by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Five weekend events to recommend
. Cleveland Orchestra praised in NY Times review by Joshua Barone
. Almanac: Eva Jessye, Tallis and Byrd, Dowland, first national radio opera broadcast, Erich Leinsdorf, Victor Borge, Henri Dutilleux, Petr Eben, Marc Blitzstein, Apple’s Macintosh computer, John Donne
THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:
Only five events to call out, but a diverse group to choose from.
Never mind the weather — Friday’s event is performed al fresco, but the audience can enjoy the McGaffin Carillon (pictured) outdoors while walking through University Circle, or via live stream beginning at 12:15 Noon. This week, UC Carillonneur George Leggiero will draw Baroque music from the bells.
On Saturday evening, Joan Ellison channels Judy Garland in her appearance with Cleveland Pops Orchestra, who will play original orchestrations of her famous tunes.
Sunday afternoon’s choices include the Akron Youth Orchestras at Tallmadge High School, saxophonist Perry Roth and pianist Hana Chu at the Church of the Western Reserve, and in the evening, Gerhardt Zimmermann will host pianist Sheng Cai for Saint Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5, and lead the Canton Symphony in a world premiere by Quinn Mason and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
Details in the Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READS:
Two Northeast Ohio ensembles are performing in New York’s Carnegie Hall this week, and Joshua Barone has lauded The Cleveland Orchestra’s performance last Wednesday of works by Berg and Schubert in today’s print edition. Read The Unaffected Elegance of the Cleveland Orchestra here. Tonight’s performance of R. Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses by Oberlin’s choral and orchestra forces is being covered by Jarrett Hoffman, whose review will be published here next week.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
(By Jarrett Hoffman)
January 20 marks 127 years since the birth of American conductor Eva Jessye in Coffeyville, Kansas. Jessye is known as the first Black woman to achieve international recognition as a choral conductor.
Founder of the Eva Jessye Choir (at first named the Original Dixie Jubilee Singers), she and the group frequented the silver screen, the stage, the radio, and the record booth as their renown grew and grew. Two of their most famous performances came in New York. She directed her choir in the 1935 premiere of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (and then in every incarnation of the show for 30 years), and in the 1934 Broadway production of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.
The latter was of industry-wide importance, not only musically — a departure in style from what the public expected of Black musicians — but also economically. The choir was paid for rehearsals after Jessye demanded it, pushing back against a tradition of discriminatory salaries and, more simply, the nonpayment of choruses for rehearsal.
Continuing her commitment to civil rights, Jessye was part of a Porgy and Bess cast strike in Washington, D.C., forcing the management of the National Theatre to temporarily desegregate its seating. In that same city, decades later, the Eva Jessye Choir was named the official choral ensemble for the 1963 March on Washington, giving performances including We Shall Overcome.
Listen to the Eva Jessye Choir in a 1940 Decca recording of “Clara, Clara” from Porgy and Bess here — they enter at 1:10.
Jessye published My Spirituals in 1927, a cross between a book of arrangements and an autobiography. Soprano Marti Newland gives a live performance of I’m a Poor Li’l Orphan from that book here.
In the classroom, she taught at Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, Kansas) and the University of Michigan, though writing in letters, she expressed frustration at being under-appreciated in Ann Arbor, and at being remembered only for her work on Porgy and Bess rather than her other work, including her mentorship of young artists.
Her own compositions include The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals, The Chronicle of Job, and the oratorio Paradise Lost and Regained, which drew on both spirituals and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I haven’t succeeded yet in tracking down a recording — here is where I glance hopefully at our enthusiastic readers.
We’ll end with a quote from Jessye:
“If anything is going to bring this world together, it’s going to be music. It’s going to be music, and it’s going to be the arts. Nothing else will accomplish this. Because nothing except the arts will reach the people. It must be communication spirit to spirit.”
(By Daniel Hathaway:)
On January 21 in 1575, Queen Elizabeth I granted English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd letters patent that gave them a monopoly over publishing music and music paper. The first collection, set that year by the Huguenot printer T. Vautrollier, was Cantiones sacrae, containing 17 motets each by the two composers. Listen to Tallis’ O nata lux de lumine sung by Almire here.
And on this day in 1626, English lutenist and composer John Dowland died in London and was buried on February 20 in St. Anne’s Church, Blackfriars. Much of his music is doleful, either due to his personal tendency toward melancholy (which led to a pun on his name) or reflecting one of the prevailing fashions of his time. An appropriate song to mark the occasion would be In darkness let me dwell, one of three of his songs published by his son in 1610. Listen to it here performed by soprano Estelí Gomez and guitarist Colin Davin.
Two events on this date that altered the course of American music history include the first national radio broadcast from a U.S. Opera House in 1927 (Gounod’s Faust from Chicago), and the American debut of conductor Erich Leinsdorf in New York in 1938. The first paved the way for weekly Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. The second could have kept Leinsdorf on the podium at Severance Hall had not service in the Army pulled him into uniform. Enter George Szell.
Finally, Danish pianist and comedian Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” closed on this date in 1956 at the John Golden Theater in New York after 849 performances, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest-running one-man show in the history of theater. We could all use some of Borge’s sophisticated silliness these days.
January 22 birthdays include French pianist and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916), Czech composer and church musician Petr Eben (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzstein died on January 22, 1964.
Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.
Cleveland organist Karel Paukert has frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)
And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.