by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS WEEKEND’S EDITION:
.Three days packed with concerts sure to satisfy every classical musical taste
. Orchestra openings at Ohio Light Opera
. Training songs that make Music Theory and Aural Skills fun
. Anniversaries of entrances and exits by Daniel Pinkham, Martha Argerich, Victoria Bond, Louis Andriessen, Serge Koussevitzky, Orlando Gibbons, and Carl Maria von Weber
EVENTS THIS WEEKEND:
Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival
In addition to a busy weekend of performances by international guitar heroes, the Festival incorporates the final rounds of the James Stroud International Competition for young guitarists. The Semifinal Round will take up most of the day on Friday, June 3, and the surviving four finalists will appear in the Final Round on Sunday, June 5 beginning at 6:30 pm.
Artists appearing on the Festival calendar include the Davin/Levin Duo (Colin Davin, guitar & Emily Levin, harp, USA, June 3 at 7:30 pm), the Patterson/Sutton duo, (Patrick Sutton, guitar & Kimberly Patterson, cello, USA, June 4 at 4:00 pm), Duo Melis (Susana Prieto (Spain) & Alexis Mousorakis (Greece), guitars (June 4 at 7:30 pm), Duo Damiana (Dieter Hennings, guitar & Molly Barth, flute (USA, June 5 at 1:00 pm) and Petra Polácková (Czech Republic, June 5 at 4:00 pm).
For an overview of the festival, read our interview with Armin Kelly. Read an interview with the Davin/Levin Duo (pictured above) here.
CityMusic Cleveland has ordered a new work from composer Dawn Avery and the Pantheon Ensemble will give the second performance of her Peace at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus on June 3 at 7 pm. Free, but reservations encouraged.
Music at Main will host Good Company, A Vocal Ensemble in a free performance in celebration of LGBTQ+ PRIDE month on June 4 at 2pm in the 3rd floor lobby of the Cleveland Public Library, Main Branch, downtown.
Delayed by the pandemic, The Cleveland Orchestra will present its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Concert on June 4 at 7 pm, Vinay Parameswaran, conducting, with Jacqueline Echols, soprano, Tony Sias, narrator & the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Chorus, Dr. William Henry Caldwell, director. Free tickets have long been distributed, but the performance will be live streamed free on the Orchestra’s Adella app, Adella.Live, and on YouTube and broadcast live on 90.3 WCLV Classical 104.9, 89.7 WKSU, on ideastream.org, and on the Ideastream Public Media app.
Read an interview with Parameswaran here.
The Cleveland Chamber Collective will perform the third installment of its “Music of America” series at Disciples Christian Church on June 5 at 3pm, including works by Ty Emerson, Ryan Charles Ramer, William Grant Still, and George Walker.
More concerts can be found on the Clevelandclassical.com Concert Listings page.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Ohio Light Opera is still accepting applications for viola and cello auditions for the 2022 Festival Orchestra (June 6 – August 1 at Freedlander Theater of the College of Wooster). Housing is provided and stipends begin at $2,000. Email Laura Kellogg and read more details here.
INTERESTING LISTEN:
For a somewhat specialized audience, Oberlin’s director of vocal ensembles Gregory Ristow recommends David Newman’s “delightful” Music Theory and Aural Skills training songs in this Notes From the Staff podcast. Newman does Tom Lehrer one better with his rap song on the periodic table of elements, and makes such chores as the spelling of chords and the inverting of intervals fun. Really.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
June 4:
Only one departure to memorialize today: Russian-born double bassist and conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who died on this date in 1951 in Boston, where he had led the Boston Symphony for 25 eventful years.
It’s difficult to imagine 20th century music without the long list of works that Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered, or the young musicians he mentored at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts beginning in 1940, two years after the BSO had established its summer home there. Watch The Tanglewood Story, a 1949 movie about Tanglewood’s early years produced by the U.S. Information Service that features rare footage of Koussevitzky, Aaron Copland, and “Koussey’s” star pupil Leonard Bernstein.
Those commissioned works include Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (listen here to a recording made in Symphony Hall in October 1930), Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, as well as occasional works like Randall Thompson’s Alleluia (ordered for the opening of the school at Tanglewood) and The Last Words of David (watch a rare video of Koussevitzky conducting at Tanglewood in 1950).
Self-taught as a conductor, Koussevitzky spawned many stories about his baton technique and grasp of scores. Flummoxed about when to come in during a soft passage (the conductor unhelpfully said “Ven my stick touch de air, you play”), some of his players decided that the proper moment was when the baton passed the third button on his vest.
And Nicholas Slonimsky reported on his attempts to help Koussevitzky grasp the complex rhythms in The Rite of Spring in his autobiography, Perfect Pitch. “To my dismay, I realized Koussevitzky was incapable of coping with these complications.” Slonimsky’s solution was to work out an alternate score that simplified changes of meter but preserved the composer’s rhythms.
June 5:
On the 5th, Boston composer Daniel Pinkham was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1923, Argentine pianist Martha Argerich was born in Buenos Aires in 1941, and American conductor Victoria Bond was born in Los Angeles in 1945. Death notices on June 5 included Elizabethan composer Orlando Gibbons in Canterbury in 1625, and composer Carl Maria von Weber in London in 1826.
June 6:
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen was born in Utrecht on June 6, 1939. Andriessen was the son of a celebrated Dutch composer, but took a very different tack with his music. His Worker’s Union, symphonic movement for any loud-sounding group of instruments, leaves many decisions to the performers (view the score here). Members of The Cleveland Orchestra played it on a Composers Connect program in Severance Hall in June, 2010. Watch a performance by eighth blackbird and friends in February, 2011 at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.
And Andriessen’s Hoketus is interactive. Its name comes from the medieval technique of ‘hocket,“ quick alternation of notes between musicians meant to resemble hiccups. In this 2015 performance by Ensemble Offspring at Eugene Goossens Hall in Sydney, Australia, “the audience becomes piggy-in-the-middle in an aural game of volleyball, as competing ensembles on either side battle it out.”
Bond is profiled in a video by Los Angeles storyteller Ty Kim, and two of her full-length Cutting Edge concerts are available here (April 12, 2021) and here (April 19, 2021).
And further evidence that new music doesn’t have to frighten audiences out of their seats comes in the form of Bond’s The Page Turner, recorded at New York’s St. Peter’s Church with pianist Kathleen Supove and actor Oleg Dubson on April 26, 2011.
