by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
A 2 pm Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute Faculty Recital features Michael Lynn, flute, Catharina Meints, pardessus de viole, Rebecca Landell, viola da gamba & Lisa Crawford, harpsichord in music by Marin Marais, Louis Heudelinne & François Couperin in Kulas Recital Hall. Also at 2 pm, Ohio Light Opera presents Guys and Dolls in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.
And tonight at 7:30 in Harkness Chapel at Case, Cleveland Lute Fest continues its nightly series of recitals with a program of 16th Century Dances & music by S.L. Weiss performed by Robert Barto (pictured) with flutist Mara Winter, flute. For details, visit the Concert Listings page.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra continues its summer community engagement programming on Wednesday, June 26 at 7 pm with a free, outdoor performance as part of University Circle’s Wade Oval Wednesdays concert series. The program, led by former Cleveland Orchestra Associate Conductor Vinay Parameswaran and emceed by Chris Webb, includes Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout, Bedřich Smetana’s The Moldau from Má vlast, William Grant Still’s Summerland, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol. In case of rain, the performance will move indoors to Severance Music Center.
INTERESTING READS:
Two articles address the current state of affairs at the San Francisco Symphony. Click here to read Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future by Robin Pogrebin and Javier C. Hernández in the June 24 edition of the New York Times, and here to read Hear that? It’s the sound of the San Francisco Symphony setting itself on fire, a June 20 opinion piece by editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky in the San Francisco Standard.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1767, the super-prolific German composer Georg Philipp Telemann died in Hamburg, where he had earlier used his pending appointment to cantorships in Leipzig to negotiate a raise from the Hamburg authorities (J.S. Bach, Leipzig’s third choice after No. 2 had turned them down, remained a friend).
Click here to watch a performance of Telemann’s funeral cantata, Du aber, Daniel, gehe hin by the Oberlin Conservatory HIP Baroque Ensemble on Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival in June, 2011 at First Lutheran Church in Boston. Coached by Webb Wiggins and Kathryn Montoya, the group includes students who have gone on to distinguished careers in historical performance.
For a funereal work on a lighter subject, watch Apollo’s Fire bass Jeffrey Strauss sing (and act out, with props) Telemann’s Funeral Cantata for an Artistically Trained Canary-Bird Whose Demise Brought the Greatest Sorrow to its Master.
On June 25, 1940, African American composer William Grant Still’s choral ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree received its debut in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. Cleveland Orchestra music director Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic with the Schola Cantorum and Wen Talbert Choir. Philip Brunelle later recorded the work with William Warfield, the Hilda Harris Choir, VocalEssence, and the Leigh Morris Chorale. Listen to the 2010 recording here.
For more insights into Still’s music, listen to a Voice of America interview about his opera Troubled Island before its premiere in 1949. (The U.S. State Department recorded the work for distribution abroad.)
And on this date in 1983, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera died in Geneva. Yolanda Kondonassis performed his Harp Concerto with Jiménez and the Oberlin Orchestra in October, 2016. Watch that performance from Finney Chapel here. The performance was later released on Oberlin Music as part of the CD Ginastera: One Hundred.
Cleveland Orchestra Principal Cello Mark Kosower has been a strong advocate of Ginastera’s music. In advance of his performance of the Second Cello Concerto in October, 2018, the Orchestra released two short promotional videos. In the first, Kosower discusses the work and plays excerpts. The second is a short clip of a rehearsal led by guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno.
Kosower recorded the complete concerto with his former orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, led by Lothar Zagrosek. Listen here.
