by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Events: Cleveland Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with Vadim Gluzman (pictured), Stars of Summer, Tuesday Musical Passport series, Tailgating with Cleveland Opera Theater
. CityMusic announces 2022-23 season
. Arthur Loesser, Eric Coates, and Aspen Music Festival celebrate birthdays
WEEKEND EVENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra is off to Europe for its first European tour since 2018. Friday night at 7:30 pm you can catch the second sendoff concert at Severance Music Center, when Franz Welser-Möst will lead Richard Strauss’ Macbeth, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks & Suite from Der Rosenkavalier (compiled by Welser-Möst) & Alban Berg’s Three Pieces from Lyric Suite. Tickets can be ordered online.
On Saturday, August 27 at 7:30 pm, New York’s celebrated Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, “a radical experiment in musical democracy” that plays without a conductor, will make a guest appearance at Blossom with violinist Vadim Gluzman as soloist. The all-string orchestra program includes Francesco Geminiani’s La Follia Variations, Adolphus Hailstork’s Sonata da Chiesa for String Orchestra, and Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Purchase tickets here and enjoy the performance in Cuyahoga Falls.
On Sunday, August 28 at 1:00 pm & 3:00 pm, Tuesday Musical’s Passport Series visits Italy with Alla Boara’s modern arrangements of Italy’s near-extinct folk songs, variously described as “surprising, playful, mournful, tender, and bewitching.” The vision of drummer and composer Anthony Taddeo, Alla Boara also features vocalist Amanda Powell, guitarist Dan Bruce, trumpeter Tommy Lehman, bassist Ian Kinnaman, and accordionist and keyboardist Clay Colley. In case of rain, these outdoor performances, scheduled for Akron’s Barder House, 1041 W. Market St., will move to Guzzetta Recital Hall, 157 University Ave., across from EJ Thomas Hall on The University of Akron campus. Click here for tickets.
Also on Sunday August 28, Cleveland Opera Theater will present its annual Opera for All Summer Concert at the Dunham Tavern Museum, 6709 Euclid Ave., in Cleveland. Oberlin Conservatory professor Charles Edward McGuire will emcee the show, which begins at 6 pm with Opera tailgating. Bring picnic blankets, chairs, food & beverages (or buy from The Dawg Bowl Cajun Cuisine food truck) and enjoy favorite opera arias, duets, and ensembles with string quartet and piano accompaniment. It’s free.
INTERESTING READS:
Writing for The Arts Fuse, NPR-WBUR and Boston Globe critic Bill Marx notes that today, “Critics are not expected to take the culture’s temperature, to diagnose its condition; they are there to reinforce the assumption that the business of the arts in America is … business.” Click here to read Arts Criticism — Stuck in the Bunker.
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes in an appreciation of the late Richard Taruskin, “The most formidable modern writer on music seamlessly mixed the literary and the conversational, the meticulous and the evocative.” Read The Monumental Musicology of Richard Taruskin here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
American composer, pianist, and critic Arthur Loesser was born on August 26 in 1894 in New York, the half-brother of Broadway composer Frank Loesser (who he referred to as “the evil of two Loessers”).
His career took him to Cleveland, where he began teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1926 and from 1953 headed its piano department. He died on January 4, 1969 of a heart attack at the wheel of his car outside CIM.
A witty commentator, Loesser wrote program notes for The Cleveland Orchestra and Vladimir Horowitz, and penned the popular book Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History. He talked about that book in a two-part lecture at the University of Michigan in July of 1965. Listen here and here.
English composer Eric Coates, born on August 27, 1886 in Nottinghamshire (he died in Chichester in 1957) was both celebrated and denigrated during his career as a creator of “light music.”
Coates and his music attracted a certain amount of snobbery: The Times characterized his music as “fundamentally commonplace…but well written, easy on the ear and lightly sentimental…superficial but sincere.” In its obituary notice, The Manchester Guardian took issue with such a dismissal, and preferred the French attitude of cherishing petits-maîtres for what they were rather than condemning them for what they were not: “better to write second-class masterpieces than fail to be a second Beethoven.” One of Coates’s most important musical gifts was the ability to write memorable tunes — “a genuine lyrical impulse,” as The Manchester Guardian put it. On first meeting him Dame Ethel Smyth said, “You are the man who writes tunes,” and asked him how he did it.
(Speaking of snobbery, that paragraph appears in Coates’ Wikipedia article, a source that many treat with general suspicion, but it’s pretty obvious when the anonymous authors are demonstrating respectable scholarship.)
Click here to listen to Eric Coates’ London Suite (London Everyday) played by Guilhem Boisson and Orchestra Symphonique Opus 31, a French amateur ensemble based in Toulouse. The listener comments are worth your time.
Colorado’s Aspen Music Festival and School was founded on August 28, 1949 as a two-week event celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of German social philosopher and dramatist Johann Wolgang von Goethe, who entered the world on August 28, 1749 in Frankfurt.
Watch A Bridge to Beethoven, a live performance by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Shai Wosner from the 2015 Festival, and, from the Aspen School, a faculty-student showcase led by oboist Elaine Douvas.
Goethe’s most celebrated work is his tragic play, Faust, which became a German cultural monument, and whose mystical final lines have inspired settings by Schumann (Scenes from Goethe’s Faust), Liszt (Faust Symphony), and Mahler (Symphony No. 8).