by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The first busy weekend of the fall has much to offer.
On Friday at 6 pm, the Emily Cornelius & Ross Karre Violin and Percussion Duo play at Café Indigo, and at 7:30, pianist Polina Osetinskaya (pictured) makes her Cleveland debut with a recital of transcriptions of works by J.S. Bach and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at Severance Music Center.
On Saturday at the main Cleveland Public Library, Les Délices plays a 2 pm program of ballad tunes, jigs, and reels that crossed the Atlantic and traveled up through the Cuyahoga Valley to Lake Erie in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, Latin jazz icon Sammy DeLeon y su Orquesta give a free Hispanic Heritage Month concert at Severance Music Center at 7 pm, and at 7:30 in Finney Chapel, the Oberlin Artist Recital Series presents the American Patchwork Quartet, which binds American folk songs with jazz, country, West African, and East Asian musics. And at 8 pm at Gallery 33, Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project hosts vocalist Alex Koi and cellist Kirin McElwain, who perform a synthesis of acoustic and electronic music, followed by singer-songwriter Marzi Margo performing solo experimental music under the name Let’s Fight!
On Sunday at 2 pm, Local 4 Music Fund presents She Roars!, an afternoon of chamber music by living female composers, featuring the music of Margaret Brouwer at The Bop Stop, and at 3 pm, Cleveland Silent Film Festival screens The Phantom of the Opera (1925) with its original score performed live by American Musical Productions’ 17-piece orchestra led by Joseph Rubin in Gartner Auditorium, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The weekend comes to a thrilling conclusion with a 4 pm concert in which the brass and percussion sections of the Canton Symphony Orchestra join forces with the 72-rank Schantz organ in Canton’s Christ Presbyterian Church for music by Richard Strauss, George Frideric Handel, Giovanni Gabrieli, and Modest Mussorgsky.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Here’s a local figure to celebrate this weekend. Cleveland is a hub for musical talent from all over, but many fine musicians were born and raised in the city itself. Such is the case with Johann Heinrich Beck, who was influential in the Cleveland music scene in the late 1800s.
Born on September 12, 1856, Beck honed his composing and performance skills abroad at the Leipzig Conservatory before returning to his hometown. A violinist, he frequently performed with the Schubert String Quartet and its successor, the Beck String Quartet.
The latter group performed Beck’s own pieces, including his String Quartet in C Minor, and also gave the Cleveland premiere of Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-Flat Major in 1891. Listen to a 2011 performance of the Schubert by Janine Jansen, Torleif Thedéen, and Itamar Golan on YouTube.
As a conductor, Beck led a variety of local orchestras before the inception of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1918. One of these was the Cleveland Grand Orchestra, where he worked together with conductor and oboist Emil Ring, another prominent figure in the local music scene.
Today, visitors to the Fine Arts Division of the Cleveland Public Library are greeted with a bust of Johann Heinrich Beck — inside is a large collection of his music manuscripts, letters, and other memorabilia.
