by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: organist Kelsey M. Berg at the Covenant, and a Cleveland Cello Society master class with Klaus Mäkelä
•News: Sphinx Performance Academy applications due soon, and an interview with Rhiannon Giddens (pictured)
•Almanac: Lutosławski’s early years in Warsaw
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 pm, the Church of the Covenant’s Tuesday Noon Organ Plus series will feature organist Kelsey M. Berg in a program of music by J.S. Bach and Frank Bridge. A freewill offering will be taken up.
And at 7 pm, the Cleveland Cello Society will present a master class led by conductor Klaus Mäkelä at Severance Music Center’s Reinberger Chamber Hall. Register here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Applications are due by February 12 for the Sphinx Performance Academy (SPA), a full-scholarship summer program open to Black and Latinx string players ages 11-17, and held at the Cleveland Institute of Music (as well as the Juilliard School and Colorado University at Boulder). More information here.
Oberlin Conservatory alumna and Silkroad Ensemble artistic director Rhiannon Giddens is the featured guest on the latest episode of the podcast Speaking Soundly, hosted by Met Opera principal trumpet David Krauss. Among the topics they discuss: her studies at Oberlin (where she enrolled to study opera without yet being able to read music or having seen a live performance), her apprenticeship with Joe Thompson, her recent collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma and Francesco Turrisi, her love of the banjo, and her mission to reclaim American musical traditions. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
INTERESTING READ:
The 65th Grammy Awards took place on Sunday, and among the winners in the classical categories was the New York Youth Symphony, which became the first youth orchestra to win a Grammy when they took home the prize for “Best Orchestral Performance.” CBS New York spoke with two of the orchestra’s players as well as music director Michael Repper in an article that touches on the surprise and delight surrounding the award, recording the album during the pandemic, and the diverse cast of composers included on the playlist. Read here, and see the full list of winners in the classical categories here from The Violin Channel.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
When you think of Polish composers, you probably think first of Chopin, but next in line would be names like Karol Szymanowski, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Witold Lutosławski — who died on this date in 1994 in Warsaw.
That city runs a powerful through-line in Lutosławski’s life, which makes for a complex biography politically due to the country’s occupation during WWII and, after the war, the restrictions of Soviet artistic “guidelines” taken up by the ruling party in Poland. We’ll focus today on the composer’s life up to the end of the war.
Warsaw was the site of Lutosławski’s birth in 1913, as well as his early piano and violin lessons, his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory and Warsaw University, and his performances at the city’s cafes to earn a living during the war (including of Polish music such as Chopin, in defiance of the Nazis). Sadly, after the failed Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis destroyed the city, and most of his music was lost.
A couple of exceptions to that: the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (a piece that had been performed in an early version at the cafes) and sketches for his First Symphony, which he finished after the war, and which did not put him in the favor of Stalinist authorities due to its “formalism.”
Let’s celebrate those early pieces that survived the destruction of war: the Variations here in a live performance by Martha Argerich and Evgeny Kissin at the Verbier Festival, and the Symphony here as performed by Antoni Wit and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.