by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Only two events are on our radar for the last weekend of January.
On Sunday at 7:30 pm, Paul Ferguson and Bill Rudman will host a joint retrospective, “The Gershwins on Broadway” with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra and the Musical Theater Project at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Also on deck: the Joe Hunter Trio, and vocalists Treva Offutt & Evelyn Wright. Ticket prices include a live streaming option. Click here to reserve.
Another meeting of minds is scheduled for Sunday at 6 pm in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, when the Cleveland Chamber Choir (Scott MacPherson, artistic director) will team up with Cleveland State University’s composition programs (Andrew Rindfleisch, director), for a workshop of choral works written by CSU School of Music graduate and undergraduate Music Composition Majors. It’s free.
NEWS BRIEFS:
A reminder to music students: Tuesday Musical Scholarship Applications are due online on Monday, January 31. Details here.
Lisa Wong would like us to alert our readers to a job opening: The College of Wooster is receiving applications for Visiting Assistant Professor in Music-Voice. Read the details and download application materials here.
INTERESTING READS:
In an opinion piece, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette critic Jeremy Reynolds (who served as ClevelandClassical.com‘s Nicholas Jones Young Writer Fellow for 2015) ponders the primacy of live performances, even in the age of COVID. Read his comments in a review of The Rose Elf here.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
We’ll begin by noting the first performance of William Walton’s Partita for Orchestra, dedicated to George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, which received its premiere on January 30, 1958.
Asked by Szell to provide program notes, Walton demurred. “It is surely easier to write about a piece of creative work if there is something problematical about it, Indeed — it seems to me — the more problematical, the greater the flow of words. Unfortunately from this point of view, my Partita poses no problems, has no ulterior motive or meaning behind it, and makes no attempt to ponder the imponderables.”
Online recordings give us the opportunity to compare performances both in musical and technical terms. Here’s a remastered recording of the piece by its original dedicatees, followed by a live performance Szell gave with the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra later in 1958.
Born on January 29, 1852, Jamaican-born British composer Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen represents a composer lauded in his lifetime for a large body of compositions — operas, oratorios, cantatas, orchestral suites, songs, and six symphonies — but now nearly completely forgotten. Of those Symphonies, No. 3, subtitled “Scandinavian” and dating from 1880, was widely performed in Europe and the U.S. Click here to hear a performance by the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra led by Adrian Leaper.
Cowen’s orchestral overtures — curtain-raisers for concerts — were among his most popular works. Click here to hear Leaper and his Slovak musicians play The Butterfly’s Ball, written in 1901 and based on a poem by William Roscoe partly quoted in the video notes.
