by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
Here are our top classical music recommendations for this weekend, selected from our master concert listings calendar.
On Saturday evening at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, The Cleveland Orchestra led by Franz Welser-Möst, and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus prepared by Lisa Wong, present Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem, with Asmik Grigorian, soprano, Deniz Uzun, mezzo-soprano, Joshua Guerrero, tenor, and Tareq Nazmi, bass. Repeated on Sunday afternoon at 3.
On Sunday afternoon at 3 pm at the Hudson Library & Historical Society, Les Délices will celebrate the Scottish bard Robert Burns in A Red, Red Rose, a new program featuring his poetry and music with tenor James Reese.
On Sunday evening at 7pm, CityMusic Cleveland will present its January Chamber Concert at Praxis Fiber Workshop. Erin Reidhead & Shreya Sachdev, violins, Anne Yu, viola, and Helen Hawersaat, cello, will play Jessie Montgomery’s Breakaway, Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation & Valencia, and Samuel Barber’s String Quartet.
The weekend ends interestingly on Sunday evening at 7:30 with a visit from the Relic Ensemble (pictured above), who will bring the epic adventures of Homer’s Odyssey to life at Heights Theater through a dramatic curation of works by Handel, Monteverdi, Rameau, and others, performed on period instruments.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Among those who have left their mark on the history of classical music who departed on January 16:
Anton Schindler (died 1864), who falsely claimed a close relationship with Beethoven and manufactured bogus information about the composer, but perhaps not as extensively as his critics have claimed. Read the ClevelandClassical.com interview with Beethoven scholar Theodore Albrecht, who addresses the question of the composer’s lost conversation books as an aside while dispelling the myth of Beethoven’s alleged total deafness.
Italian-American conductor Arturo Toscanini (died 1957), who led the NBC Symphony in groundbreaking radio and television broadcasts. Listen to him rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem here, and to a brief recording of one of the conductor’s famous rages here.
And Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Gustav Leonhardt (died 2012), who mentored such young musicians as Jeanette Sorrell, founder of Apollo’s Fire. Watch the Dutch documentary Traveler in Music here (partially subtitled). I had the rare experience of being an audience of one for an impromptu performance in 1978 when Leonhardt was in town for a harpsichord recital at the Art Museum and wanted to try out the new Dutch organ by Flentrop in Trinity Cathedral. He improvised brilliantly for more than an hour and gave the instrument high marks on one of the only occasions when he played organ in the U.S.
