by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
On Saturday at 7 pm, Antonello Manacorda will lead The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus, with pianist Nelson Goerner, in Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Nocturnes, and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G and Suite from Mother Goose.
Then on Sunday at 7 pm, vocalist Tony DeSare will be featured with the Orchestra, Steven Reineke, conducting, in “Let’s Misbehave,” a program of music by Cole Porter, featuring symphonic arrangements of hits like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Night and Day.”
For Details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
On August 21, 1893, French composer Juliette Marie Olga Lili Boulanger was born in Paris, American soprano Queena Mario (née Queena Tillotson) made her first vocalizations in Akron in 1896, English mezzo-soprano Janet Baker debuted in 1933 in Hatfield, Yorkshire, and the celebrated American choral conductor Gregg Smith was born in Chicago in 1931. Add to that list American composer Lansing D. McLoskey, who arrived more recently — in 1964 in Cupertino California.
Not as well-known as her sister Nadia, who mentored countless 20th-century composers, Lili Boulanger’s career lasted only 24 years until her death in 1918. But she left a cache of luminous compositions, of which probably the best-known is her setting of Psalm 24. Hear it in a performance by the choir of First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska led by Painesville native Tom Trenney.
Lili Boulanger won the Prix de Rome in 1913 on her second try at the age of 19 with her cantata Faust et Hélène, the first female composer to achieve that distinction. Listen to Music’s Greatest Loss: Why Listen to Lili Boulanger from the Inside the Score series here.
Queena Mario, a lyric soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera Company from 1922 to 1938 passed to her reward in New York City in 1951 at the age of 54. As her obituary in the New York Times notes, she began her career in New York as a writer, penning columns for several daily newspapers, which earned her enough cash to take singing lessons.
Despite two unsuccessful auditions at the Metropolitan Opera, after singing with the San Carlo company and San Francisco Opera, she made her debut at the Met on Thanksgiving Day, 1922 as Micaela in Carmen, later becoming famous for her portrayal of Gretel in the Humperdinck classic.
On the side, while teaching at Curtis and Juilliard, she reintroduced herself as a writer with three murder mysteries, Murder at the Opera House, Murder Meets Mephisto, and Death Drops Delilah. Something about opera companies seems to inspire homicide…
And this is a good time to get to know Lansing McLoskey, first through his faculty bio on the website of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. He prefaces it with two quotations:
Music is the only art form with equal power to move the mind, heart, soul, and pelvis. I have an insatiable and omnivorous appetite for music, and am as moved by Berio’s Sinfonia and DuFay’s Nuper rosarum flores as I am by a J.S. Bach cantata. In my lessons, I may reference Steve Reich, Machaut, William Schuman, Claude Vivier, Miles Davis, Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, and The Ramones…in the same lesson.
Debussy perfectly encapsulated my feelings when he said “Music in its essence is not a thing that can be poured into a rigorous and traditional mold. It is made of colors and rhythmical beats. All the rest is fraud, invented by cold-blooded imbeciles riding on the masters’ backs.”
Here’s a sampling of his music: This Will Not Be Loud and Relentless (2017), performed and commissioned by Passepartout Duo (Nicoletta Favari, prepared piano & Christopher Salvito, percussion), #playlist (2018) for reed quintet (English horn, clarinet, alto sax, bassoon, bass clarinet), premiered by Splinter Reeds on April 13, 2019 at the Frost School of Music (the bassoonist is Oberlin’s Dana Jessen), and the first movement of his Zealot Canticles, performed by The Crossing, Donald Nally, conducting.
