by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
OCTOBER 2 – FRIDAY
12:15 Noon – Keiran Cantilina, carillon, Alexander McGaffin Carillon, University Circle, Cleveland | 7:30 pm – Youngstown Symphony, Stambaugh Auditorium.
OCTOBER 3 – SATURDAY
7:00 pm – Gallery Concert, Kirsten Docter and the Pandan String Quartet, Heights Arts | Stow Symphony Orchestra, Tallmadge Bible Church | 7:30 pm – BlueWater Chamber Orchestra (pictured), Church of the Covenant, Cleveland | 7:30 pm – Verona String Quartet, Federated Church, Chagrin Falls | Les Délices, Bach’s Musical Offering, Gamble Auditorium, Baldwin Wallace U., Berea | Lorain Civic Orchestra, Stocker Center, Elyria.
OCTOBER 4 – SUNDAY
3:00 pm – Les Délices, Bach’s Musical Offering, Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art | 4:00 pm – Variant 6, Philadelphia vocal ensemble, Church of the Western Reserve, Pepper Pike | Paul Fey, organ, St. Sebastian Church, Akron | Andrew Peters, organ, improvised accompaniment to the Harold Lloyd silent film For Heaven’s Sake, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Akron | 4:00 pm – Jennifer Lory-Moran, carillon, Alexander McGaffin Carillon, University Circle, Cleveland.
For Details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
WEEKEND HEADLINE:
The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst embark on final European tour together
The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst return to Europe for their final international tour, a 15-concert journey through nine countries and 13 distinguished venues. The tour runs October 2 through 21, at the beginning of Welser-Möst’s 25th and final season as Music Director. Read the press release here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
German composer Max Bruch died on October 2, 1920 in Berlin-Friedenau. Inspired by Brahms and mostly known as a choral composer during his lifetime, Bruch is now celebrated for a few instrumental works that have remained popular.
The first of his three violin concertos is one of those, performed here by Rachel Barton Pine and CityMusic Cleveland at St. Stanislaus in October, 2012. And ChamberFest Cleveland featured selections from his Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano on a concert in June, 2019 (with Franklin Cohen, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Evren Ozel).
And on this date in 1943, Canadian American composer R. Nathaniel Dett died of a heart attack in Battle Creek, Michigan while on tour with a USO orchestra. Born in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of the city of Niagara Falls), Dett moved across the border with his family at the age of 11, was the first Black student to graduate from the Oberlin Conservatory’s 5-year degree program, and studied composition during the summers at Harvard with Arthur Foote.
Dett reflected the opinions of Antonín Dvořák when he wrote, in 1918
We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people … But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long.
Dett’s Don’t Be Weary, Traveler, which won Harvard’s Francis Boot Award, was sung by Quire Cleveland at Historic St. Peter Church in April, 2014. And click here to listen to Canada’s Nathaniel Dett Chorale perform his popular spiritual, Listen to the Lambs.
Perhaps Dett’s most ambitious work is his 1937 oratorio, The Ordering of Moses, premiered at Cincinnati’s May Festival in 1937.
The Oberlin Orchestra and conservatory choral ensembles — numbering some 250 musicians in all — joined forces at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2023 for the second time in as many months for a program that showcased the masterwork of Oberlin composer R. Nathaniel Dett and the talents of two standout alumni soloists making their Carnegie Hall debuts: soprano Chabrelle Williams ’11 and the late tenor Limmie Pulliam ’98.
Watch Dett Revisited: Reflections on The Ordering of Moses here.
