by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
We recommend 18 events in our calendar for Saturday and Sunday this week. Let’s cut to the chase and send you directly to our Concert Listings for details of these performances.
Recognize anyone in this photo? See the almanac!
ANNOUNCEMENT
The Board of Trustees of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture will hold its regular meeting on December 13 at 3:30 pm in the 2nd Floor Learning Commons, Louis Stokes Wing, of the Main Cleveland Public Library. The public is invited to attend either in person or via livestream.
The Agenda includes the approval of 2024 resident-led arts & culture grants, approval of a 2024 Support for Artists grant to Assembly for the Arts, and routine matters of business.
Click here to view the agenda and handout materials for the meeting.
INTERESTING READ:
Born before the outbreak of World War I, French pianist Colette Maze began making albums in the 1990s. She released her latest, 109 Ans de Piano, this year. Widely considered the world’s oldest recording pianist, Maze died on Nov. 19 in the same Paris apartment where she had lived since she was 18, with views of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine River. She was 109. Read an article in the New York Times here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
December 9:
German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born on this date in 1915 and passed away in her sleep at age 90 in 2006. She was most celebrated for performing Lieder, and in that arena, she helped inaugurate Blossom Music Center — listen here to Strauss’s Four Last Songs performed live by Schwarzkopf, George Szell, and The Cleveland Orchestra in a radio broadcast from the venue’s first season. (Read more about that first season of Blossom here.) Or head to Spotify for those Strauss works in another Schwarzkopf-Szell pairing, this time in a recording with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin.
Complicating Schwarzkopf’s legacy is her involvement with the National Socialist Party, including ways that were far from routine at the time, as Michael H. Kater wrote in The Guardian in the weeks after the soprano’s death.
December 10:
French composer and organist Olivier Messsiaen was born on December 10, 1908 in Avignon. The maître and his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, were invited by Karel Paukert to a celebration of his 70th birthday at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978. Can you identify some of Cleveland’s musical personalities who were mingling in the lobby of Gartner Auditorium with the Messiaens in the photo above?
Probably Messiaen’s most-performed work, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. ChamberFest Cleveland has featured it on at least two occasions. Click here for a performance in Mixon Hall at CIM by Cohen with Yura Lee, violin, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Orion Weiss, piano in June, 2013. Franklin Cohen talked about the piece in a promotional video before a later performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall.
Messiaen was also a keen ornithologist who incorporated bird song into such works as his Oiseaux exotiques, which won pianist Angeline Chang, conductor John McLaughlin Williams, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony a Grammy Award in 2007.
Messiaen the organist was titular at La Trinité in Paris for more than six decades. Hear him in some of his celebrated improvisations in this video.
Ready for a touch of the bizarre? Here’s a performance of “Dieu parmi nous” from the organ suite La Nativité du Seigneur played on bayan (accordion) by Ukrainian artist Artem Nyzhnyk, and an arrangement for accordion and theremin of the “Louange à l’Éternité du Jésus” from the Quatour performed by Lydia Kavina and Roman Yusipey. Given Messiaen’s enthusiastic embrace of another electronic instrument, the ondes martenot, he probably would have approved.
