by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday evening, point your browser toward Oberlin for a pre-recorded concert by the Conservatory’s large ensembles. The program features the Oberlin Sinfonietta in works by British composer Elisabeth Luteyns (pictured) and Olly Wilson, and the Oberlin Orchestra in Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. Timothy Weiss and Raphael Jiménez conduct the ensembles.
On Sunday afternoon, catch young pianist Evren Ozel, a name that will be familiar to Piano Cleveland and ChamberFest Cleveland audiences, in a live performance from The Gilmore in Kalamazoo, and watch an interview with Music From the Western Reserve Executive Director Zsolt Bognár.
Details in our Concert Listings.
HONORS AND AN INTERVIEW:
Marilyn Horne, a frequent guest at the Oberlin Conservatory and Honorary Voice Program Director (and alumna) of the Music Academy of the West, will be honored with a lifetime achievement award at the 63rd Grammy Awards on Sunday at 8:00 pm EDT. Read an announcement here.
ChamberFest Cleveland cellist Oliver Herbert, 23, is among the recipients of this year’s Avery Fisher Career Grants. Read more here.
New Zealand-born conductor Gemma New has received the annual Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award. Music Director of the Hamilton, Ont. Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Dallas Symphony, and Resident Conductor of the St. Louis, Symphony, she replaced Bramwell Tovey in a Cleveland Orchestra concert at Blossom in July, 2019. Read our review here.
British pianist and polymath Stephen Hough recently sat for an interview with Musical America’s Clive Paget in its One to One series, where he “discusses the effect of the pandemic on musicians’ bank balances, its impact on international touring, and reflects on how the industry might change as it seeks to re-establish live performance in a post-COVID world.” Watch here.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
On March 13, 1842, Italian-born composer Luigi Cherubini died in Paris at the age of 82, having taken up residence in France in 1785, where his aristocratic connections nearly put him on the wrong side of history during the Revolution. He wrote his most famous work, the Requiem in c in 1816 to commemorate the execution of Louis XVI. Watch a performance in Trieste in 2010 by a youth orchestra and four youth choirs led by Riccardo Muti.
Austrian composer Hugo Wolf, most celebrated for his many Lieder, was born on this date in 1860 in Windisch. 127 years later, British pianist Gerald Moore died on March 13, 1987. Though composer and pianist obviously never met, we can conjoin their landmark dates today through German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with whom Moore recorded Wolf’s Mörike Lieder — nearly two hours worth of music.
Gerald Moore spent his career advancing the usually sublimated role of the collaborative pianist, and filled several books with his witty commentary. Listen to an audio version of The Unashamed Accompanist dubbed from an Angel LP.
And on to March 14, the date on which German composer Georg Phillip Telemann was born in 1681 in Magdeburg. Choosing to accept a position in Hamburg, Telemann turned down the post of Cantor in Leipzig in 1723, leading the authorities to offer the job to their second choice, Johann Sebastian Bach (who made Telemann godfather to his son C.P.E. Bach) Telemann seems to have spent his every waking moment writing music for a career total of some 3,000 works.
Here are three in performances by Cleveland ensembles. First, his Concerto for Four Violins played by Cleveland Orchestra members in their Music Medicine series from the kitchen of Mitchell’s Ice Cream in Ohio City. Second, a movement from his Concerto for Recorder and Viola da Gamba from a concert presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art by Michael Lynn and friends in benefit for the Cleveland Clinic Liver Transplant Research Program. And third, a light-hearted funeral cantata for a dead canary performed by baritone Jeffrey Strauss and Apollo’s Fire.
