by Daniel Hathaway with Mike Telin
IN THIS EDITION:
. The weekend concert calendar gives you a multiplicity of options.
. CIM ventures outside University Circle in an expanded series of community concerts.
. Hamilton C. MacDougall and William Barclay Squire (who?) make their debuts while Leonard Bernstein and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (pictured above on a Dutch 25 guilder banknote) exit the scene.
WEEKEND EVENTS:
On Friday, October 14 at 11:00 am Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider leads The Cleveland Orchestra with cello soloist Mark Kosower in Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand’s timely Lamentation On The Disasters of War, Ernst Bloch’s Schelomo (Solomon, Hebraic Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra) & Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) at Severance Music Center, 11001 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. Tickets are available online for this program, which will be repeated Saturday at 8:00 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm. Read our preview article here.
On Friday at 7 pm, The Singers’ Club of Cleveland reprises a concert of reflective choral music in recognition of the global impact of the COVID pandemic. The featured work is British composer David Briggs’ Requiem for men’s voices and organ.. First Baptist Church, 3630 Fairmount Boulevard, Cleveland Heights. Tickets available online.
On Friday at 8 pm, Apollo’s Fire, Jeannette Sorrell, conducting, continues its round of performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 with soloists Erica Schuller, Molly Netter, Rebecca Myers, sopranos, Kristen Dubenion-Smith, mezzo-soprano, Jacob Perry & Steven Caldicott Wilson, tenors, Edward Vogel & Andrew Padgett, baritones. Tonight’s performance is at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 1361 W. Market St., in Akron. The program is repeated at First Baptist Church in Shaker Heights on Saturday at 8. Tickets available online.
Also at 8:00 pm – No Exit new music ensemble presents the next installment of their video concerts with works by Dembski, Norgard, and Khorassani. Watch on the ensemble’s Website.
On Saturday at 7:30 pm – Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra conducted by Anthony Parnther perform Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and highlight Bernard Herrmann’s film scores for Alfred Hitchcock with the Prelude and The Murder from Psycho, Scène d’Amour from Vertigo, and Overture from North By Northwest, along with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in c. Kulas Hall, Free.
7:30 pm – Cleveland Philharmonic: Victor Liva, conductor, William Barbini, violin, Kineko Okumura, viola. Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Mozart’s Sinfonia Conertante, and Brahms: Symphony No. 4. Westlake Performing Arts Center, Westlake Performing Arts Center, 27830 Hilliard Blvd., Westlake. The program is repeated at 3:00 pm on Sunday at Waetjen Auditorium, Cleveland State University Tickets available online.
At 8:00 pm – Akron Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Wilkins, conducting. Stella Sung’s Rockwell Reflections, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes: Four Sea Interludes & Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral.” E.J. Thomas Hall, University of Akron, 198 Hill St. Tickets available online.
On Sunday, October 16 at 4, the Cleveland Institute of Music’s New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch director, performs George Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten (Images III) and Harrison Birtwistle’s Duets for Storab & Cortege in Mixon Hall. Admission is free, but a reservation is required.
IN THE NEWS:
The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced the launching of a slate of community concerts. CIM students have been performing Community Concerts for up to 10 years, but with a gift from The Schlang Family Fund the series will be both more expansive and more comprehensive. An estimated 200 students this fall will gain critical concert planning experience and forge deep personal and musical ties through repeat appearances in concert with a range of partners, becoming true musical ambassadors in the process.
The full schedule for fall 2022 includes dozens of private engagements with listeners all over Northeast Ohio, at houses of worship, apartment complexes, medical centers and public libraries. Click here for a complete listing of CIM’s Community Concerts.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
October 14 marks the passing of American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who died on this date in 1990 of a heart attack in his New York apartment at The Dakota. He was 72 years old.
Unfortunately for Northeast Ohio audiences, his sole appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra was a 1970 performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony at Blossom.
In our August 25, 2020 Diary, Daniel Hathaway honored Bernstein’s birth by going behind the scenes for a look at “Lenny” in rehearsal — a process even more revealing than the resulting performance.
Hathaway wrote: “I had the honor of studying with Bernstein in the conducting class at Tanglewood in the early ‘70s, and of singing in Mahler 2 with the Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses and the Boston Symphony on a radiant summer afternoon during that time.” Click here to watch Bernstein rehearse Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring during the 1987 International Conductor’s Competition and Master Course at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany. And in a separate clip, he takes the triangle players in Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette aside for a brief tutorial.”
Organists should take note of the birth on October 15 in 1868 of Hamilton C. MacDougall, who founded the American Guild of Organists in 1896 while teaching at Wellesley College from 1900-1925. With some 275 chapters and 12,000 members throughout the United States and abroad, the AGO has recently invested its energies into the recruitment and training of young musicians. Click here to watch Oberlin graduate Katelyn Emerson’s video A Reason to Practice, which she wrote, recorded, and produced for the American Guild of Organists’ Virtual Pipe Organ Encounter 2021.
On October 16 1621, Dutch organist and composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck died in Amsterdam, where he spent his entire career, although his fame spread elsewhere. He was known in Germany for his mentoring of young organists and in England for his keyboard compositions, which found their way into the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. (A modern edition of this vast collection of keyboard music held at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University was co-edited by British musicologist William Barclay Squire, who was born on October 16, 1855.)
Sweelinck was employed by the city rather than by the Oude Kerk, where he played, and which shunned organ music in its Calvinist services. His duties included improvising on Dutch psalm tunes and hymns at other times.
Take a deep dive into the composer’s keyboard music with a 6-½ hour recording by Daniele Boccaccio, who plays three historical German organs: the 1678 Arp Schnitger instrument in the Johanneskirche, Oederquart, the 1612-1613 Fritz Scherer organ in the Marienkirche, Lemgo, “and an instrument of unknown manufacture from around 1550 in the Andreaskirche, Ostönnen.” The harpsichord is a copy of a 1679 instrument by Jan Couchet.
