by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 6 pm at Heights Arts, you can sit in on an open rehearsal of the Omni Quartet’s Beethoven quartet program and watch the process of preparing for the concert that Amy Lee & Alicia Koelz, violins, Joanna Patterson Zakany, viola, and Tanya Ell, cello, will give on Sunday.
Tonight at 7 pm, No Exit will present music from The Collective, an international consortium of composers including Agata Zubel, Mathew Rosenblum, Douglas Knehans, Spiros Mazis, Amy Kaplan, Constantine Koukias, Edward Smalldone, and Timothy Beyer (pictured) in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art (it’s free).
And at 7:30, Apollo’s Fire takes its summer program ¡HISPANIA!, led from the harpsichord by Jeannette Sorrell and featuring flamenco guitarist Jeremías García, to Harkness Chapel at Case.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1805, Italian composer Luigi Boccherini died in Madrid, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923, and German baritone and conductor Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau took his first breath in 1925 in Zehlendorf.
Boccherini’s Cello Sonata No. 6 received a local performance by CIM double bassist Benjamín Harris and pianist Evan Solomon in March, 2019. Watch here.
ChamberFest Cleveland musicians Diana Cohen, violin, William Caballero, horn, and Zoltán Fejérvári, piano played Ligeti’s Trio during the 2018 festival in Mixon Hall at CIM, and frequent Cleveland Orchestra soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard has recorded a brilliant performance of Ligeti’s Etude L’escalier du diable (“The Devil’s Staircase”), commenting,
When I play Ligeti’s Étude No. 13, I have the feeling of climbing and of [M.C.] Escher’s endless staircases that Ligeti loved so much. I have the feeling not of looking at this famous architectural illusion, but of being part of it, and in vain of looking for an exit. And I feel deeply the existential dimension that this situation had for Ligeti.
And the Latvian/Danish/Hungarian woodwind quintet Carion gave an unforgettable performance (memorized, and choreographed!) of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles on Cleveland’s Latvian Concert Association series a few years back. Enjoy their previously recorded video here.
Finally, if you don’t mind thinking of winter even as spring is hesitantly trying to establish a foothold in Northeast Ohio, here’s a slightly gloomy video of Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel performing Schubert’s Die Winterreise that nonetheless captures the baritone’s wonderfully evocative interpretations of Lieder. Watch here.
