by Daniel Hathaway
READ AND WATCH THIS WEEKEND:
The 40-degree temperature drop between yesterday’s summery conditions and today’s reminder of what’s coming (or is already here) suggests that indoor activities are on the agenda this weekend.
Last we heard, Oberlin College Choir was going ahead with their plans for a rescheduled outdoor concert tonight at 7:30 pm at the Mudd Learning Center Patio off of Wilder Bowl on the Oberlin Campus. This event will also be streamed live.
Matthew Robertson’s The Thirteen Choir, who appeared at St. John’s Cathedral just a year ago, are broadcasting a performance of Heinrich Schütz’s exquisite Musicalisches Exequien today at 7:30 pm as part of their program “Sorrow to the Stars.” Tickets and connection details here.
Writing in the New York Review, conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin re-evaluates the legacy of Pierre Boulez. Read Sound and Fury here.
And a New York Times feature by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim visits Peruvian-born composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank and her husband on their farm in Mendocino County, California, where she raises chickens and hosts an academy for young composers. Read Part Teacher, Part Den Mother, a Composer Fosters Diversity here. Frank wrote a piccolo concerto for Mary Kay Fink and The Cleveland Orchestra in 2014 (read our preview here). She was to have been the featured guest composer with the Cleveland Institute of Music New Music Ensemble in November, 2019, but had to cancel because of the California wildfires.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Among the decedents on October 24 and 25 in music history are French composer and organist Jean Titelouze (1633), Austrian violinist and composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1799), Hungarian operetta composer Franz Lehar (1948), and American composer Carl Ruggles (1971).
We’ll pick one work to memorialize Ruggles, the prickly New England composer who was also a prolific painter, Listen to his Sun Treader, recorded in a live performance in February, 1988 by Christoph von Dohnányi and The Cleveland Orchestra.
The storks were busy on this weekend in history, delivering Italian composer Luciano Berio in Oneglia (1925), Russian composer Sophia Gubaidulina in Tchistpol Tatarstan (1931), American harpsichordist and pianist Malcolm Bilson in Los Angeles (1935), German composer Hans Leo Hassler in Nuremberg (1564), English composer Thomas Weelkes in Elstedt (1576) and Russian composer Alexander Tikhonovich Grechaninov in Moscow (1864).
Here are just a few suggestions to mark those birthdays:
In the Berio documentary Voyage to Cythera, in addition to “interviews with conductors such as Riccardo Chailly and Riccardo Muti who shed light for us on Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berio,” the composer unpacks his Sinfonia, a tribute to Gustav Mahler, and rehearses it with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun was performed by the Oberlin College Choir, Gregory Ristow, conducting, with Darrett Adkins, cello, on October 18, 2018. Here’s an earlier college performance of her dynamic setting of Francis of Assisi’s words by the Indiana University Contemporary Ensemble from February, 2013.
And Thomas Weelkes, one of the greatest madrigalists and church music composers of the Elizabethan period was also one its most colorful personalities. Listen here to his Hark, all ye lovely saints above, in a performance by the Sidonia-Ensemble, and here to his Gloria in excelsis Deo as sung by King’s College Choir in 2000. For insights into the craft of the English madrigalists, watch Texting With Madrigals, an Early Music America lecture by retired Oberlin English professor (and ClevelandClassical.com board member) Nicholas Jones.
