By Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. A short but eclectic mix of musical offerings
. Almanac: historical links with a weekend Cleveland Orchestra concert
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
APRIL 7 – FRIDAY
7:30 pm – Québecois trio É.T.É brings a mix of Gaelic jazz, folk, and step dancing, performances on fiddle, cello, and bouzouki, and vocal harmonies. Maltz Center for the Performing Arts,1855 Ansel Rd, Cleveland. Click here for tickets.
7:30 pm – Apollo’s Fire: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered, Jeannette Sorrell, direction & harpsichord, featuring Francisco Fullana & Alan Choo & Emi Tanabe, violins. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Concerto for Two Cellos & La Folia. West Shore Unitarian Universalist, 20401 Hilliard Blvd, Rocky River, 44116. The program will be repeated on Saturday at the Federated Church, 76 Bell St., Chagrin Falls. Tickets available online.
7:30 am – Trinity Good Friday Concert: Trinity Cathedral Choir, Todd Wilson, conducting, Elizabeth DeMio & Anne Wilson, pianists, Jacqueline Josten, soprano, Edward Vogel, baritone. Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsche Requiem with accompaniment for piano four hands arranged by the composer. 6:45 pre-concert talk by Charles McGuire, Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering.7:30 pm – Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble: conducted by Tim Weiss. Works by Golfam Khayam, Gabriela Ortiz Denibée, Olly Wilson, Nicole Mitchell, and composer-in-residence David Liptak, featuring faculty baritone Timothy LeFebvre. Warner Concert Hall, 77 W College St, Oberlin. Free. Click here for the webcast.
7:30 pm – The Cleveland Orchestra: Rafael Payare, conductor Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano. Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”) and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Severance Music Center, 11001 Euclid Avenue. The program will be repeated on Saturday at 8:00 pm. Tickets available online.
8:00 pm – No Exit: world premieres of Robert Honstein’s Sonnets, Chris Neiner’s Time Machine Hyperboles, Victoria Cheah’s Except for the silence in your touch and Connie Converse’s Songs, along with Victoria Cheah ‘s We waited for each other on aim. SPACES, 2900 Detroit Avenue Cleveland. Free. SPACES, 2900 Detroit Avenue Cleveland. Free.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
There’s a plethora of dates to remember this weekend in classical music history. We’ll choose one for each day that comes with an illuminating video and mention other historical events in passing.
For April 7:
On this date, Good Friday of 1724. Johann Sebastian Bach premiered his Passion according to St. John in St. Nicolas Church in Leipzig (it was to have taken place at the Thomaskirche, but was moved due to problems with the venue). He immediately revised it for a second performance in 1725, then made other versions during his lifetime. Click here to watch a 2022 performance of the work in the Thomaskirche during the 2022 Leipzig Bach Festival by The Choir & Orchestra of the J.S. Bach Foundation, conducted by Rudolf Lutz.
Other first performances to memorialize on April 8 include the premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony in Vienna in 1805, the first performance of a work by a woman to be played by a major orchestra (Margaret Ruthven Lang’s Dramatic Overture, by the Boston Symphony), and the opening of South Pacific on Broadway (the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical ran for 1,925 performances).
Speaking of the Boston Symphony, its music director Karl Muck was interned as an enemy alien on this date in 1918. More happily, Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes was born in 1970, and soprano Beverly Sills made her operatic debut at The Met in 1975 in Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth. And British bass baritone John Shirley-Quirk made his final curtain call in Bath in 2014.
For April 8:
On this date in 1949, Leonard Bernstein soloed in the debut of his Symphony 2, “The Age of Anxiety” (after a poem by W.H. Auden) in a concert led by Serge Koussevitzky. Click here to watch a video of a performance led by Bernstein with a very young Krystian Zimerman at the keyboard. The rarely performed work will be played this weekend by The Cleveland Orchestra led by Rafael Payare, and featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
Other events to remember on this date include the demise of opera composer Gaetano Donizetti (at 60 in Bergamo), composer Arthur Foote (at 84 in Boston), and singer Marian Anderson (in 1993).
For April 9:
Our highlighted event for April 9 is the first American performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in 1938 by Artur Rodzinsky and the NBC Symphony. The work also appears on this weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts led by Rafael Payare along with Bernstein’s Second Symphony. Click here to watch clips of the composer and Bernstein during the NY Philharmonic’s 1959 Moscow visit.
Click here to watch Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in a “Keeping Score” episode about the Fifth Symphony.
The Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich is the story of a fall from grace and redemption. Shostakovich was the golden boy composer until, virtually overnight, his patriotism was questioned and condemned in the most public way possible. Written in 1937 in Stalinist Russia, the Fifth Symphony marked his triumphant return. But the question remains: what did the composer mean to say with this enigmatic music? In scenes filmed in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony offer clues to unlocking Shostakovich’s musical secrets and make the case for how this symphony may have saved his life.
Three memorable dates in Black American classical music history appear on the April 9 calendar: the birth of composer Florence Beatrice Price in 1887, the birth of bass and actor Paul Robeson in 1898, and Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, that drew a crowd of 75,000. The performance protested the decision of the Daughters of the American Revolution to prevent the contralto from performing at the DAR’s Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.
Other April 9 milestones to note: the births of impresario Sol Hurok (Russia, 1888), of conductor Antal Dorati (Hungary, 1906), and New York Pro Musica founder Noah Greenberg (USA, 1919), and the death of post-Romantic composer Siegfried Karg-Elert (Leipzig, 1933), who gave a much-anticipated but disastrous organ recital at the Cleveland Museum of Art shortly before his demise.
