by Daniel Hathaway
CLASSICAL MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS THIS WEEKEND:
TRI-C JAZZFEST takes over Playhouse Square this weekend with a rich menu of indoor and outdoor concerts on Friday and Saturday. Ben Giesen unpacks the events in a preview article here.
AKRON SYMPHONIC WINDS are touring their program “Happy Birthday, America!” in Advance of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, stopping off on Saturday at 7:30 at Brooklyn Veterans Memorial Park. Patriotic music & fireworks, too.
CHAMBERFEST CLEVELAND presents “Continental Rifts” On Friday at MOCA Cleveland, and “Convergence” on Saturday in Kulas Hall at CIM, both at 7:30.
THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA has added a Summer Choral Institute to its summer schedule, and attendees will present selections from Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center on Friday at 7:30.
THE LUTE SOCIETY OF AMERICA will wrap up its Cleveland Lutefest with a concert by participants in its vocal program on Friday in Harkness Chapel on Sunday at 7:30.
OHIO LIGHT OPERA will have the first three of its six shows up and running this weekend in Freedlander Theater at The College of Wooster — Damn Yankees on Friday at 2, Boys from Syracuse on Saturday at 2, and My Fair Lady on Saturday at 7:30.
For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical concert listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Composer Jacob Druckman was born on June 26, 1928 in Philadelphia. While teaching at Juilliard, The Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Brooklyn College, Bard College, and Yale University, he mentored a number of composers including Daniel Asia, Conrad Cummings, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Kevin Puts, and Augusta Read Thomas.
Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra performed Windows, his 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for large orchestra, in October of 1974. Listen to a live performance at Severance Hall here. Druckman described the work in his composer’s notes:
The ‘Windows’ of the title are windows inward. They are points of light which appear as the thick orchestral textures part, allowing us to hear, fleetingly, moments out of time – memories, not of any music that ever existed before, but memories of memories, shadows of ghosts. The imagery is as though, having looked at an unpeopled wall of windows, one looks away and sees the afterimage of a face.
And Edwin London and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony recorded Druckman’s The Sound of Time in September, 1992. The late soprano Marlene Rosen, then Professor of Voice at Oberlin, is the soloist in the composer’s setting of texts from Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies (and other Disasters). Listen here.
