by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND: On Friday, CIM Museum Melodies features pianists in one-hour recitals (12 Noon, Natural History Museum), Sky Creature performs (7 pm at Transformer Station) & experimental cellist Ian Maskin plays original works (7:30 at the Maltz).
On Saturday, Les Délices reprises The Highland Lassie (1:30 at Waterloo Arts Fest), pianist Brian Wilson plays Beethoven, Chopin & Frank Martin (7 pm at Federated Church), Sammy DeLeon y su Orquesta & Las Sirenas mariachi band mark Hispanic Heritage Month (7 pm at Severance Music Center) & Cleveland Classical Guitar Society presents a showcase with Colin Davin & Moises Borges (pictured, 7:30 at the Maltz).
On Sunday, “The ____ Experiment” (oboist Ava Wirth, saxophonist Andrew Hosler & percussionist Joseph Fox) performs new works (2 pm at Kaiser Gallery, Tremont), trumpeter Jack Sutte gives a faculty recital with pianist Craig Ketter (3 pm at Baldwin Wallace), upright bassist Beth Hiser & guitarist Rachel Roberts play music from the 50s and 60s (4 pm at Bath Church) & Cleveland Chamber Symphony with pianist Mark George plays a tribute to two deceased Northeast Ohio musical giants, H. Leslie Adams & Loris Chobanian (7 pm at Baldwin-Wallace).
Visit our Concert Listings for details of upcoming performances.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
September 13 — by Jarrett Hoffman
German pianist and composer Clara Schumann, née Wieck, was born on September 13, 1819.
It was at the piano where Schumann achieved international stardom during her lifetime, becoming one of the foremost virtuosos of the 19th century. A child prodigy, she was touring Europe by age 11, and a series of recitals in Vienna at age 18 inspired a glowing response from all corners.
Audiences sold out venues to hear her play. Fellow musicians sang her praises — including Franz Liszt in a letter that was later published — as did leading poets such as Franz Grillparzer. State officials gave her Austria’s highest musical honor. And as one critic wrote:
In her creative hands, the most ordinary passage, the most routine motive acquires a significant meaning, a colour, which only those with the most consummate artistry can give.
Clara Schumann wrote music since her early childhood, thanks in part to the broad musical education provided by her exacting father: daily, hour-long lessons covering a range of topics, from piano and composition to violin, voice, and theory. Her early programming, as was customary at the time, included her own works. And as Nancy Reich wrote in her 1985 biography Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, she “astonished audiences as much by her compositions as by her playing.”
Her output was relatively small, since she mostly stopped composing at age 37 after her husband’s death. Even before that point, composition was at times crowded out by other responsibilities. As Robert Schumann wrote,
Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But…she cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost…
A great place to immerse yourself in her music is the 2019 debut album of British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, Romance, entirely devoted to music by Clara Schumann.
“I think the fact that we don’t hear much of her music has nothing to do with the quality of the music,” Kanneh-Mason told NPR. “It’s all to do with the history and the fact that female composers are not recognized as much by musicians.”
Watch Kanneh-Mason perform a favorite of hers — the Scherzo No. 2 in c — on YouTube.
September 14 — by Jarrett Hoffman
September 14 marks several notable birthdays: Austrian composer Michael Haydn (1737), Italian composer Luigi Cherubini (1760), American composer and organist George Whiting (1840), and French pianist and composer Gabrielle Ferrari (1851), as well as the death of American composer and pianist Mary Howe (1964).
We’ll focus on Cherubini, who was known for both sacred music and opera, and for his stylistic straddling of the Classical and Romantic eras. His best known work is the opera Medea, which tells the story of that mythological character who killed her children in revenge after being abandoned by her husband Jason.
One rare Northeast Ohio performance of Medea came in 2017 from the Cleveland Institute of Music Opera Theater program. In a preview conversation with Mike Telin, director David Bamberger cautioned against judging the title character too harshly: “In Euripides’ play, it’s clear that our sympathies are supposed to lie with her even though she does terrible things.” Read Daniel Hathaway’s review here.
Cherubini also ties in to one important moment in the area’s history. On June 3, 1970, Robert Shaw led a community performance of the composer’s Requiem in c at Kent United Church of Christ to commemorate the tragedy of the Kent State shootings.
September 15:
On September 15, 1890, Swiss composer Frank Martin was born in Geneva (he died in the Netherlands in 1974, where he spent much of his career). Martin developed a lean compositional style influenced by Schoenberg’s 12-tone theories, but never abandoned tonality altogether. George Szell programmed his Cello Concerto with Pierre Fournier and The Cleveland Orchestra in October, 1967, two years after it was written. Click here to listen to the live performance.
Austrian organist, conductor, composer, and influential teacher Anton Heiller was born on this date in 1923 in Vienna, where he died in 1979. He was a prolific composer whose works, influenced by Hindemith and Martin (see above), never approached the popularity of his solo performances, which included a series of recitals on the new Fisk organ at Harvard in 1970. Two performances of his organ works include Oberlin alumnus Dexter Kennedy playing his In Festo Corporis Christi in 1971 on the Beckerath organ in Dwight Chapel at Yale, and Simone Gheller playing his Fantasia super Salve Regina on an artist diploma recital on the Fisk organ in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel in 2011.
In 1945, American soprano Jessye Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia. A celebrated opera diva, she sang 85 performances at the Met, including 11 roles in 10 different works. Revisit her artistry in a live performance of Richard Strauss’ Morgen at the 1991 Salisbury Festival inaugural concert on the West Green of England’s Salisbury Cathedral, and — out-of-season but in another cathedral — her 1992 Christmas Concert with the Lyon Opera Orchestra at Notre-Dame in Paris.
Also on this date in 1945, Austrian composer Anton von Webern was accidentally shot to death by an American soldier when he stepped outside his house to light a cigar during the post-war occupation. Webern’s eventually sparse compositional style is contrasted to J.S. Bach’s polyphonic textures in his arrangement of the 6-voice Ricerar from A Musical Offering, performed here by The Cleveland Orchestra led by Christoph von Dohnányi.
