by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Locally on Saturday, Oberlin Stage Left features music by Kevin Puts, Martijn Padding, Julia Wolfe and Michael-Thomas Foumai, and the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra salutes the late Chick Corea. On Sunday, guest artists Fiona Gillespie, voice and Irish whistle, and Paul Holmes, theorbo, Baroque guitar and banjo join Caitlin Hedge, violin, viola d’amore, and voice and Kivie Cahn-Lipman, cello, viola da gamba and lirone in a mixed genre program at Youngstown’s McDonough Museum.
Online performances include programs from the Hamburg International Music Festival, Boston’s A Far Cry chamber orchestra, and Duke Performances, plus the first streamed Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Details in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
It’s a wildly varied list of anniversaries to celebrate this weekend. On Saturday, the birth of American composer and virtuoso pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829, but maybe on May 7), the birth in 1846 of German-American opera composer and impresario Oscar Hammerstein (father of the Broadway lyricist), the death in 1944 of British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, the birth in 1945 of American composer, harpsichordist and pianist Keith Jarrett, the death of Italian composer Luigi Nono in 1990, the death of Austrian-American pianist Rudolp Serkin in 1991 (or perhaps on May 9), and the death of French composer and organist Jean Langlais in 1991.
Sunday’s list includes Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, probably born on May 9, 1525, the death of North German organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude in 1707, and the death of the late French Baroque composer Claude Balbastre in 1799.
Choosing somewhat randomly from all these events, let’s start with Louis Gottschalk, born in New Orleans to a Creole mother and Jewish father, who became the most famous pianist of the mid-19th century in the New World, earning high praise from the likes of Chopin, Liszt and Alkan on his European tours. The elements of Creole music in his compositions have caused them to be regarded as precursors of jazz. Unfortunately, Gottschalk got involved in a scandal involving a student at a female seminary in California, and left the United States, never to return.
Gottschalk’s Grand Tarantelle was only discovered after his death in 1869, in versions for piano solo and piano duo. Hershey Kay orchestrated it, and Reid Nibley recorded it with the Utah Symphony under Maurice Abravanel. Listen to the “bravura, toe-tapping showpiece” here.
Luigi Nono, born into a wealthy artistic family in Venice, was a member of the Italian Resistance during World War II, and a committed anti-fascist. His 1955 Il canto sospeso incorporates farewell letters written by political prisoners before execution, and his 1960 one act opera Intolleranza caused a riot at its Venetian premiere.
Salutes to the organists on the list include Dietrich Buxtehude’s seven-verse cantata Membra Jesu Nostri (1680, performed here by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis under René Jacobs), his Praeludium in C, BuxWV 136 (performed in 2008 by Kirk M. Rich on the Flentrop organ in Oberlin’s Warner Concert Hall), and his Praeludium in d, BuxWV 140, played here on the Arp Schnitger organ in Norden by Thiemo Janssen). Buxtehude, who invented the Advent Abendmusik concerts and served as Werckmeister as well as organist of St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, inspired J.S. Bach to take an unauthorized leave to study with the North German composer.
And for Jean Langlais, who was titular organist of Ste-Clotilde in Paris, a parish previously served by César Franck, here’s a performance of his “Thème et variations” from Hommage à Frescobaldi, recorded live in concert in July 2016 on the organ of Église Saint-Vaast, Béthune, France, by Oberlin graduate Katelyn Emerson.
Finally, we should mention that pianist Vladimir Horowitz returned to the concert stage in New York’s Carnegie Hall on May 9, 1965 after a twelve-year hiatus. His recital — at 4 pm on a Sunday, of course — was marked by a 30-minute standing ovation.