by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S EVENTS:
Events in Ukraine are on everyone’s mind, but musicians are engaging with the crisis through consciousness-raising and fundraising performances.
Oberlin Conservatory Faculty pianists Scott Cuellar, Peter Takács, Tony Cho, Yulia Fedoseeva and Haewon Song, clarinetist Richard Hawkins, French hornist Jeff Scott, bassoonist Drew Pattison, violinists Francesca dePasquale and David Bowlin, violist Kirsten Docter, cellists Dmitry Kouzov and Andrei Ionita, bassist Derek Zadinsky and members of the Verona Quartet will play a benefit concert tonight at 7:30 in Oberlin’s First Methodist Church. Donations will be directed to UNICEF Ukraine, Red Cross Ukraine, and Razom.
The CIM Orchestra will perform at Severance Music Center tonight under Carlos Kalmar in a program featuring pianist Jacob Bernhardt in Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, as well as the first outing of a new piece by CIM’s Keith Fitch, Charles Ives’ amusing The Unanswered Question (the Druids have no comment) and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony.
And although today’s Brownbag Concert at Trinity Cathedral has already come and gone, check the Cathedral’s YouTube channel if you missed the live performance by violinist Andrew Maxwell, cellist Eleanor Pompa, and pianist Daniel Colaner of the Lotus Trio.
NEWS
The stats sent analysts in the broadcast world into a tailspin when the classical radio station in Charlotte, N.C. was rated No. 1 in its market. A fluke or a trend? Read “Roll over, Beethoven” on Insider Radio here.
ALMANAC:
Organist-composers get all the recognition on March 23: 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 here by American organist David von Behren on the organ of First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, near his birthplace. Von Behren took his undergraduate degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music and served as organ scholar at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights before grad study at Yale and Boston U. He’s now the assistant organist and choirmaster at Harvard.
And two pieces stand out among French organist 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.
