by Daniel Hathaway
SUMMER TICKETS ON SALE:
ChamberFest Cleveland, Stars in the Classics, The Cleveland Orchestra, and Apollo’s Fire, have announced that their box offices are now open for summer al fresco reservations.
ChamberFest’s performances at The Grove Amphitheatre in Mayfield (pictured) and a Cleveland Heights Yard Concert between June 9-25 will be free, but reservations are required. The Festival Finale on June 26 at St. Paschal Baylon will be a ticketed event. You’ll also need tickets for Apollo’s Fire’s May 30-31 and July 10, 13 & 14 shows, for STARS’ June 10 & 11 Garden Concerts, and for The Cleveland Orchestra’s dozen concerts at Blossom from July 3 through September 5.
Tickets for shows on Ohio Light Opera’s reduced schedule in Wooster from July 10-23 will be available when the box office opens on June 1.
IN THE NEWS:
CityMusic Cleveland has released a new podcast featuring composer Amanda Harberg, who joins Eric Kisch and Jim Mehrling to discuss her work Lucas’s Garden. Pianist Donna Lee and clarinetist Daniel Gilbert join the conversation to preview works by Libby Larsen, Beethoven and Schubert, all of which will be performed on programs at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus on May 14 & 15.
Harpist Yolanda Kondonassis has a new, long-term project in the works. For Five Minutes for Earth®, she has commissioned fifteen composers to create works or soundscapes for harp lasting five minutes or less “that express a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres. FIVE MINUTES is also a metaphor for the urgent and compressed timeframe that remains for our global community to find and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
The results will be released by Cleveland’s Azica Records in March of next year and premiere performances will take place in April, 2022. Composers (who are contributing their works free of charge) include Chen Yi, Jocelyn Chambers, Michael Daugherty, Daniel Dorff, Reena Esmail, Keith Fitch, Patrick Harlin, Stephen Hartke, Nathaniel Heyder, Aaron Jay Kernis, Hannah Lash, Philip Maneval, Máximo Diego Pujol, Gary Schocker, and Zhou Long. More information here.
Composer Tyshawn Sorey, featured last month on the Donald P. Pipino Concert Series at Youngstown State University, has been commissioned by the Houston Dacamera and Rothko Chapel to create a 30-minute work celebrating the 50th anniversary of the fourteen dark-hued canvases Mark Rothko created for the octagonal chapel that opened in 1971. The piece, to be performed by the Houston Chamber Choir next February, will feature performers who debuted Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel in 1972 (Rothko missed both the opening and the Feldman piece, having died in 1970).
ONLINE TODAY:
Apollo’s Fire releases its video Virtuosity today, the Dallas Symphony features its collaboration with members of the locked-out Met Opera Orchestra, the Church of the Covenant presents organist Matthew Dion and oboist Anne Pinkerton in a concert honoring the 30th anniversary of the death of Jean Langlais, a National Sawdust broadcast considers the future of performance, and the Cleveland Chamber Music Society hosts the Junction Trio (Stefan Jackiw, violin, Jay Campbell, cello, and Conrad Tao, piano) for an in-person concert at St. Pascal Bayon in Highland Heights that you can also watch remotely. See our Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1849, German composer Otto Nicolai died of a stroke at the age of 38, Russian composer Anatoly Liadov was born in St. Petersburg in 1855, American songsmith Irving Berlin was born (as Israel Belin) in Russia in 1888, American choreographer Martha Graham was born in Pittsburgh in 1894, African American composer William Grant Still was born in Mississippi in 1895 (some sources say 1898), and German composer Max Reger died in Leipzig in 1916 (of a heart attack at the age of 43).
To pick just a few tributes, let’s start with Berlin, whose 101 years on earth (and on Tin Pan Alley) produced a flood of songs that document the popular cultural life of America in the 20th century. Carnegie Hall celebrated his 100th birthday in May of 1998 with an amazing tribute featuring such luminaries as Walter Cronkite, Michael Feinstein, Isaac Stern, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Jerome Robbins, Garrison Keillor, Frank Sinatra — the list goes on. Watch here.
Baldwin Wallace voice professor JR Fralick joined pianist Nicole Keller in a laid-back performance of Berlin’s Slap That Bass on a Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert in March of 2019.
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, subtitled “Ballet for Martha (Graham)” was originally written for a chamber ensemble of 13 players, which many think more appropriate for the music than the composer’s later version for full orchestra.
Here are two performances: one by the New York Classical Players led by Dongmin Kim in 2017, and another performed without a conductor by students at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston during a 2015 chamber music marathon.
The full extent of William Grant Still’s oeuvre is still being explored by conductors and performers, including his numerous operas. Still is interviewed here on Voice of America before the premiere of his 1949 work, Troubled Island.
Cleveland Orchestra musicians recently recorded two of Still’s works at Plymouth Church. Watch here as principal oboe Frank Rosenwein and pianist Carolyn Gadiel Warner play his Incantation and Dance, followed by his Danzas de Panama in the version for string quartet.
Conductor John McLaughlin Williams leads the CIM Orchestra in Still’s “rousing and amiable” Festive Overture, which won first prize among 39 anonymously submitted pieces in a 1944 competition sponsored by the Cincinnati Symphony.
To end, we should mention the first performance on this date in 2000 of Colin Matthews’ Pluto — the Renewer, written to update Gustav Holst’s original list of planets. Wrong-headed, since the composer had astrological signs rather than heavenly spheres in mind when he wrote The Planets (he also left Earth out). Even though Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006, Matthews’ add-on piece may still be worth a listen. Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic.