by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
One year ago, on August 8, 2020, the second three of the six finalists in PianoCleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition played their ultimate round via videos. Two of them are back in the flesh for the 2021 Cleveland International Piano Competition, this time for final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.
Byeol Kim played on Friday evening, and Lovre Marušić is on for tonight at 7 with Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, sharing the program with Martín García García, who solos in Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. You can attend in person (face masks required) or watch the performances via live stream and stick around to hear the results after the jury decides who won what prizes. Click here for tickets.
On Sunday at 4, Oberlin professor Steven Plank plays a recital on the Flentrop organ in Christ Church, Oberlin featuring music by Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck and Heinrich Scheidemann. It’s free.
Outdoor concerts fill out the schedule on Sunday. At 4, guest Carillonneur Keiran Cantilina previews the program he’ll be playing from Belgian bell towers later this month on the McGaffin Carillon in University Circle. At 7, Martin Herman conducts The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom in Classical Mystery Tour, a Beatles tribute concert (tickets here). And at 7:30, Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony Virtuosi take music by Scott Joplin, Miguel del Águila, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa outdoors in Firestone Park.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has undergone emergency surgery in California for a brain tumor and has cancelled appearances through the end of October. Read more here.
The Baltimore Symphony announced on Thursday that it had fired Emily Skala, 59, its principal flute for more than three decades, after receiving complaints from musicians, audience members, and donors that she “shared Covid-19 conspiracy theories and other misinformation on social media.” Read the New York Times story here.
Since we’re now entering the Silly Season, the slow news period during late summer when frivolous news stories find their way onto front pages, our choice for today is a little Violin Channel feature about Paddy Moran, an Irish fiddler from County Mayo, who crafted a violin in 1972 made entirely out of parts from an old Ford Anglia. Read about that here (more such trivia to follow, we’re sure).
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Czech-American composer Karel Husa was born in Prague on August 7, 1921, He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, and taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years. In a January, 2017 New York Times obituary, Steve Smith writes
Mr. Husa created works in most of the standard concert-music forms apart from opera, including two symphonies, several concertos, four string quartets and three ballets.
…
In “Music for Prague 1968,” a response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire.
The piece, given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, became one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date.
Click here to listen to a retrospective of Husa’s music, including Music for Prague, from a 2005 symposium in which the composer participated.
