by Daniel Hathaway
EVENTS THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday, join members of the Greater Cleveland Flute Society for a 1 pm master class with Robert Dick featuring some of his extended techniques and inventions.
In the evening, the 7:00 hour presents students and alumni of CIM Opera Theater in a MET Opera-style gala culminating in Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, “A Season of Thanksgiving” program by an octet from Cleveland Chamber Choir, and the debut of Kent State Youth Winds, featuring National Trumpet Competition high school division winner Chris Petrella.
Mark Edwards leads the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra at 7:30 in Warner Concert Hall (live stream available), and British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason delivers the Elgar Concerto at 8 at Severance with Jakub Hrůša and The Cleveland Orchestra.
On Sunday (you did set your clocks back an hour, right?) The Oberlin Senior Concerto Competition begins bright and early (10 am in Finney Chapel), Kanneh-Mason and Hrůša wrap up their four-concert set at Severance at 3, and violinist Andrew Sords and pianist Anitra Pontremoli perform at First Lutheran in Lorain at the same hour.
At 4 pm, the Cavani Quartet continue their Beyond Beethoven series at The Temple – Tifereth Israel, both Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland and Christ Presbyterian in Canton offer Choral Evensong (including the blessing of the new organ at Trinity), and the Lakeland Civic Orchestra plays a homecoming concert in Kirtland.
The weekend ends as it began with flutist Robert Dick, this time at 7:30 pm at Praxis Fiber Workshop in an improvisation-fest with Dana Jessen, bassoon, Bob Drake, hardware electronics, and Stephan Haluska, harp.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Semyon Bychkov has withdrawn from next week’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts, to be replaced by Thierry Fischer. The new program replaces Dvořák and Tchaikovsky with Messiaen’s Les Offrandes oubliées and Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with Tom Borrow remains as originally announced.
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Meyer, music director, has announced a three-concert season for 2021-2022. An hour-long family concert on November 20 at 3 pm at the Breen Center will celebrate Cleveland landmarks with musical selections by Respighi, Debussy, Jennifer Higdon, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Howard Arlen, and Michael Daugherty. On March 5 at 7:30 pm, the orchestra will join organist Jonathan Moyer at the Church of the Covenant for music by Walter Piston, Satie, Robin, and Haydn, and a Mother’s Day Weekend performance at the Covenant on May 7 at 7:30 with flutist Jessica Sindell will feature works by Tamm, Mozart, and Beethoven.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
The announcement of a podium change for next week’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts neatly coincides with the first performance of one of the works that Thierry Fischer will conduct: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in the 1922 arrangement for orchestra by Maurice Ravel, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony and first performed on November 6 of 1924.
The original is a cleverly-conceived suite for solo piano that Modest Mussorgsky completed in 1874 after visiting an exhibition of watercolors and drawings by his late friend Victor Hartmann. On his walkthrough, the composer views and contemplates ten of the vivid and sometimes bizarre works in the show, with thoughtful little promenades in between.
In his program notes for the L.A. Philharmonic, Orrin Howard writes,
Pictures at an Exhibition proved to be a welcome rarity in Mussorgsky’s anguished experience – a composition born quickly and virtually painlessly. Reporting to his friend Vladimir Stassov about the progress of the suite he was writing for piano (Pictures’ original medium), Mussorgsky exulted: “Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and over-eat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.”
Most concertgoers are familiar with the Ravel orchestration. A few may be aware that other arrangements were made by Leopold Stokowski, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Alexander Taneyev, as well as by Sir Henry Wood (writing under the nom de plume of “Klenovsky,” until he heard Ravel’s version and immediately withdrew).
In fact, there are dozens of arrangements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures, as detailed in a spreadsheet made for the Petrucci Project, which lists those for orchestra or wind ensembles made since Leo Funtek made a complete orchestration in 1922, and includes versions by Mekong Delta for rock band and orchestra, and the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer reworking.
Considering the attractiveness and splendid colors of Ravel’s orchestration, you can emphasize with Henry Wood’s decision to get out of the way.
Another happenstance to mark this weekend is the anniversary of Belgian Adolphe Sax, born on November 6, 1814, who invented the instruments of the saxophone family in 1840. Ravel used a solo alto sax to great effect in “The Old Castle” in Pictures.
