by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
“June is busting out all over,” declares one of the opening numbers in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel, which kicks off the Ohio Light Opera season in Wooster on June 14.
The summer concert season will be similarly exploding with festivals and other events next week, but our weekend events make up an interesting if modest list.
No Exit presents a program of music from The Collective, an international consortium of composers on Friday at 7 at the Bop Stop, and Saturday at 7 at Heights Arts. The program features works by Agata Zubel, Mathew Rosenblum, Douglas Knehans, Spiros Mazis, Amy Kaplan, Constantine Koukias, Edward Smalldone, and Timothy Beyer (pictured).
On Saturday at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, Carl Topilow will lead Cleveland Pops Orchestra in real tunes from the fictitious Great American Songbook, featuring vocalist Capathia Jenkins and the Cleveland Pops Chorus.
On Sunday at 3 at Shore Cultural Center, Euclid Symphony will join conductor Jimmie A. Parker, Sr., and special guests for a program of big band music.
Closing out the weekend, on Sunday at 3, the Omni Quartet will play Beethoven’s string quartets Nos. 8 and 12 in a carriage house in Cleveland Heights. At 5, The Resonance Project will put Baroque instrumentalists together with West African drummer and vocalist Assane M’Baye at Forest Hills Church. And at 7, OPUS 216 will launch their summer Symphony at Sunset series in Voinovich Bicentennial Park on the E. 9th Street Pier.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
We’ll zero in on one date in music history: May 31, which in 1656 marked the birth of French composer and violist da gamba Marin Marais in Paris. In 1999 Gérard Depardieu starred as Marais in Tous les Matins du Monde, bow-syncing to the playing of Jordi Savall in opulent scenes from the court of Louis XV shot in the Golden Gallery of the Bank of France. Savall, who has been a distinguished visitor to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s performing arts series, plays himself in a video of Marais’ Suite d’un goût étranger with Hyperion XXI — watch here.
On May 31,1809, Austrian composer Joseph Haydn died in Vienna, leading to the curious story of the theft of the composer’s head. The now-defunct Lyric Opera Cleveland commissioned a one-act comic opera from local composerLarry Baker on the subject in 1987, described thusly by Plain Dealer critic Robert Finn: “There are intricate ensembles, elaborate musical parodies (including a page or two of ‘Salome’ for connoisseurs of severed-head music) and bursts of lyricism.”
The composer himself added, according to Wilma Salisbury’s Cleveland Arts Prize bio of Baker, that “the work is ‘absurd’ rather than ‘creepy or spooky’ and involves ‘no blood and gore whatsoever.’ Maybe worth a revival.
And English countertenor Alfred Deller was born on May 31, 1912 in Margate. Deller, who created the role of Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, teamed up with Gustav Leonhardt in 1954 for a pioneering recording of Bach Cantatas with the Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble. Hear Deller and Leonhardt in five Purcell songs recorded live in Hilversum in 1952 (note: photos of the harpsichordist probably aren’t of Leonhardt!) Deller performed with his trio at the Cleveland Museum of Art in September, 1955..
