by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival gets up to speed for the weekend today at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Click here for details about the numerous events on the docket for this weekend, culminating in the Final Round of the James Stroud Youth Competition on Sunday evening at 6:30.
Jinjoo Cho’s ENCORE Festival of Music and Ideas has events scheduled this weekend in Peninsula, at Gilmour Academy’s Dodero Center in Gates Mills, and Federated Church in Chagrin Falls. Tickets available online.
Margi Griebling Haigh’s opera The Higgler receives its world premieres on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3:30 in a production directed by Marla Berg and conducted by Steven Smith, featuring tenor Brian Skoog in the title role at Disciples Church in Cleveland Heights. Tickets available online.
Apollo’s Fire repeats its Countryside Concert ¡HISPANIA! on June 6 at 7:30 pm, June 7 at 3:30 and 7:30 pm, and June 8 at 3:00 pm, but better check venue updates here. It’s safe to assume that the indoor performance on June 9 at 7:30 pm at Avon Lake UCC, will proceed as planned. Tickets available online.
On Saturday at 3 pm, Studio Espressivo Sunday Studio Series presents Sounds of the Cinema at Murray Hill Galleries, repeated on June 7 at 8 pm and June 8 at 3 pm. Pay-what-you-wish, suggested donation $15. At 7 pm, Matthew Salvaggio will conduct the Cleveland Repertory Orchestra, featuring hornist Van Parker, in Federated Church, in Chagrin Falls. Freewill offering.
And on Sunday at 3:30, Western Reserve Chorale will perform Dan Forrest’s Jubilate Deo, with chamber orchestra and soloists conducted by David Gilson, at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights. (Freewill offering, concert to be live streamed here.)
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Notable births on June 8 in music history include German composer Robert Schumann in Zwickau (1810), Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff in Prague (1894), and Polish-American pianist Emanuel Ax (1949).
Departures included American composer Frederick Shepherd Converse (1940, in Westwood, Massachusetts) and English composer Gordon Jacob (1984, in Saffron Walden).
One of Schumann’s extended works, Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, remains relatively unknown. It’s a magnificently flawed creation, over which the composer obsessed for a decade and wrote in stages from back to front, beginning with the finale, “Chorus Mysticus,” in 1844 and concluding with the Overture in 1853.
Widely regarded as Schumann’s magnum opus, the Scenes have been performed here and there since they were exhumed in the 1970s. I had the good fortune of singing in one of the earlier revivals — Boston Symphony performances with the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and New England Conservatory Chorus in 1966 led by Erich Leinsdorf with an all-star cast of soloists that included Hermann Prey, Beverly Sills, Charles Bressler, Thomas Paul, Veronica Tyler, Tatiana Troyanos, Florence Kopleff, and Batyah Godfrey. You can listen to a live recording here.
As a composer, Schulhoff was fortunate to have lived through the anything-goes years between the World Wars, which allowed him to dabble in a range of musical styles. As a Jew who espoused Communist sentiments, he was unlucky to have been active during the Nazi regime. He died of tuberculosis in the Wultzburg concentration camp on August 18, 1942.
Enjoy Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello, played here by Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson, and his Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin, performed here by Alexi Kenney at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York in 2016. And ChamberFest Cleveland gave its patrons a taste of Schulhoff’s Dada-inspired works with Marjorie Maltais’ performance of his Sonata Erotica in June of 2016.
One of 20th century England’s most prolific composers and resourceful arrangers, Gordon Jacob became well-known for works like his William Byrd Suite, arrangements of Elizabethan-era pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. That inspired Gerard Hoffnung’s challenge to Jacob to write variations on a Scottish folk song for a bizarre collection of instruments to be performed at one of the Hoffnung Musical Festival concerts in London in November, 1966. Listen here to the composer leading his Variations on Annie Laurie with an ensemble that includes heckelphone, contrabassoon, serpent, harmonium, hurdy gurdy, bass tuba, and a pair of piccolos.
