by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
This weekend, two of Northeast Ohio’s peripatetic instrumental ensembles are touring the metropolitan area to perform multiple concerts in venues near you. Others are staying put to inaugurate new venues or are dressing up for All Hallows’ Eve.
On Friday at 7:30 at St. Jerome Catholic Church, soprano Kirsten Kunkle will join conductor John McLaughlin Williams and CityMusic Cleveland in a program featuring works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Samuel Barber, George Frederick McKay, and the world premiere of Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Ko’koomfena (Our Grandmother), a CityMusic commission.
The free concert will travel to the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus on Saturday at 7:30, and to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday at 2:30.
Beginning on Friday at 7:30 at Akron’s Westminster Presbyterian Church, Cleveland’s period instrument ensemble Les Délices will tour “Bohemian Rhapsody,” featuring works by Franz Krommer, Georg Druschetzky, and Katerina Victoria Dusikova-Cianchettini, as well as Mozart’s Oboe Quartet (starring Debra Nagy), and a collection of traditional Czech folk tunes arranged for the ensemble. This program will reappear on Saturday at 7:30 at Forest Hill Presbyterian Church, and on Sunday at 4 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church in Rocky River. You’ll need tickets.
The Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra is staying put on Friday at 7:30 to enjoy playing the second event in its newly redesigned home, Kulas Hall. Tito Muñoz conducts, and Hiroka Matsumoto, will be violin soloist for a playlist that visits works by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Johannes Brahms, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It’s free, but tickets are required — reserve online.
And All Hallows’ Eve will arrive early for The Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Philharmonic, who will open the doors of Severance Music Center and Westlake Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoon to all manner of ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.
There will be two Halloween Spooktacular shows at Severance on Sunday at 1 pm and 4 pm, both conducted by Vinay Parameswaran, with music by John Williams (Jurassic Park), Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast), Edvard Grieg (In the Hall of the Mountain King), and others. The earlier show will be ”sensory-friendly, with relaxed house rules.” Costumes are encouraged, and tickets are available online.
On Sunday at 3 pm, Halloween With the Cleveland Philharmonic will offer music by Paul Dukas, Antonín Dvořák, Camille Saint-Saëns, Modest Mussorgsky, and Hector Berlioz, conducted by Dean Buck with Amber Dimoff, violin. Tickets are also available online.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
On October 19, 1922, Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition premiered in Paris, commissioned and conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. He recorded the work in late October of 1930 with the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall (listen here), and there are numerous other orchestral adaptations and rearrangements of the Russian composer’s popular piano suite. Click here to watch John Scott play his solo arrangement on the 1895 organ in Albion Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, UK.
A smaller work was first heard on this date in 1967 at the Library of Congress when the Juilliard String Quartet debuted George Gershwin’s lovely Lullaby for string quartet (1919-20). Give that and other 20th-century American string quartets a listen on the CD American String Quartets 1900-1950.
Twenty years later, English cellist Jacqueline du Pré left us at the age of 42 in London. Married to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, she was permanently associated with the Elgar concerto. Her life, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis, has been the subject of the partly fictionalized Broadway play, Duet for One (1981) and film about the cellist and her flutist sister, Hilary and Jackie (1998).
