by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S EVENTS:
12:00 pm – Trinity Brownbag Concert: Music and Meditation. Todd Wilson & Nicole Keller, organ & piano. Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering. Hybrid concert will also be livestreamed.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Every day brings news of the latest fallout for Russian artists from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Catch up with this story (“Conductors Stand Down from Posts Amidst Russian Invasion”) on the Violin Channel.
Heights Arts writes, “Each year, Heights Arts invites its members to apply to perform in its Gallery Concert Series. These performances are meant to showcase the talent of our area musicians in our unique space on Lee Road. Applications are being accepted from local artist-member musical groups of between two and six musicians. All performances will be at 7:00 pm.” (It pays!) Details here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 2020, The Cleveland Orchestra announced the cancellation of its European and Middle Eastern tour due to the COVID pandemic. During the next week, some 35 Northeast Ohio musical organizations canceled or postponed their seasons, or took their events online. Today, March 9, 2022, marks the second anniversary of the great shutdown.
Thanks to the availability of vaccines, musical events continue to multiply, and some pandemic protocols like masking are gradually being relaxed. But it’s been a long two years!
On this date in 1910, composer Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Conductor Artur Rodzinky invited the 26-year-old composer to Cleveland in January of 1937 for the American premiere of his Symphony in One Movement (Symphony No. 1). Marin Alsop chose that work for her debut with the Orchestra in December of 2011, which sent ClevelandClassical.com executive editor Mike Telin into the Musical Arts Association archives at Severance Music Center to see how Barber’s visit went and how local critics had written about the work on its first outing. Read that article here.
The Rosemunde Quartet will give a rare performance of one of the composer’s most beloved pieces when Noah Bendix-Balgley (1st concertmaster, Berlin Philharmonic), Shanshan Yao (violin, N.Y. Philharmonic) Teng Li (principal viola, Los Angeles Philharmonic) & Nathan Vickery (cello, N.Y. Philharmonic) perform Barber’s Adagio on March 15. They’ll play it on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series at Plymouth Church in its original context as the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op.11.
The piece having become popular immediately after its debut in 1936, Barber arranged it for string orchestra later that year, naming it the Adagio for Strings. It’s often heard in an organ arrangement by William Strickland (the assistant organist at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York at the time), as well as in a choral version Barber made himself in 1967, when he published it with the text of the Agnus Dei.
The wistful sadness of the piece has made it appropriate for memorializing events from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the invasion of Ukraine.
Click here to listen to a performance of the original piece by the Dover Quartet, here to listen to the string orchestra version with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and here to watch the Laurens Symfonisch (formerly the Rotterdam Symphony Chorus) sing the choral version or Agnus Dei. Finally, click here to watch the young German concert organist Felix Hell play the Strickland arrangement at Trinity Church, Wall Street in New York.
A frequently posed question is how slow Barber wanted his Adagio to be performed. Timings vary widely. The Dover Quartet only took 7:41 to play the quartet version. Bernstein — whose tempos tended to get slower as his career continued — clocked in at 10:06, and the Laurens Symfonisch at 8:17. Felix Hell was the “most adagio” at 10:20. And the Rosemunde? Come to the concert and find out!
