by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. An extensive list of concert choices
. In the News: Cleveland Orchestra tour and recording, Curtis Institute tries out an immersive orchestra concert experience
. Almanac: Composers George Perle and Victoria Bond celebrate birthdays and Johann Sebastian Bach meets Prussian King Frederick II in Potsdam
THIS WEEKEND’S EVENTS:
With Mother’s Day weekend upon us, there’s plenty of live music in the area to add a little something special to the celebration. Here are our choices of concerts that offer a diverse selection of ensembles and musical styles — and many are free. Check our Concert Listings page for details.
Friday, May 6 —
At 7:00 pm at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Hts., Alchemy Baroque presents “The Mystics,” featuring music by Monteverdi, Schütz, and John Dowland. Also at 7:00 pm in Mentor, the Fine Arts Association Faculty Artist Recital Series will present pianists Feroza LaBonne and Katie Hug in works by Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin, Albéniz, Granados and Johann Strauss. A half hour later at 7:30 pm, Cleveland Orchestra principal cello Mark Kosower and pianist Max Levinson will play Fauré, Strauss, Beethoven, Chausson, Myaskovsky, and Martinu at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Hts. (program to be repeated on Sunday, May 8 at 3:30 pm in Port Clinton). Also at 7:30, Fridays at Finney features the Oberlin Orchestra & Contemporary Music Ensemble led by Raphael Jiménez and Timothy Weiss in music by Michael Foumai, Unsuk Chin, Christian Woehr, and Arnold Schoenberg. And Apollo’s Fire begins its 30th Anniversary celebration with a 7:30 concert in Akron.
Saturday, May 7 —
At 11:00 am The Cleveland Orchestra shines a spotlight on composer, violinist, conductor, fencer, colonel, and abolitionist Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Conductor Vinay Parameswaran and the Orchestra will be joined by guest violinist Brendon Elliott and four actors in a play-turned-concert-production titled “The Chevalier.” Read a preview article here. At 7:30 pm at the Church of the Covenant, Daniel Meyer leads the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra in “Taking Flight” a program of music by Hilary Tann, Mozart, and Beethoven with Cleveland Orchestra assistant principal flute Jessica Sindell as the featured soloist. Read a preview article here. Also at 7:30 pm, Miriam Burns will lead the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra at Stambaugh Auditorium in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and music by von Suppé and Mozart — clarinetist Nicholas Thompson is the soloist. At 8:00 pm at Severance Music Center, Apollo’s Fire and Jeannette Sorrell present their main 30th Anniversary Celebration Concert “Mozart and the Chevalier,” featuring Francisco Fullana, violin and Sonya Headlam, soprano. The program is repeated on Sunday at 4:00 pm at St. Raphael Catholic Church in Bay Village. Read a preview article here.
Sunday May 8 —
At 3:30 pm at Church of the Gesu in University Heights, David Gilson leads the Western Reserve Chorale and Promethean Quartet in “With Strings Attached,” featuring .works by J.S. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Ola Gjello, Stephen Foster, and Katie Kring with vocal soloists Joanne Uniatowski and Bryan McGucken. At 5:00 pm at Christ Episcopal Church in Hudson, Music From the Western Reserve presents the debut of the Cleveland Consort of Voices under the direction of Steven Plank. The playlist includes music by J.S. Bach, Brahms, Gibbon, Byrd, and Villette.
At 7:00 pm at Severance Music Center, Vinay Parameswarean leads the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra & Youth Chorus in Reena Esmail’s She Will Transform You, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, featuring Moonhee Kim, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. Read a preview article here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Philadelphia Inquirer critic Peter Dobrin reports on the Curtis Institute’s experiment with creating an immersive orchestral concert experience. Read “How Can Classical Music Be More Like Netflix?” here.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Today we celebrate the births of two Americans who made their debuts on May 6: composer George Perle in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1915, and composer/conductor Victoria Bond in Los Angeles in 1945.
After graduating from DePaul University, George Perle served in the United States Army during World War II and later earned his doctorate at New York University in 1956. As a composer, Perle employed his own technique that he called “twelve-tone tonality” — which is somewhat related to the technique used by composers of the Second Viennese School. In 1968, along with Igor Stravinsky and Hans F. Redlich, Perle co-founded the Alban Berg Society. His work on that composer’s music included documenting the third act of Lulu.
After retiring from Queens College Perle became a professor emeritus at the Aaron Copland School of Music and in 1986 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Fourth Wind Quintet as well as a MacArthur Fellowship. Perle also served a three-year appointment as composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Symphony, and authored several books including The Listening Composer. Click here to listen to the Dorian Wind Quintet’s performance of the fourth Wind Quintet, and pianist/composer Michael Brown performs Perle’s Toccata here.
Born into a musical family, Victoria Bond has long been a leading voice in classical music as a composer, conductor, lecturer, and artistic director of Cutting Edge Concerts. The first woman awarded a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the Juilliard School, her teachers included Ingolf Dahl and Roger Sessions (composition); William Vennard (voice); Jean Morel, James Conlon, Sixteen Ehrling, Leonard Slatkin, and Herbert Blomstedt (conducting).
In 1978 Bond became the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductor with the Pittsburgh Symphony and in 1986 was invited to conduct the Houston Symphony for the premiere of her work Ringing. She has served as artistic director of the Bel Canto Opera Company in New York, music director and conductor of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Southwest Virginia Opera, the Harrisburg Opera and the New Amsterdam Symphony. Her opera Mrs. President was premiered in 2012 in Anchorage, Alaska. Click here to visit her website and here to listen to Bond discuss her life in music.
On May 7 in 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach met the Prussian king Frederick II in Potsdam while visiting his son, Carl Phillip Emanuel, and accepted the flute-playing monarch’s challenge of improvising a three-voice Ricercar on a theme that Frederick supplied. Back home in Leipzig, Bach the father turned that royal theme into A Musical Offering, a suite that included Ricercare for three and six voices, twelve canons — a number of them expressed as musical puzzles to be solved — and a trio sonata featuring Frederick’s instrument, the flute.
Click here to hear the entire collection conducted by Jordi Savall, with harpsichordist Pierre Hantaï, and here to listen to the Trio Sonata played by Cleveland Orchestra principal flute Joshua Smith, violinist Allison Edberg, gambist Ann Marie Morgan, and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour.
A version of the polyphonically dense six-voice Ricercar arranged by Anton Webern has been recorded by Christoph von Dohnányi and The Cleveland Orchestra, and Arseniy Gusuv tackled the piece on his semifinal round of Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso competition in 2020. Watch that here.