By Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Four OLO shows, Montero recital, three visits to Jurassic Park, and U.C. Bells
. Cleveland Pops’ season & William Byrd’s legacy
. Almanac remembers premiere of Paula M. Kimper’s Sojourner Truth & milestones for Percy Grainger, Fernando Sor, George Antheil & Randall Thompson
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
In Freedlander Theatre on the campus of the College of Wooster, Ohio Light Opera repeats Arizona Lady, an unusual Viennese operetta by Emmerich Kálmán with an American West theme on Sunday at 2, and continues its stagings of H.M.S. Pinafore (pictured, Friday at 2), No, No, Nanette (Saturday at 2), and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Saturday at 7:30). Check our reviews columns to read what our writers have had to say about the productions (we’ll eventually review all six of the shows).
The Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists will sponsor a recital on Sunday at 7:30 by Gabriela Montero, who will serve up music by Chopin, Schumann, and Stravinsky as well as her own improvisations in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance.
The Blossom Music Festival hosts three nights at the movies (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 7), celebrating the 30th anniversary of John Williams’ score for the epic film Jurassic Park, music provided by Sara Hicks and The Cleveland Orchestra.
On Friday at 12:15 Noon, carillonneur Keiran Cantilina will play “an eclectic concert program inspired by trees” on the McGaffin bells in University Circle.
Everything we know about these events, including addresses, programs, and ticket information, can be found on our Concert Listings page.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Cleveland Pops has announced its 2023-2024 Season. Click here to read.
INTERESTING READS:
“When William Byrd died on July 4, 1623, the Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal noted the passing of “a Father of Musick.” That’s not an exaggeration: Today, his legacy as a composer flexible in style and firm in belief still resounds across England and the world of choral music.
“‘As a composer Byrd was, in essence, a miniaturist, said Peter Phillips, the founder of the early music ensemble the Tallis Scholars — “a kind of jigsaw composer’ who wrote “little snippets of music that fitted together mind-bogglingly well.” Phillips compared Byrd to the painter Paul Klee, a thinker for whom ‘the little things matter very much.’”
Click here to read the New York Times article William Byrd: An Essential English Composer for Four Centuries, and here to read a follow-up article, How William Byrd Influences Music, 400 Years After His Death, with comments by composers Roxanna Panufnik, James MacMillan, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
July 7 — Jarrett Hoffman
If you find yourself discussing great women in the history of the U.S., a fitting topic would be an opera inspired by one of the most important names in abolitionism and women’s rights. The work in question is TRUTH: An American Opera about Sojourner Truth by New York-based composer Paula M. Kimper (left), who was born on this date in 1956.
The opera was premiered in 2012 at the Academy of Music in Northampton, MA, while its chamber version was first heard at the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival in a performance by the Paula Kimper Ensemble. YouTube offers up an album of highlights from the opera, as well as a video excerpted from Act III.
Since graduating from the Eastman School of Music, Kimper’s career in New York City has been quite multidisciplinary in nature, ranging from the theater to dance, film, and particularly opera — both as a composer and as director of the Executive Committee of the New York Opera Alliance.
Sojourner Truth is not an outlier when it comes to Kimper’s inspiration: historical figures — and literature — have played a prominent role in her oeuvre. Click here to read more about her works, all of which have been acquired by the Loeb Music Library of Harvard University.
July 8 — By Mike Telin
On July 8 in 1883, Australian American pianist, composer, and folk tune arranger Percy Grainger was born in Melbourne — he became a U.S. Citizen in 1919. Click here to listen to a selection of piano rolls that preserve his performances of his popular works. And in 1939, Spanish composer Fernando Sor died in Paris.
The day also marks the world debut of American avant-garde composer and inventor George Antheil in 1900 in Trenton, New Jersey. The young George began learning piano at the age of six. In 1916, he began studying composition with Constantine von Sternberg in Philadelphia. It was there that he was exposed to conceptual art, including Dadaism. Anthiel would later become a pupil of Ernest Bloch. Although Bloch was initially skeptical of Antheil’s talents, calling his compositions “empty” and “pretentious,” his teacher was eventually won over by the young composer’s enthusiasm and energy.
During his lifetime, Antheil composed symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. In addition to music, his interests included endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history, and he was co-holder (with actress Hedy Lamarr) of a patent for what today is known as “spread-spectrum technology.”
An excellent writer, at the age of sixteen, Antheil wrote an essay for the Trenton High School Spector titled “A Madman’s Narrative,” which begins “I am not mad. They are all maniacs here; all but me. I, alone am sane; a great composer, yet they tell me I am also mad. Surely, sir, you will not make that mistake. See how calm I am, how measured I talk.” Click here to continue reading. He would pen many articles during his life including his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music.
Although Antheil composed over 300 works, his Ballet mécanique is the most famous. Written in 1924 the work is scored for 16 player pianos playing four separate parts, four bass drums, three xylophones, a tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three different-sized airplane propellers (high wood, low wood, and metal), as well as two human-played pianos. Click here to read more about that notorious composition and here for a performance by Ensemble Modern, led by Peter Rundel
July 9 — By Daniel Hathaway
In the Diary for July 9 2020, we marked anniversaries of Ottorino Respighi, Jester Hairston, Pierre Cochereau, Edward Burlington Hill, and Randall Thompson.
Thompson’s name came up again more recently in obituaries for the American avant-garde composer and pianist Frederick Rzewski. Unlikely as it may seem, Rzewski took much away from his studies with the conservative, tonal composer at Harvard.
As Rzewski told me in a 2010 interview, “[Thompson] was my teacher of counterpoint — modal counterpoint. And I think a very good teacher, also. He certainly understood and loved it, which seemed to me the most important thing about teaching counterpoint: you actually have to love it. It can be very boring. But one thing I remember about that class is that he made us sing our exercises. It wasn’t enough to write them — we had to sing them. He always insisted on that.”
This seems a good time to dig a bit deeper into Randall Thompson’s choral music, which many of us had our first opportunity to sing in high school and college — works like the famous Alleluia, the a cappella suite The Peaceable Kingdom, and Frostiana, subtitled “Seven Country Songs,” which I had the pleasure of singing with a massed choir for Thompson’s retirement concert in April of 1965 in their newly-orchestrated version.
Less well-known, and as sophisticated as his Frost settings are simple, are his Six Odes of Horace, composed when Thompson was on a three-year study grant at the American Academy in Rome.
For a sampling of Thompson’s choral music less traveled by, bring up the album The Legacy of Randall Thompson on Spotify. Performed by the United States Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus, the collection includes the Horace ode O fons Bandusiae, humorous settings of texts from H.L. Menken’s The American Mercury (1924-1933), the whole of The Peaceable Kingdom, and his arrangement of the Somersetshire folksong, The Lark in the Morn. And read more about the composer in the CD’s program booklet.
Another recording by Richard Sparks and Seattle’s Choral Arts introduces settings of two George Herbert poems, Walt Whitman’s The Last Invocation, and Five Love Songs (recorded here for the first time). Sample tracks from The Light of Stars here.
