by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
A whopping 19 events are listed in our calendar from Friday through Sunday, including pairs of performances by BlueWater Chamber Orchestra (soloists Afendi Yusuf and Amy Zoloto pictured) and Cleveland Chamber Choir, ensembles that are celebrating their 15th and 10th anniversaries this season.
Click here to read an interview with Ladonna Woods, widow of BlueWater founder Carlton Woods, and here to watch a brief video of Cleveland Chamber Choir and youth choir HaZamir Cleveland rehearsing a Salamone Rossi psalm at Congregation Mishkan Or (concert preview here).
Let’s cut to the chase and send you directly to our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances this weekend. Enjoy the richness and depth of classical performances in Northeast Ohio!
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Cleveland Institute of Music announced on Thursday that Tito Muñoz, former music director of The Phoenix Symphony and former assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, has been appointed interim principal conductor of the CIM Orchestra from next fall through the 2026-27 academic year. Read a press release here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
February 28:
On this Kalevala Day — named in honor of Finland’s national epic — it’s only fitting to celebrate the culture of that country by wishing a happy 72nd birthday to Osmo Vänskä.
Born in Sääminki, Vänskä began his musical career as a clarinetist in the Turku and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras before turning to conducting. And soon enough he had won the 1982 International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors and taken up his first position — principal guest conductor, then a few years later chief conductor — with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in his home country.
Among several over posts he has taken up since then, Vänskä has been most widely praised for his leadership of the Minnesota Orchestra, which he led from 2003-2022 — save for a span of six months, after he resigned in protest due to a long and acrimonious lockout, then returned.
Vänskä and Minnesota partnered on many acclaimed recordings, including the complete symphonies of his most musically famous countryman. Listen to them play Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4 here.
But let’s also shine a spotlight on his lesser-known talents: as an instrumentalist, and as a composer. Click here to listen to Vänskä on the clarinet — joined by his wife, Minnesota Orchestra concertmaster Erin Keefe — in one of his own compositions: the “Dialogue” from Duo for Clarinet and Violin.
Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco
March 1 — by Jarrett Hoffman:
It’s interesting to examine the ties between two pianist-composers who share a birthday today: Frédéric Chopin (born in 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, Poland) and Thomas Adès (1971 in London).
“He’s the No. 1 piano composer for me,” Adès said of Chopin in an interview for the San Francisco Examiner in 2015. “Listening to his music, the piano is a bottomless pool. His music seems to float freely and rises or falls, seems to have no stability at all…It has this total aquatic fluency.”
Poland’s most famous composer, Chopin was also considered one of the great virtuoso pianists of his time, and that interest certainly played a part in his oeuvre. All of his known compositions include the piano — most of them solo works such as his collections of Études and Preludes, but also two concertos, works of instrumental chamber music, and at least nineteen songs for voice and piano (some have been lost).
And while Adès began his career as a pianist and continues to perform with impressive results (in addition to having made his mark in conducting), he has been clear that he identifies most strongly with pen and ink. “When you come to see me play the piano, you’re seeing a composer who is a pianist,” he has said. The piano has played an important part in his writing, but his most famous works range from opera (The Tempest) to orchestra (Tevot and Asyla, the latter of which made him the youngest winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Composition).
One notable occasion in which Chopin and Adès shared a program was pianist Emanuel Ax’s three-part celebration of Chopin’s (and Schumann’s) 200th birthday at Carnegie Hall in 2010. Partway through the second program, Ax juxtaposed three Chopin mazurkas — a genre the composer made entirely his own, even while using the traditional Polish folk dance as a model — with three Adès mazurkas, Op. 27, that were receiving their premiere.
Critics and musicologists have pointed out similarities between the Adès and Chopin mazurkas, such as the prevalence of three-quarter time, the specification for rubato, and the use of drone — while noting that things are imaginatively a little bit off in the Adès. For Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times, that’s evidenced by spiky harmonies and a fractured sense of rhythm. Paul Griffiths, writing for the Faber publishing company, remarked the “dotted rhythms in triple time and the heave of its shifting accents are now caught from further off, in a stranger world.”
Listen to the Adès Mazurkas here in a live performance by Kirill Gerstein from 2018, and listen to 51 of Chopin Mazurkas here in a playlist of recordings by the great Chopin interpreter Arthur Rubinstein.
As for playing Chopin himself — asked which Etude he finds most difficult, Adès had a clear choice. “The very first one!” he said in an interview with Elijah Ho. “I tried for weeks and weeks. It should be easy for me because I have an extremely large stretch, but that’s obviously one of the things that makes it so difficult — you have to change your hand position…Actually, that was the piece that made me think, I’d better try to be a composer instead!”
Read our review of Thomas Adès’ appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra earlier this month here.
March 2:
On this date in 1695, Bernhard Breifkopf, founder of the German music publishing company that became Breitkopf and Härtel, was born in Clausthal. After moving to Leipzig, he inherited a print shop that he rescued from bankruptcy, and launched his publishing career with the 1723 publication of a manual of the Hebrew Bible. The oldest music publisher in the world that’s still in business, Breitkopf and Härtel’s catalog includes over a thousand composers, eight thousand works, and 15,000 music editions or music books.
Although B&H’s early history coincided with J.S. Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, Breitkopf and Bach never seem to have collaborated, although the company published the Bach-Gesellschaft edition of the composer’s complete works beginning in 1850. Visit the company’s website to learn more.
