by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS:
BOP STOP is acquiring state-of-the-art streaming equipment, enabling the Music Settlement’s near-West Side venue to begin streaming live events and select archived performances by mid-July. Read the press release here.
News of the latest North American cancellations and furloughs comes from the Nashville Symphony, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, and Canada’s Banff Centre in Alberta, while East Asian orchestras like the National Symphony of Taipei (Taiwan) are experimenting with ways to carry on live performances with reduced capacity audiences.
Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, joined MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell to discuss “the power of music to affect change and how the worldwide jazz community is activating to join the conversation on civil rights.” View the conversation here.
THIS WEEKEND ON THE WEB AND ON THE AIR:
Lots of opera online this weekend: an encore screening of the MET Opera’s recent At-Home Gala, plus Handel’s Rodelinda, Dutch National Opera’s staging of Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, Florida Grand Opera’s 2015 production of Menotti’s The Consul, and on the lighter side, Ohio Light Opera’s selections from Carousel with cast members who would have performed Rodgers & Hammerstein’s classic musical this summer.
On the orchestral side, Berlin Philharmonic ensembles live stream Mozart and Dvorak, and WCLV 104.9 Ideastream rebroadcasts concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra from 2005 featuring Ingolf Dah’s Saxophone Concerto and Mahler’s 9th Symphony. In the chat category, in the third episode of “Sitdown with LB,” Lawrence Brownlee welcomes soprano Latonia Moore, and in the new music column, on Sunday, the six-hour live stream of the Second Bang on a Can Marathon will involve 25 musicians from all over the map. Details here.
And this weekend and next, Bachfest Leipzig will be streamed online. “The 2020 Bachfest Leipzig had to be cancelled because of the COVID 19 pandemic. On four days, that would have been the starting and closing weekends, the artistic director of the Bachfest, Prof. Dr. Michael Maul, together with the Leipzig Bach churches and with sponsors, invites you to a concert marathon. Mainly freelance artists will present a varied, innovative and interactive programme that starts every day (apart from day 1) at 4.00 pm [Leipzig time — six hours later than EDT] and will be streamed all over the world live from St. Thomas’ and St. Nicholas’ Church. The Bach Marathon will reach its peak in the performance of a never-before-heard version of the Mass in B minor that will dissolve borders between artists and audience.” Click here for program and links.
FEATURED VIDEO:
Time Canvas — violinist Chiara Fasani Stauffer and lutenist Joshua Stauffer — write: “After a long time spent concentrating on our historical performance studies at Juilliard, we are now using this time of quarantine to regroup and plan what is next for our ensemble. Since we are fortunate enough to still be able to play together in the age of social distancing, here is a piece by 17th century Italian composer Carlo Farina that we hope will brighten your weekend!
Click here to watch the duo perform Farina’s Sonata detta la fiamma, published in Dresden in 1628.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
June 13 of 2005 saw the death of composer David Diamond in Rochester, NY. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music who taught for years at Juilliard, his works — along with those of other mid-century tonal composers — were overshadowed by the rise of atonal music.
Diamond, whose extensive works list includes eleven symphonies and ten string quartets, was honorary composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony. Gerard Schwarz and the Orchestra recorded his 1948 orchestral fantasy The Enormous Room, based on e.e. cummings’ autobiographical novel of the same name. Listen here.
On June 14 of 1594, the Flemish composer Orlandus Lassus died in Munich. Quire Cleveland performed his Musica dei donum, a tribute to music, in September 2014, for which founder Ross W. Duffin wrote this note: “There is a legend that [Lassus] was kidnapped three times as a choirboy because of his exceptional voice and, certainly, by the age of twelve, he was in the service of a member of the Gonzaga family and on his way to Italy. After years of travel, including back to the Low Countries where his first collection was published in 1555, he accepted an appointment at the court of Bavaria in Münich in 1556 and, aside from travel on behalf of the court, spent the rest of his life there. One of the most prolific composers of the Renaissance, his Musica dei donum was published in the year of his death.” Watch here.
And on June 14 of 1671 (some sources say June 8), Italian composer Tomaso Albinoni was born in Venice. Famous in his time as a composer of opera and sonatas and concertos for the oboe, he’s most celebrated today for a work he didn’t write — the counterfeit Adagio for Organ and Strings, actually composed by the 20th century musicologist Remo Giazotto. Watch a performance by the New York Classical Players here.
The Adagio has inspired multiple arrangements and some strange interpretations. Among the latter is a performance by pianist Paul Barton, who describes it in his own words:
I made this shortened Adagio arrangement to play to Chaichana, a powerful 40 year old bull elephant while he was having his favorite breakfast of bananas and pumpkins. His name means “Victory” in Thai. I love this elephant very much. In this video Chaichana is free to walk away if he chooses to. Chaichana is an extremely dangerous elephant (as most bull elephants are) and is kept well away from people for their safety. Chaichana is the alpha-male elephant at Elephants World in Thailand.
Barton serenades Chaichana on an upright piano, whose temperament doesn’t seem to annoy the pachyderm, and invites viewers to help support his work with elephants. Watch here.
