by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
There are sixteen events in our calendar that we’ll file by title here, and give further information in our Concert Listings.
Saturday: Apollo’s Fire’s family concert (11am at the Art Museum), Irish singer-songwriter Andrew McManus (2pm at the Main Cleveland Public Library), pianist Shuai Wang in No Exit’s Piano Dada (7pm at the Bop Stop), Cleveland Repertory Orchestra (7pm at Disciples), Les Délices in Jonathan Woody’s Song of Orpheus (7:30 at Inlet Dance @ Pivot Center), the Stow Symphony (7:30 at Tallmadge Alliance Church) and The Cleveland Orchestra with guest conductor Fabbio Luisi & principal piccolo Mary K. Fink (pictured with composer Oded Zehavi, photo by Roger Mastroianni, 8pm at Severance).
Sunday: Youngstown Symphony (2:30 at Stambaugh Auditorium), pianist Yefim Bronfman in a solo recital (3pm at Severance), the Parma Symphony with violinist Andrew Sords (3pm at Valley Forge H.S.), Cleveland Winds with the Cincinnati Wind Band (3pm at the Maltz), Western Reserve Chorale and orchestra in Brahms’s German Requiem (3pm at Church of the Saviour, Cleveland Hts.), Les Délices in Jonathan Woody’s Song of Orpheus (4pm at Disciples) & CityMusic Chamber Series (6pm at Praxis Fiber Workshop).
NEWS BRIEFS:
Good News, Bad News for CIM
“The good news for the Cleveland Institute of Music is the recent $5 million gift, representative of the board’s confidence in school leadership. The bad news is the faculty’s majority vote of no confidence, in either President Paul Hogle or Provost Scott Harrison.” Read the Musical America story here.
Apollo’s Fire artist update for ¡Hispania! concerts
Guitarist Marija Temo has withdrawn from next week’s concerts due to a hand injury, and will be replaced by virtuoso flamenco guitarist Jeremías García. Read more about García here.
Met Orchestra Asian Tour revived
“The coronavirus pandemic forced the Metropolitan Opera to shut its doors for more than a year and a half. It also upended plans that had been in the works for the Met Orchestra’s first Asian tour.
“Now, that idea is being revived. The Met announced on Thursday that the orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, would visit South Korea, Japan and Taiwan in June, performing the music of Bartok, Wagner, Debussy and others alongside star soloists.” Read the New York Times article by Javier C. Hernández here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
MARCH 9
On this date in 2020, The Cleveland Orchestra announced the cancellation of its European and Middle Eastern tour due to the COVID pandemic. During the next week, some 35 Northeast Ohio musical organizations canceled or postponed their seasons, or took their events online. March 9, 2024, marks the fourth anniversary of the great shutdown.
Thanks to the availability of vaccines, musical events have continued to multiply, and pandemic protocols like masking have gradually being relaxed. But it’s been a long four years — and it’s not over yet!
On this date in 1910, composer Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Conductor Artur Rodzinky invited the 26-year-old composer to Cleveland in January of 1937 for the American premiere of his Symphony in One Movement (Symphony No. 1). Marin Alsop chose that work for her debut with the Orchestra in December of 2011, which sent ClevelandClassical.com executive editor Mike Telin into the Musical Arts Association archives at Severance Music Center to see how Barber’s visit went and how local critics had written about the work on its first outing. Read that article here.
The Rosemunde Quartet gave a rare performance of one of the composer’s most beloved pieces when Noah Bendix-Balgley (1st concertmaster, Berlin Philharmonic), Shanshan Yao (violin, N.Y. Philharmonic) Teng Li (principal viola, Los Angeles Philharmonic) & Nathan Vickery (cello, N.Y. Philharmonic) performed Barber’s Adagio on March 15, 2021. Their performance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series at Plymouth Church presented the piece in its original context as the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op.11.
That movement having become popular immediately after its debut in 1936, Barber arranged it for string orchestra later that year, naming it the Adagio for Strings. It’s sometimes heard in an organ arrangement by William Strickland (the assistant organist at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York at the time), as well as in a choral version Barber made himself in 1967, when he published it with the text of the Agnus Dei.
The wistful sadness of the piece has made it appropriate for memorializing events from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the invasion of Ukraine.
Click here to listen to a performance of the original piece by the Dover Quartet (who return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series next Tuesday), here to listen to the string orchestra version with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and here to watch the Laurens Symfonisch (formerly the Rotterdam Symphony Chorus) sing the choral version or Agnus Dei. Finally, click here to watch the young German concert organist Felix Hell play the Strickland arrangement at Trinity Church, Wall Street in New York.
A frequently posed question is how slow Barber wanted his Adagio to be performed. Timings vary widely. The Dover Quartet only took 7:41 to play the quartet version. Bernstein — whose tempos tended to get slower as his career continued — clocked in at 10:06, and the Laurens Symfonisch at 8:17. Felix Hell was the “most adagio” at 10:20.
March 10 — by Jarrett Hoffman
One of the important early works of John Harbison — the Pulitzer Prize- and MacArthur Fellowship-winning composer who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 52 years — is Diotima, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and premiered on this date in 1977 by the Boston Symphony under the direction of Joseph Silverstein.
But the piece was not recorded until November 2021, one month prior to Harbison’s retirement from MIT right around his 83rd birthday.
This new album (also titled Diotima), as Harbison writes, spans his “first and likely last music for orchestra, written over forty years apart,” and recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose.
The work has an interesting backstory, inspired by the writings of German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. But zooming out, Harbison has also shared fascinating thoughts on writing for orchestra in general — which he says is one of the most challenging “regions” for a composer:
The hardest thing about the full orchestra sound is to individualize it every time. That’s always been what’s interested me. Every full orchestra moment in a Stravinsky piece, for instance, is cockeyed and working very hard not to be generic. I think the listener to these pieces will find one common thing, which is, something’s always missing, or not functioning on all the cylinders we expect from our most familiar encounter with the orchestra — the Hollywood film, which has conditioned the ears of virtually everyone who hears a full orchestra today.
And in the liner notes, Harbison describes the sense of possibility that orchestra offers:
In the world of orchestra music, composers, players and conductors journey together toward something none of them can fully imagine until it happens.
