by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Cleveland International Piano Competition’s Concert Truck makes an appearance at noon at Edgewater Beach bearing a baby grand and 2024 quarter-finalists Mirabelle Kajenjeri, 26 (France) & Zhu Wang, 27 (China). Bring a lawn chair and enjoy a free concert — which might include some Scarlatti (see the Almanac).
Ohio Light Opera presents a 2 pm matinee performance of The Arcadians in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster, and Oberlin Piano Festival hosts a Guest Faculty Recital by Zhou Ting and Tianying Zhao in Clonick Hall.
For details of upcoming concerts, visit our Concert Listings page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1757, Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (pictured above) died in Madrid. Son of composer Alessandro, Domenico spent most of his career in Spain, producing mainly keyboard works — including the 555 sonatas that have become popular opening works for many piano recitals.
Click here to begin watching an extensive 1985 BBC documentary about Domenico’s life with musical selections played by Rafael Puyana (part two is here). And click here to watch Oberlin Harpsichord Professor Mark Edwards play three of the sonatas in Warner Concert Hall in February, 2018.
And on July 23, 1928, American pianist Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco. Well-known to Cleveland and worldwide audiences for his commanding recordings of the Beethoven Concertos, Fleisher lost control of his right hand in 1964 due to focal dystonia. He spent the next decades concentrating on left-hand repertoire, teaching, and conducting, but made a famous comeback in 2004 with the Vanguard recording Two Hands.
Listen here to a Peabody Institute Founders Day interview with Fleisher by Ray Sprenkle, enjoy Fleisher’s recording of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra from 1961, and — for something completely different, watch him play a transcription of J.S. Bach’s Schafe können sicher weiden aka “Sheep may safely graze” from the secular Cantata BWV 208.
Bach also left us some 200 church cantatas, and British composer and conductor William Gillies Whitaker, born on this date in 1876, set out to perform all of them. He succeeded, presenting a third of them in Newcastle and the rest in Glasgow with his Bach Choir.
A number of conductors have recorded all the sacred cantatas, including Karl Richter, Masaaki Suzuki, John Eliot Gardiner, Helmuth Rilling, Nikolaus Harnoncourt with Gustav Leonhardt, and Ton Koopman. I’ve had friends who made it a habit to listen to one cantata every Sunday morning, an inspiring regimen that could take four years to complete. It would be interesting to listen to a single conductor’s interpretations, or to mix and match them. Time to get started!
July 23 marks the birthdates of a number of American composers who may not be familiar household names: Ben Weber (born in 1916 in St. Louis), Jerome Rosen (1921 in Boston), David Noon (1946 in Johnstown, PA), John Carbon (1951 in Chicago), and Steven L. Rosenhaus (1952 in Brooklyn, NY).
Another challenge: get to know the works of these sometimes prolific figures, using the following as points of departure. For Weber, his Piano Concerto (performed by William Masselos with Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic). For Rosen, his String Quartet No. 1. For Noon, his Saxophone Quartet No. 1. For Carbon, his Fantasy-Nocturne for piano and orchestra. And for Rosenhaus, a “Meet the Composer” interview on Zoom, and his wittily-titled chamber work for soprano, string quartet and piano, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pigeon.
