by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE TODAY:
On this week’s Baldwin Wallace Bachcast, released today, BachFestival Director Dirk Garner interviews Stuart Raleigh, who served as Festival Choral Director from 1974 to 2007. Watch the 17-minute conversation here.
Young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who made a sensational debut at Blossom two summers ago, joins favorite Cleveland Orchestra guest pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Orchestre de Paris today at 3:30 pm, and violinist James Ehnes is the featured guest soloist with the Dallas Symphony tonight at 8:30 pm (Katherina Wincor is on the podium).
At 6:00 pm, Dominick Farinacci hosts Trio Tuesdays and a Songbook Watch Party at the Bop Stop, and at 8:00 pm, pianist Aaron Diehl plays concert works in the jazz style on the Dacamera series in Houston. Check our Concert Listings for connection details.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
ClevelandClassical.com extends our sincere condolences to Rich Fried and family on the death of his wife, Judy S. Fried on March 11. She played violin with The Cleveland Orchestra from 1980 to 2008, and with the Cleveland Octet. Read an obituary here.
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society sent out a survey today asking its audience under what conditions they would be willing to return to the concert hall. At the moment, three live events remain on the CCMS calendar this spring: violinist Alexi Kenney and pianist Renana Gutman at the Maltz PAC on April 27, the Junction Trio (violinist Stevan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao) at CIM’s Mixon Hall on May 11, and violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong at the Maltz on May 18. Click here to access the survey (to be returned by March 29).
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Three very different organist-composers to honor today: German Kappelmeister Johann Gottfried Walther who died in Weimar on this date in 1748, German Romantic composer Julius Reubke, born on March 23, 1834 in Hausneindorf, and Eugène Gigout, born ten years later in Nancy.
J.S. Bach’s cousin and almost his exact contemporary, Walther authored an important Lexicon, the first German-language encyclopedia of music, as well as some 132 organ works that include both elaborations of chorales and transcriptions of Italian orchestral concertos that were popular in Germany during his era.
His variations on Jesu, meine Freude are among his best. Listen here to a performance by Tom Anschütz on the 17th-century Hoffmann organ in Langenhain (near Frankfurt), rebuilt by Knauf in the 18th century, and by Kutter (ongoing) in 2020.
Walther’s Concerto el Signr. Meck is mislabeled — it’s actually a work by Vivaldi, but remains one of Walther’s most popular reworkings. Hear it played by Dutch artist Jacques van Oortmerssen on the organ at the Smarano Organ Academy in Italy, and then in an arrangement of an arrangement — for two marimbas, played by Marimbazzi, the young Polish percussion duo of Paweł Dyyak and Jakub Kołodziejczyk.
Reubke died at 24, which didn’t give this disciple of Liszt much time to compose, but he left two relatively monumental works to posterity. Listen to his Piano Sonata played by Austrian pianist Til Fellner here, and to his Sonata on the 94th Psalm played by American organist Nathan Laube here (at a Pittsburgh regional convention of the American Guild of Organists).
And two pieces stand out among French organist Eugène Gigout’s works for the instrument. His Toccata in b minor is quintessentially French (Jonathan Moyer plays it here on the organ at Cleveland’s Church of the Covenant), while his Grand Choeur Dialogué lends itself to various call-and-response echo treatments. Jonathan Scott plays it here in its original organ solo format on the Pascal Quorin organ at Évreux Cathedral, in Normandy, France.
And now the fun begins. If you have two players and two organs at your disposal, you can play it like Peter Eilander and Jaap Eilander do at the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. If it’s just you and you have organs in multiple locations, you can arrange the work like Michael Hey did at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Or go all out and add brass and percussion as Michael Murray and the Empire Brass did in their over-the-top Telarc recording at Boston’s Church of the Advent.
