by Daniel Hathaway
CONCERTS THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday at 1:30 pm at the Hay-McKinney Mansion of the Western Reserve Historical Society, members of The Cleveland Orchestra will play music by winners of the Cleveland Arts Prize in conjunction with the exhibit “Honoring Our Past Masters: The Golden Age of Cleveland Art, 1900-1945.” And at 8:00 pm, the Oberlin College Black Musicians Guild hosts the Nicholas Payton Trio in Finney Chapel.
On Sunday at 1:00 pm, Finney Chapel will be the site of the inaugural Peter Takács Beethoven Prize in Piano competition, named for the longtime Oberlin piano professor for whom Beethoven’s music has been a lifelong inspiration. (You can watch a webcast as well as attend in person.) A few blocks away at 5 pm, the Sacred Heart Concert Series presents the Orb Quartet and other Oberlin Conservatory musicians in “Chillin’ with Contemporary Composers.”
Otherwise, a long list of Advent and Christmas concerts fills this weekend’s calendar.
On Saturday, performers include the Lake Effect Concert Band, the Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus, Cleveland Jazz Orchestra with vocalists Vanessa Rubin, Evelyn Wright, and Ava Presto, and Quire Cleveland’s third and last “Mary’s Song” program.
On Sunday, seasonal music continues with Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas, the Euclid Symphony Orchestra Holiday Pops, Western Reserve Chorale, Advent Lessons and Carols with Trinity Cathedral Choir, Singers Companye in Fairlawn, the University of Akron Choral Ensembles and Brass Choir (pictured above), and the West Shore Chorale.
Visit our Concert Listings page for details.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov was born on December 5, 1960 in La Plata, but departures far outnumber arrivals on these two dates in history.
Those who left us on December 4 include English poet and librettist John Gay (London, 1732), Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen (Oslo, 1935), British composer Benjamin Britten (Aldeburgh, 1976), and American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa (Los Angeles, 1993).
There’s only one departure to remember on December 5, but a major one: Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (Vienna, 1791).
For celebratory pieces, let’s start with cellist Alisa Weilerstein and her NPR Tiny Desk Concert performance of Omaramor, Golijov’s tribute to the tango singer Carlos Gardel (she also plays the Bourée and Gigue from J.S. Bach’s Solo Cello Suite No. 3).
Add to that an excerpt from a local performance of Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, featuring clarinetist Franklin Cohen with Diana Cohen, Isabel Trautwein, Kirsten Docter, and Tanya Ell. Audio production was by the late Thom Moore.
It’s interesting that John Gay and Benjamin Britten should appear in the same edition of the Almanac, for Britten adapted Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera for modern performance in 1948. (An even later adaptation by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill resulted in The Threepenny Opera). Click here to watch a 1963 video with the English Chamber Orchestra that features the young Janet Baker as Polly Peachum.
And considering the season, who can mention Britten without thinking of his wonderful A Ceremony of Carols for treble choir and harp, written at sea between the U.S. and England in 1942? The eleven Middle English poems Britten selected inspired him to write some unforgettable music.
Listen here to a performance by the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and here to a 2017 Brownbag Concert performance by the soprano and altos of the choir of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, who will sing the piece at noon on December 8.
Finally, there are numerous compositions we can invoke to remember Mozart on the anniversary of his premature passing at the age of 35, but perhaps none so touching as his simple setting of the Eucharistic hymn, Ave verum corpus. In the middle of composing Die Zauberflöte, Mozart wrote this exquisite 46-bar motet for his friend Anton Stoll, who directed the music at the parish of St. Stephan in Baden bei Wien, where it was performed on the feast of Corpus Christi on June 23, 1791. Click here to listen to a performance by the Vienna Boys Choir and the Vienna Radio Symphony led by Bertrand de Billy in celebration of Mozart’s 250th anniversary in 2006. The entire concert is available here.
