By Daniel Hathaway
A CHANGE IN OUR NEWSLETTER SCHEDULE:
Beginning this week, our weekly newsletter will be emailed to subscribers at 5:00 pm on Wednesdays. This change will give the editors a bit more time to prepare the weekly Concert Listings and for our staff to write and copyedit articles before posting. Because details of the classical music scene can change so quickly these days, we recommend that you check the website frequently for new and updated information.
DALLAS INVITES THE MET ORCHESTRA:
Fabbio Luisi, who served as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera before taking the helm at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (photo above), has invited some 50 of his former colleagues to Texas to join the DSO in two benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony on April 30 and May 1.
The MET Orchestra has been furloughed without pay since the house closed its doors on March 12, 2020, although recent negotiations with general manager Peter Gelb have yielded a plan for partial salary restoration. On their Facebook page, the MET musicians wrote, “We cannot overstate the impact this unprecedented collaboration will have on our members, both financially and artistically, after this long year of cultural famine.” Read more in New York Times articles here and here.
MIGNARDA RELEASES NEW ALBUM:
The voice and lute duo of Donna Stewart and Ron Andrico, who perform as Mignarda, announce the release of their 14th CD on April 10.
“Unquiet Thoughts presents a selection of rarities and perennial favorites by John Dowland (1563 – 1626) and a few of his contemporaries, concentrating on songs with exquisite poetical texts by some of the best poets of the Elizabethan age. It is no accident that we chose the very first song from Dowland’s First Booke as the title of our album, as the eloquent term so appropriately describes a genre that pairs an intimate voice with the most personal of instruments to express the secrets of the soul. Unquiet Thoughts is also the title of our blog (soon to be published in book form), which since 2010 has been a platform that offers our insights and experience of music for voice and lute and its relevance in the modern era.”
More details here.
EVENTS ON TODAY’S CALENDAR:
Two online events look forward to Baldwin Wallace’s upcoming virtual Bach Festival. Director Dirk Garner speaks to recent Conservatory alumni and Festival Choir members in this Tuesday’s edition of BACHCAST, and half a dozen young scholars discuss the projects they’re pursuing through the Riemenschneider Bach Institute.
Today’s breakfast-time stream from London’s Wigmore Hall (still available at lunchtime, tea time, and suppertime) features Christian Wolff’s setting of Susan Griffin’s text about Underground Railway figure Harriet Tubman, while the New York Festival of Song features works written during the pandemic. Performers include Oberlin alum Joshua Blue.
Russian piano wizard Daniil Trifonov will be featured in works by Debussy, Prokofiev, and Brahms he recorded in January for New York’s 92nd St. Y, and the Baltimore Symphony showcases some of its soloists in BSO Session—Spotlight.
And organist Paul Jacobs, who soloed with The Cleveland Orchestra in last week’s Focus 8 performance of the Poulenc Organ Concerto (when he also gave a tour of Severance Hall’s E.M. Skinner instrument), pops up this evening in a concert from the University of Minnesota featuring music by J.S. Bach and Handel.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two very different musicians to remember on this 13th day of April, when French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut died in 1377 in Reims, and Polish American pianist and avant-garde composer Frederic Rzewski was born in 1938 in Westfield, Massachusetts.
Machaut, whose musical creations helped define the Ars nova movement of the eventful fourteenth century, was equally active as the author of some 400 poems in the courtly love tradition. His Messe de Nostre Dame may have been the first cyclical setting of the Roman Catholic mass by a single composer. Listen here to a performance by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois in which other music appropriate to the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is interleaved.
Just in time for his obsequies, Cleveland’s Les Délices has joined Boston’s Blue Heron to produce Machaut’s Lay of the Fountain. Read Mike Telin’s article here and watch the hour-long program here until April 19.
Rzewski had a traditional academic education at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, studying with Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. Then he sojourned in Italy, where his career was influenced by Luigi Dallapiccolo and he was introduced to electronic music and improvisation.
Famous for politically-charged works, one of Rzewski’s most famous works is The People United Will Never Be Defeated! — 36 variations on Chilean leftist song meant to be a companion piece to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Conrad Tao plays it here at the 2020 Modern Music Festival. (While listening, think of editor Nicholas Slonimsky’s comment in Baker’s Dictionary:
[Rzewski] is furthermore a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.”