by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE & ON THE AIRWAVES THIS WEEKEND:
Although the weather is becoming increasingly springlike, a lot of us will still be spending time indoors this weekend. Here’s a selection of scheduled online attractions, some of which will remind us of events that had to be cancelled.
Apollo’s Fire was to have concluded its season this weekend with “Virtuoso Fireworks.” In lieu of those life performances, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra has posted the latest in its “Music For the Soul” series, featuring Bach’s Fourth and Fifth Brandenburg Concertos in a 2015 performance at the Tanglewood Festival, and arias from Handel’s Alcina and Giulio Cesare sung by coloratura soprano Amanda Forstythe at Cleveland concerts, also in 2015. Click here to follow links to the video and program notes.
Matthias Pintscher was scheduled to guest conduct The Cleveland Orchestra this weekend in a program that was to include the premiere of Oded Zehavi’s Piccolo Concerto, commissioned for Mary Kay Fink. That concert would have ended with Arnold Schoenberg’s fascinating orchestral arrangement of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in g. Here’s a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony led by Christoph Eschenbach in 2017.
And the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra was planning to cap off their season on Sunday evening at Severance Hall with music by Gabriella Smith and Debussy. Instead, WCLV 104.9 Ideastream will broadcast the Orchestra’s March 1 concert, when Vinay Parameswaran led the ensemble in Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer, Arvo Pärt’s In Principio, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Suite (1945). Soprano Martina Janková was featured in the Mendelssohn. Listen at 4:00 pm Sunday on the radio or on the web.
Check our Concert Listings for details and links to a performance by the Callisto Quartet, the MET Opera’s HD rebroadcast of Verdi’s Luisa Miller, and Harry Bicket’s guest appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra on Saturday. On Sunday, you can spend six hours live with New York’s “Bang on a Can Marathon,” experience an Oberlin Stage Left historic performance of Mozart’s Requiem by Oberlin community forces at Washington Cathedral commemorating the Kent State shootings, and end the weekend with the MET Opera’s HD archive performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Lots of events happened in classical music history on May 2 and 3. On the 2nd, Haydn’s oratorio The Creation was first performed in Vienna in 1798, and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was premiered at a children’s concert by the Moscow Philharmonic in 1936. On the 3rd, Austrian composer Heinrich Biber died in 1704 in Salzburg, organists Marcel Dupré and Virgil Fox entered the world in 1886 and 1912, respectively, and Parisian audiences heard the premieres of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1923) and Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre for harpsichord and chamber orchestra with Wanda Landowska as soloist (1929).
There are plenty of recordings to listen to if you’re interested in commemorating those events.
One important historical event that took place on May 2 of 1971 was the birth of National Public Radio, marking the launch of the first nation-wide, non-commercial radio network. To mark the occasion, you can take a deep dive into NPR’s YouTube channels (especially the Tiny Desk Concerts on NPR Music), but also check out this collection of the catchy tunes B.J. Liederman wrote to introduce some of NPR’s most popular shows.
