By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday at 2 pm, Baldwin Wallace Conservatory presents its Christmas Concert in Gamble Auditorium, at 7 pm Cleveland’s No Exit completes its trio of performances with the St. Paul new music ensemble Zeitgeist — the second installment of No Exit’s Year of Surreality: The Unconscious — at SPACES, and at 7:30, the Stow Symphony presents its Christmas Concert in Tallmadge.
On Saturday at 8 pm, Daniel Harding (pictured above in the cockpit of an Airbus — he’s also worked as an Air France pilot) will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in its final performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with soprano Lauren Snouffer, as well as of the U.S. premiere of Betsy Jolas’s Ces belles années.
On Sunday at 3, Good Company, A Vocal Ensemble will host composer and guest conductor René Clausen in a program of his works at Lakewood Presbyterian Church, Oberlin Conservatory will launch its end-of-semester ChamberFest! in Stull Recital Hall beginning at 4:30, and organist Marcia Snavely’s 30-year career will be celebrated in a 7 pm concert by the Chagrin Falls Studio Orchestra at Federated Church.
Holiday concerts abound on Sunday, including a 2 pm & 5pm performances by the Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus, a 3 pm Holiday Carol Sing with carilloneur George Leggiero from the McGaffin Tower in University Circle, and a Parma Symphony Christmas Concert, a 3:30 performance by Western Reserve Chorale at Church of the Saviour with Brass and Percussion, a 4 pm Festival of Advent Lessons & Carols at Trinity Cathedral, a 4 pm tag-team recital by members of the Cleveland Chapter of the American Guild of Organists at Church of the Ascension in Lakewood, a 4 pm Holiday Concert by the choral forces of the University of Akron, and a 7:30 program by the West Shore Chorale at Rocky River Methodist.
For details of this and other events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEF:
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra is receiving applications for the position of part-time executive director, interviews to be scheduled in January. Download the job description here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
December 2 — by Mike Telin
On this day in 1931, French composer and teacher Vincent d’Indy died in Paris at the age of 80. Born in Paris as well, d’Indy began studying the piano with his grandmother at an early age. He began his studies in harmony with Albert Lavignac at 14 and at 16 was introduced to Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration.
d’Indy’s talents as a composer caught the attention of César Franck, and In 1872, he became Franck’s pupil at the Paris Conservatory where he remained until he joined the percussion section of the orchestra at the Châtelet Theatre in 1875. Along with Charles Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant, d’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris in 1894, becoming principal in 1904. Of the school’s teaching, The Oxford Companion to Music says that “A solid grounding in technique was encouraged, rather than originality.”
d’Indy’s students included Albert Roussel, Joseph Canteloube, who would later write his biography, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud. His student roster also included Cole Porter — who left the school after a few months, and Erik Satie. Satie would later write: “Why on earth had I gone to d’Indy? The things I had written before were so full of charm. And now? What nonsense! What dullness!”
d’Indy created controversy at the Société nationale de musique after becoming its joint secretary in 1885, and managed to succeed in overturning its French-music-only rule, prompting the Society’s founders Romain Bussine and Camille Saint-Saëns to resign in protest.
Although few of d’Indy’s works have become staples of the repertoire, his best known pieces include the Symphony on a French Mountain Air for piano and orchestra and Istar, a symphonic poem in the form of a set of variations. He also was responsible for reviving forgotten Baroque works — he created his own edition of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.
In his 1906 composer profile for The Etude, Edward Burlingame Hill writes that: “D’Indy’s principles as an artist are developed from the teachings of César Franck, of whom he was the ardent disciple, not only as a teacher of composition, but as an artist and as a man.”
Hill goes on to say that “It is too soon even to predict d’Indy’s ultimate rank as a composer. In mastery of technique, in vividness of expression, he stands very high; his originality and power are incontestable, while his reverent devotion to the memory of Cesar Franck by word and deed is without parallel in this self-seeking age.”
Perhaps history has been the judge.
Click here to listen to Symphony on a French Mountain Air. Recorded in 1958, the performance features pianist Robert Casadesus and the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy.
December 3 — by Daniel Hathaway
On December 3, 1883, Oberlin College began classes as the first institution of higher learning in the U.S. to admit both women and men.
And on this date in 1978, composer William Grant Still (pictured), one of Oberlin’s first Black students, passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 83. (He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the school in 1947.) Still has recently received long-overdue attention for his extensive catalog of works that includes symphonies, ballets, operas, choral works, art songs, chamber music and works for solo instruments. A good reason to go exploring! Start here to access a web site maintained by his family and click away!
We’ll continue our December list of premieres with a look at the first performance of Samuel Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony on this date in 1954.
Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1942, the gestation of Barber’s one-movement piece for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, was prolonged by a few interruptions — notably World War II.
Barber chose to set words by the 19th-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, whose writings had always appealed to him, but the composer avoided Kierkegaard’s complicated philosophy, turning to some simple and beautiful prayers instead,
Although it’s difficult to imagine in today’s media world, Time Magazine devoted an unsigned editorial to Barber’s new work, beginning with a description of the piece:
The work begins with plain chant, moves on to orchestral fortissimos. a restrained soprano solo, joyous choral passages and occasional Dies Irae trumpet blasts. But the overall effect is quiet, without either the sweetness or the grandeur expected of religious music. It is clean rather than austere. But at its best, the music matches the tender earnestness of the prayers’ poetry:
Father in Heaven! . . .
Hold not our sins up against us but
hold us up against our sins: So that the thought of Thee should not
remind us of what we have committed But of what Thou didst forgive;
Not how we went astray, but how Thou didst save us!
Time also reported on the critical reception of Prayers:
After last week’s Carnegie Hall performance by the Boston Symphony, the critics emerged dazed, uncertain, but impressed. The Times’s Olin Downes wrote, somewhat existentially, that one “wonders whether many pages of the score are not symbolic rather than expressive, or attemptedly expressive, of what cannot be communicated.” The Herald Tribune’s Paul Henry Lang found the work a “serious, moving and convincing piece.” On one point, most of the critics were agreed: they wanted to hear Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard again.
Click here to listen to a live performance of the 20-minute work featuring soprano Leontyne Price, the Cecilia Society Chorus, and the other original performers. Does anyone recall hearing a Cleveland performance of the work?
