by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Events with multiple performances include The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, Sara Hicks, conductor & emcee, in holiday concerts (Saturday & Sunday at 2:30 & 7:30 at Severance Music Center), the Cleveland Philharmonic, Victor Liva, conductor (Saturday at 7:30 at CSU & Sunday at 3 at Westlake PAC), CityMusic Cleveland, John McLaughlin Williams, conductor & Sibbi Bernhardsson, violin (Saturday at 7:30 at St. Stanislaus & Sunday at 4:30 at Our Lady of Angels). Note: Apollo’s Fire’s performances of Handel’s Messiah are sold out.
Sunday’s concerts include Candlelight Carols and Singalong (3 pm at Fairmount Presbyterian), Gaudete! bell choir and instrumentalists (4 pm at St. Noel, Willoughby Hills), and NOVA Ensemble (Northwest Ohio Vocal Arts, pictured) in “Songs of Wonder: The Nativity Through the Ages” (7 pm at Church of the Saviour, Cleveland Hts.)
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Cuyahoga Arts & Culture’s Board of Trustees will hold a regular meeting on Wednesday, December 18 on the 2nd floor of the Louis Stokes wing of the downtown Cleveland Public Library. After a brief 3:30 pm executive session, the public meeting agenda will include a 2025 resident-led arts & culture grant to Neighborhood Connection, a 2025 Support for Artists grant to Assembly for the Arts, the 2025 organizational budget, and routine business. The meeting will also be livestreamed on CAC’s YouTube page.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
December 14:
On this date in 1788, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach passed away in Hamburg at age 74. That second surviving son of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach is known for retaining the influence of his father’s music while charting a path of his own in the early Classical period.
Here’s one throwback of a listening recommendation: the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble released a record of three C.P.E. Bach sonatas in 1982. Fortunately it’s been digitized and is available on YouTube: click these links to hear the Sonata in g (oboe and continuo), Trio Sonata in d (flute, violin, and continuo), and Sonata in D (viola da gamba and continuo), played by its then members James Caldwell, Catharina Meints, Lisa Goode Crawford, Robert Willoughby, and Marilyn McDonald.
December 15:
On this date in 1938, violinist Joseph Szigeti, conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, and The Cleveland Orchestra gave the first performance of Ernest Bloch’s Violin Concerto.
Bloch had been appointed the first Musical Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music upon its opening in 1920, at its original location of 3146 Euclid Avenue. (The school’s mission as proclaimed by Bloch: “Musical education, in addition to the thorough study of technique, ought above all else, to develop qualities of appreciation, judgment and taste, and to stimulate understanding and love of music.”)
He served in that post until 1925 before moving on to San Francisco Conservatory (which still holds a copy of his “death mask” as prepared by his daughter and her husband — not creepy at all). But he spent most of the 1930s in his native Switzerland, and only returned to the U.S. in the late ‘30s following the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Italy.
Many of Bloch’s works draw on his Jewish heritage, including his famous cello concerto Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque. And while the composer noted the influence of American Indian songs on the central melodies and motives of the Violin Concerto, he also said that the work portrays “the complex, glowing, agitated soul that I feel vibrating through the Bible.”
Listen here to a live recording from a year after the premiere, featuring Joseph Szigeti himself with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg.
