by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
The schedule is packed.
On Saturday, Les Délices presents Arcadian Dreams (2 pm at Hudson Library), Klaus Mäkelä leads The Cleveland Orchestra and choruses in the last of three performances of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (8 pm at Severance Music Center), No Exit New Music continues its new season with a triptych of concerts and a trio of world premieres (7 pm at SPACES), the Akron Symphony plays Charles Ives — pictured — and Gustav Holst (7:30 in E.J. Thomas Hall), Apollo’s Fire plays four of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (7:30 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Cleveland Heights), the Cleveland Philharmonic plays Liszt with Halida Dinova; The Cleveland Opera presents Puccini’s L’amico Fritz (7:30 at First Baptist, Shaker Hts., and Wit’s Folly plays early Iberian music (7:30 at St. Noel Church, Willoughby Hills).
On Sunday, stand-alone events include Cleveland Composers Guild (organ works at 3 pm in Morley Hall, Painesville), and Lakeland Civic Chorus (4 pm at Lakeland Community College, Kirtland). Repeated programs include the Cleveland Philharmonic (3 pm at CSU), Wit’s Folly (4 pm at Bath Church), The Cleveland Opera (4 pm at First Baptist, Shaker Hts.), Apollo’s Fire (5 pm at First Methodist Church, Akron) and Les Délices (7:30 in Harkness Chapel, CWRU).
For details of these and other upcoming events, go to our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READS:
Writing for VAN Magazine, Hannah Edgar updates the situation at the Cleveland Institute of Music since the faculty voted to unionize, and reports on the effect the turmoil of the last year has had on student enrollment. Read her reporting here. (Note: the article is behind a paywall, but inexpensive subscriptions to the Berlin-based magazine are available).
Jeremy Denk on Charles Ives. In an essay this weekend in The New York Times, the pianist considers the thorny composer’s legacy on the 150th anniversary of his birth. Read At 150, Charles Ives Still Reflects the Darkness and Hope of America here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
October 19:
On this date in 1922, Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition premiered in Paris, commissioned and conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. He recorded the work in late October of 1930 with the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall (listen here), and there are numerous other orchestral adaptations and rearrangements of the Russian composer’s popular piano suite. Click here to watch Jonathan Scott play his solo arrangement on the 1895 organ in Albion Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, UK.
A smaller work was first heard on this date in 1967 at the Library of Congress when the Juilliard String Quartet debuted George Gershwin’s lovely Lullaby for string quartet (1919-20). Listen to a performance by the New York Philharmonic String Quartet here.
Twenty years later, English cellist Jacqueline du Pré left us at the age of 42 in London. Married to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, she was permanently associated with the Elgar concerto. Her life, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis, has been the subject of the partly fictionalized Broadway play, Duet for One (1981) and film about the cellist and her flutist sister, Hilary and Jackie (1998).
October 20:
American experimental composer Charles Ives, whose day job was serving as executive of several insurance companies in New York City, was born on October 20, 1875 in Danbury, Connecticut. Regarded as an American Original, early on Ives was influenced by the whole panoply of 19th century music he encountered as a young man as well as such sonic experience as hearing bands playing simultaneously in small-town parades.
Having formally studied with Horatio Parker at Yale, Ives later went off on his own, experimenting with polytonality and polyrhythm, microtones, tone clusters, and improvisatory elements. Somewhat mysteriously, he stopped composing in the late 1920s, well before his death in 1954.
Listen to a performance of Ives’ First Violin Sonata by Stefan Jackiw and Jeremy Denk here.
And watch a full-length concert of Ives’ hymns, songs, and violin sonatas at the 2014 Ojai Festival, performed by pianist Jeremy Denk, violinist Jennifer Frautschi, and the male vocal ensemble Hudson Shad.
Ives’ orchestral experiments are especially interesting. Click here to watch The Way Things Work, a short lecture by Detroit Symphony Conductor Leonard Slatkin on Ives’ Fourth Symphony, and here to listen to Pierre Boulez lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Three Places in New England in 1970.
And experience one of Ives’ experiments in bitonality: his setting of Psalm 67 in which the upper voices sing in the key of g minor, and the lower in the key of C Major. San Francisco Choral Artists perform at St. Luke’s Church.
Finally, one of Ives’ most amusing pieces is his Variations on ‘America’ for organ, written when he was only 16. Oberlin graduate Joseph Ripka plays it here on the Visser & Associates organ at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in Phoenix. E. Power Biggs is rumored to have once programmed it on a patriotic program at Princeton. The organizers were not amused.
