by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:
The Cleveland Chamber Music Society has posted the latest Front Row National program from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center featuring violinist Arnaud Sussmann with pianists Hyeyeon Park and Wu Han, violinists Francisco Fullana, Bella Hristova and Kristin Lee, violists Yura Lee and Richard O’Neill, cellists Dmitri Atapine and Nicholas Canellakis, bassist Xavieer Foley, and flutists Sooyun Kim and Tara Helen O’Connor, flutes. You can summon up J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 and Ernest Chausson’s Concerto in D for violin, piano and string quartet for free any time you like through March 2.
In more news from the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, two forthcoming concerts have now been cancelled due to the pandemic: the Takács Quartet on March 16 and the Pavel Hass Quartet on April 13.
Also online on Friday: the CIM Orchestra, saxophonist Howie Smith at the Bop Stop, and Stile Antico sponsored by the Boston Early Music Festival.
Saturday’s lineup includes Australian artist Stephanie Jones on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society’s International Series (pre-recorded), and the Cleveland Orchestra’s archived performance of Hansel and Gretel.
Sunday brings a Close Encounter from Heights Arts, the final Oberlin Black History Month event — a faculty recital — and, in case you missed it the first time around, a rebroadcast of CIM’s Music for Food benefit concert.
Details about these performances are to be found in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
February 26 saw the births of French Bohemian composer Anton Reicha (Prague, in 1770, who went on to teach Liszt, Berlioz and Franck at the Paris Conservatory and write early wind quintets) and English composer Frank Bridge (Brighton 1879, who taught Benjamin Britten), as well as the death of Italian composer Giuseppi Tartini (Padua, 1770, the first known owner of a Stradivari violin and author of the “Devil’s Trill” Sonata which still frightens modern fiddlers).
And Howard Hanson, American conductor, composer, and longtime director of the Eastman School of Music, died on this date in 1981 in Rochester, NY.
An unrepentant Romantic, Hanson left a legacy of expressive works that deserve more performances than they receive these days. His Second Symphony, subtitled “Romantic” sets the tone here in a performance by the Peabody Symphony led by Joseph Young.
Flutist Erika Boysen illustrates a performance of his Serenade for flute, harp, and strings with American artwork here, and organist Thomas Sheehan is featured in his Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Harp in a concert from Harvard’s Memorial Church led by University Organist Edward Elwyn Jones.
And here’s a performance of Hanson’s mystical Cherubic Hymn led by the composer.
On February 26 of 2013, French organist Marie-Claire Alain made her sortie at the age of 86 in the Paris suburb of Le Pecq. She succeeded her father as organist of the church of Sain-Germain-en-Laye, playing there for 40 years.
Among her 260 recordings are three complete cycles of the works of J.S. Bach. Watch a brief documentary here, and hear her perform his Fantasia in G (aka Pièce d’Orgue) here. And be a fly on the wall as she gives a lesson to a Czech organ student in 2006.
Some big names to mention for February 27: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, born either on the 27th or the 25th in 1873 in Naples, Russian composer Alexander Borodin, who died during a ballroom concert in St. Petersburg in 1887, German soprano Lotte Lehmann, born in Perleberg in 1883, and Texas pianist Van Cliburn, who lost his struggle with bone cancer in Fort Worth in 2013 at the age of 78.
Cliburn helped take the chill off the Cold War in 1958 when he won the inaugural Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Cheered by Muscovites and given the first New York ticker tape parade for a classical musician when he returned to the U.S., Cliburn founded his own competition in his hometown of Fort Worth later that year.
Click here to listen to a live recording of his winning performance of Tchikovsky’s First Concerto. A 58-minute film by Peter Rosen on Medici-TV documents that event for subscribers (watch a free trailer here).
To wrap up an eventful weekend in the milestones department, Gioachino Rossini was born on February 29 in 1792 (we’ll relax the date criteria in this non-leap year). He wrote his first opera at the age of 18, and a total of 34 stage works before either burning out or ceding the field to Meyerbeer. After finishing Guillaume Tell in 1829, he laid his pen down for the next 40 years, having amassed enough of a fortune to sustain a life of luxury in which he inspired the invention of such truffle and foie-gras-rich culinary excesses as Crema alla Rossini, Frittata alla Rossini, and Tournedos Rossini.
His final composition, the Petite messe solenelle, for chorus, soloists, two pianos and harmonium (which has been described as ‘neither small nor solemn’), was completed in 1863, whereupon the composer drafted a note to the Deity:
Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is it sacred music I have written, or damned music? I was born for opera buffa, as you know well. A little technique, a little heart, that’s all. Be blessed then, and grant me Paradise.
Click here to watch a live performance of the Mass from December, 2015 by the Accademia Corale Vittore Veneziani at the Teatro Comunale Claudio Abbado in Ferrara.