by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, CIM Opera Theater presents Mozart’s Don Giovanni (pictured) at Mimi Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square. Read preview articles here and here.
And to mark its 75th Anniversary, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society has booked Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art for five evenings and has engaged the Jerusalem Quartet to play all fifteen of Dmitri Shostaktovich’s string quartets in chronological order, creating a timeline of the composer’s life in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. The third program tonight at 7:30 includes Quartets 7-9, and will be preceded by a 6:30 lecture by James Wilding. Read a preview article here.
For details of these and other events, please visit our Concert Listings page.
INTERESTING READ & LISTEN:
When New York’s Frick Collection was nearing the completion of its renovation, the museum needed to acquire a new concert grand piano for its 220-seat concert hall to replace an instrument it had been renting. The choice was narrowed to three Steinway “D” models — an 1882 instrument nicknamed Palisandra, a 1965 piano called Volodya, and a 2017 concert grand built in Hamburg, Steinway’s German hometown. Then Jeremy Denk was retained to put each of them through a rigorous audition. New York Times critic Joshua Barone reports the results and invites readers to make their own choice of the piano to be featured in the hall’s opening festival, from April 26 through May 11.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
According to some sources, “The Bard of Avon,” William Shakespeare, was born on April 23, 1564, and it’s a fact that he died on the same date in 1616. Setting aside the contentious question of whether or not the son of a glove maker from Stratford-Upon-Avon actually authored the plays and poems attributed to him, we’ll honor both his arrival and departure dates with a setting of words from The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1. By moonlight, Lorenzo and Jessica are discussing music both earthly and celestial, and Lorenzo comes to the conclusion that
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.
Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote A Serenade to Music to mark the 50th anniversary of the first concert conducted by Sir Henry Wood, who led the popular “Proms” (Promenade Concerts) for 50 years. The original work featured sixteen soloists chosen by the conductor and the composer, who at times sing as a choir. Members of the London Symphony, the BBC Symphony, and the London Philharmonic joined together for the first performance at the Royal Albert Hall on October 5, 1938 (listen to the first recording here.)
Here, in one album, are three versions of the piece from Vaughan Williams’ pen: for soloists (with the London Philharmonic conducted by Sir Adrian Boult), for chorus and orchestra (with the Royal Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, led by Vernon Handley), and for orchestra alone (with the Northern Sinfonia under Richard Hickox).
And on this date in 1891, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was born in Sontzovka, Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine. Many works come to mind to celebrate that occasion, but since we’ve just been talking about choral music, it seems like a good time to revisit his music for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, for which Prokofiev wrote the score and later turned the material into a cantata. The composer was impressed with the director’s approach. As he wrote in broken English at the time,
Eisenstein’s respect for music was so great that he was ready to “hitch” film with visual image forward or backward only not to break the value of musical fragment. Do I need to say that working with such a condition gave me a great satisfaction!
Watch the full movie here with particular attention to the “Battle on Ice” scene and the touching mezzo-soprano solo in “The Field of the Dead.” We can recommend two videos of the cantata.
The first features mezzo soprano Ketevan Kemoklidze, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Choir of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, led by Yuri Temirkanov.
The second, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the BBC Symphony, was led by Leonard Slatkin at London’s Barbican Hall in 2000. Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung is well known to Clevelanders from her appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra.
