by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
There are fourteen interesting events listed in our calendar for this weekend. Have fun choosing which concerts to attend!
ON SATURDAY, there’s a Song Recital Project concert by baritone Jason Fuh and pianist Edward Bak (2 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Art Museum), Trobár Medieval performs 14th century Italian music (7 pm at Our Lady of Carmel), Summit Choral Society’s Metropolitan Chorus sings a concert (7 pm at St. Bernard, Akron), the Canton Symphony plays Rhapsodies from Bohemia (7:30 at Umstattd Hall), contralto Heidi Skok sings Wagner & Mahler (7:30 pm at Disciples Church), The Cleveland Orchestra hosts David Afkham & Beatrice Rana (pictured, 8 pm at Severance), Apollo’s Fire presents Bach Easter Cantatas (8 pm at St. Paul, Akron), and the Richard Bona Trio plays at Oberlin (8 pm in Finney Chapel.
ON SUNDAY, repeats of Saturday shows include The Cleveland Orchestra (3 pm at Severance), Trobár Medieval (3pm at St. Anselm, Chesterland), and Apollo’s Fire (5 pm at Gesú Church in University Hts.,). Cleveland Chamber Collective presents Ty Alan Emerson’s OATH BREAKER (3:30 pm at Pivot Center), Arts at Holy Trinity presents Bard College organist Renée Anne Louprette (4 pm at Holy Trinity Lutheran, Akron), and Lakeland Civic Orchestra features violinist Aika Birch (4 pm at Lakeland Community College.
For details of these and other performances, visit our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
The headline for a guest column by composer and musician Geoffrey Peterson published on April 25 on Cleveland.com reads “Cleveland Orchestra is ignoring music from local composers,” a situation he hopes will change under the orchestra’s next music director. Read the column here (note: this article is behind a paywall).
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
April 27:
On this date in classical music history, Russian-American musicologist, composer, conductor, and (according to himself) standup comedian Nicolas Slonimsky, was born in St. Petersburg in 1894. And on April 27, 1915, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin died of blood poisoning at the age of 43.
Slonimsky, who died in 1995, was one of the great characters of the 20th century. As editor of Baker’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, he penned priceless autobiographies as prefaces to various editions, and edited such compendia as The Lexicon of Musical Invective, a collection of critical assaults on composers since Beethoven’s time.
Watch the documentary, A Touch of Genius here, and enjoy his appearance on the Johnny Carson Show in 1986 at the age of 92, where Slonimsky “speaks about Frank Zappa (4:40), demonstrates conducting quintuple time with one hand and duple time with the other (7:21), tries to demonstrate his perfect pitch (10:51) and plays Chopin’s “Black Key” Étude with an orange (12:08).”
Scriabin made an impressive splash in the Russian piano world during his brief lifetime, but was almost as quickly forgotten. His pieces regularly show up in piano competitions. Martin James Bartlett, winner of Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition, played Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata in the final round (watch here).
2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition second-place winner Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev also included Sonata No. 4 in his semi-final round program, prefacing it with Scriabin’s 5 Preludes, Op. 16.
And Martina Filjak, 2009 CIPC Gold Medalist, knocked everyone’s socks off in her semifinal round with Scriabin’s Nocturne for the Left Hand.
Scriabin’s amazing Poème de l’Extase has been recorded by The Cleveland Orchestra under Lorin Maazel. Listen here.
April 28 — by Jarrett Hoffman:
In honor of Iowa-born, Grammy-winning, University of Michigan faculty composer Michael Daugherty’s 69th birthday, let’s look back on some memorable performances of his music in the area. We can begin in December of 2015, when Liza Grossman and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra gave the Cleveland premiere — as well as the first performance by a youth orchestra — of all five movements of the Superman-inspired Metropolis Symphony.
Mike Telin gave a sense of the work’s stylistic variety, as well as its excellent performance, in a review:
Throughout the 40-minute piece, Daugherty brilliantly interweaves scatterings of jazz, rock, funk, and avant-garde with the symphonic.…Grossman led the young musicians in a first-rate performance of the demanding work.
(As a side note, musical variety and pop-culture influence were present in the composer’s life from the beginning: his dad was a jazz and country-music drummer, his mom was an amateur singer, and his grandma played piano for silent films.)
In the review, Telin walks us through the landscape of “Lex,” “Krypton,” “MXYZPTLK,” “Oh Lois!” and “Red Cape Tango” before noting the audience’s clear appreciation, including that of the composer himself, who was present. Too bad we can’t go back in time to revisit that performance, but here’s a worthy substitute on YouTube from the Toledo Symphony under the direction of Alain Trudel.
Daugherty’s list of compositions is long and full of highlights, but one that can’t be overlooked is Dead Elvis for bassoon and ensemble. Here’s a Rice University student performance (parts one and two) from 2010 by TK DeWitt (who three years later joined the Kansas City Symphony). The music doesn’t start until a minute in, but don’t miss his entrance — in costume, of course — or the delivery of his bassoon from offstage.
