by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
MARCH 13 – FRIDAY
7:00 pm – No Exit New Music. Cleveland Renaissance: Art of the Cleveland School. An exploration of one of Cleveland’s greatest artistic legacies through music and poetry. World premiere musical works along with new poetic creations. Praxis Fiber Workshop. Repeated on Saturday at 7 at SPACES.
7:30 pm – The Cleveland Orchestra. Elim Chan, conducts, with Michael Sachs, trumpet (pictured). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center. Repeated on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3.
MARCH 14 – SATURDAY
3:00 pm – Cleveland Silent Film Festival. A May Tale (1926). Live original score compiled from Central European folk music and performed by the Harmonia Ensemble in the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium at the Main Cleveland Public Library.
7:30 pm – The Resonance Project. Chez Madame Singer: Portraits en Trio. The Poiema Trio presents an evening of French chamber music chez Madame Singer, whose Parisian salon fostered nearly all the great French composers of the 20th century. Forest Hill Church.
MARCH 15 – SUNDAY
3:30 pm – Western Reserve Chorale presents Mozart: Celebration and Solemnity at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights.
4:00 pm – Singers Companye performs music from 17th & 18th Century European Chapels at Faith Lutheran Church, Fairlawn.
7:00 pm – CityMusic Cleveland plays chamber music by Clint Needham and Béla Bartók at Praxis Fiber Workshop.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
For details of these and other performances, please visit our Concert Listings page.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
March 13: Austrian composer Hugo Wolf, most celebrated for his many Lieder, was born on this date in 1860 in Windisch. 127 years later, British pianist Gerald Moore died on March 13, 1987. Though composer and pianist obviously never met, we can conjoin their landmark dates today through German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with whom Moore recorded Wolf’s Mörike Lieder — nearly two hours worth of music.
Gerald Moore spent his career advancing the usually sublimated role of the collaborative pianist, and filled several books with his witty commentary. Listen to an audio version of The Unashamed Accompanist dubbed from an Angel LP.
March 14: Peter Maxwell Davies, one of the great English composers of the 20th century, died on this date in 2016 at the age of 81 in Sanday, Orkney, Scotland. Davies traversed a multitude of styles over the course of his career, sometimes within a single work — a great example being his 1969 St Thomas Wake for orchestra and small band. Based on 16th-17th century English composer John Bull’s St Thomas Wake Pavan, the piece distorts that material almost as if with a series of funhouse mirrors.
As Davies himself writes in the program notes,
This pre-existing material is “projected” through a progressive series of mathematical curves, which affect it much as, in visual terms, would distorting mirrors of systematically varying degrees of convexity and concavity.
Or, as the unknowing listener says, hearing the piece for the first time coming from another person’s computer,
Are you listening to two pieces at the same time?
Listen here to a recording by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra — where Davies served as associate conductor/composer — led by the composer himself.
March 15: Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Broadway musical My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, and starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, opened on this date in 1956 to run for a then record number of performances.
The 1964 film replaced Andrews with the dubbed voice of Audrey Hepburn, thus featuring two actors who really didn’t sing (Harrison spoke his way through most of his part). Click here to watch Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Jeremy Irons, and Warren Mitchell in a concert performance of My Fair Lady with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Mauceri at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1987.
Ohio Light Opera will stage the musical at the College of Wooster this summer.
