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923, and German baritone and conductor Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau took his first breath in 1925 in Zehlendorf.
Boccherini’s Cello Sonata No. 6 received a local performance by CIM double bassist Benjamín Harris and pianist Evan Solomon in March, 2019. Watch here.
ChamberFest Cleveland musicians Diana Cohen, violin, William Caballero, horn, and Zoltán Fejérvári, piano played Ligeti’s Trio during the 2018 festival in Mixon Hall at CIM, and frequent Cleveland Orchestra soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard has taped a brilliant performance of Ligeti’s Etude L’escalier du diable (“The Devil’s Staircase”), commenting,
When I play Ligeti’s Étude No. 13, I have the feeling of climbing and of [M.C.] Escher’s endless staircases that Ligeti loved so much. I have the feeling not of looking at this famous architectural illusion, but of being part of it, and in vain of looking for an exit. And I feel deeply the existential dimension that this situation had for Ligeti.
And several years back, the Latvian/Danish/Hungarian Carion woodwind quintet Carion gave an unforgettable performance (memorized, and choreographed!) of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles on Cleveland’s Latvian Concert Association series. Enjoy their previously recorded video here, and look forward to their appearance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series next season.
Finally, there’s a slightly gloomy video of Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel performing Schubert’s Die Winterreise that nonetheless captures the baritone’s wonderfully evocative interpretations of Lieder. Watch here. And if you enjoy the rehearsal process, here’s a video behind the scenes of their 1979 recording (in German, but captions are available).
