by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
There’s much to choose from during these three early May days:
On Friday: No Exit presents pianist Geoffrey Burleson (repeated Saturday) • Summit Choral Society’s Metropolitan Chorus sings Fauré and Vaughan Williams • Cleveland Pops Orchestra plays Simply Sinatra • Oberlin Chamber Orchestra features pianist Yu-Wei Lee • and The Resonance Project programs Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
On Saturday: Friends of the McGaffin Carillon sponsors a Carillon Crawl with David Osburn at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Hts. • Music at Main presents Sugar Mules, “Cleveland’s Unexpectedly Good Bluegrass Band” • Wayne Center for the Arts presents the Escher String Quartet • and the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra features pianist James Carson (repeated Sunday).
On Sunday: Tuesday Musical’s Scholarship Competition holds its Final Round/Winners Concert in Akron • The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra features pianist Saya Uejima • the Parma Symphony Orchestra welcomes pianist Alex Wasserman • Sounds of St. James, Lakewood presents a Festival of Sacred Music • The Cleveland Opera performs Pietro Mascagni’s Zanetto • Arts at Holy Trinity, Akron hosts organist David Lines • and West Shore Chorale & Orchestra perform Mozart and Beethoven.
R.I.P. KAREL PAUKERT:
The longtime curator of musical arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art and organist and choirmaster of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Hts. passed away on April 30 at the age of 90. (Pictured above with Olivier Messiaen at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978.) Read an obituary here.
A service in celebration of Paukert’s life will be held on Saturday, June 28, at 11 am at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2747 Fairmount Blvd., Cleveland Heights, followed by a reception.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Karel Paukert Memorial Music Fund at St. Paul’s.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Classical Guitar Society informs us that tickets are now on sale for all concerts in its 2025-2026 International Series, including the Showcase Performance with Vanessa Rubin and Perry Hughes (September 20), and the programs featuring Leonela Alejandro (October 25), Duo Noire (November 15), Edel Muñoz (February 7), An Tran (March 7), and David Russell (April 11).
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
May 4 in classical music history marks some important beginnings that ultimately led to the modern grand piano, the phonograph record, and the international orchestral tour.
Italian craftsman Bartolomeo Cristofori, born in Padua on May 4, 1665, was responsible for inventing the first practical pianoforte, an instrument that looks just like a harpsichord until you raise the hood. Inside, instead of quills that pluck strings, a hammer mechanism strikes them and then retreats, allowing the performer to play soft, loud, or at any dynamic level in between. Thus Cristofori named his invention the “gravicembalo col piano e forte.”
Cristofori’s pianoforte mechanism was so sophisticated that no major improvements were made for the next 75 years, and the basic concept has persisted to today. You can see the 1720 model he built in Florence in the musical instrument collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, read about it here, and listen to Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in d played on it here by Dongsok Shin.
A number of late 19th century inventors were involved in creating machines that would reproduce sound, but on May 4, 1887, Emile Berliner was the first to file a patent application (U.S. patent 372,786) for a device he called the gramophone. His machine “recorded a lateral pattern on lamp-blacked paper wrapped on a cylinder, similar to the phonautograph of Leon Scott, but with an oil applied to the surface mixed with lampblack to make a fatty ink better able to be engraved with a cutting stylus.” Read about it in The Early Gramophone.
That a lot remained to be done before Sony could develop a single disc capable of reproducing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is suggested in the first news story about Berliner’s invention. A two-page article in Electrical World dated November 12, 1887 described a device driven by a weight box and controlled by a paddle-wheeled governor that recorded four minutes of sound on an 11-inch glass disc at 30 rpm.”
And on May 4, 1920, The Symphony Society of New York — which eventually became the New York Philharmonic — played the opening concert of its debut European Tour at the Paris Opera, making it the first American ensemble to perform overseas.
The Symphony Society Bulletin of March 18, 1920 noted that the European Tour was being undertaken “by official invitation from the governments of France, Italy, Belgium and a committee of England’s foremost musicians.” The Orchestra embarked on the transatlantic crossing aboard the Rochambeau on April 22, beginning “a tour which is unprecedented and indicates in a remarkable manner the new position of America in the world of music.”
The May 4 performance, led by Walter Damrosch, included Berlioz’ Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, d’Indy’s Istar: variations symphonique, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, “Fragment Symphonique.” The Orchestra’s European adventure lasted nearly two months, culminating in a June 20 matinee at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Like the Middle Eastern tour The Cleveland Orchestra was forced to cancel at the beginning of the pandemic, orchestral touring will eventually resume, however slowly and more modestly. On this May 4th, it’s good to look back and recall that cultural exchanges had until recently been important tools of international diplomacy, and not merely expensive expressions of musical vanity.
