by Daniel Hathaway
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS:
On Thursday at 7 pm, No Exit & Zeitgeist’s “An Evocation of Our Current Time” will premiere at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, and will travel on Friday to SPACES and on Saturday to Heights Arts.
On Thursday at 7:30, The Cleveland Orchestra will play Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, which have been subtitled “the Jupiter” and “The Year 1905” respectively. Read the program notes here to find out why. The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday.
On Saturday at 1 pm, the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series will feature Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani in a number of local theaters, conducted by Marco Armiliato, with Lisette Oropesa, soprano, Lawrence Brownlee, tenor, Artur Ruciński, baritone, and Christian Van Horn, bass-baritone.
On Sunday at 4 pm, organist Kevin Jones will continue the long-standing January tradition of a complete performance of Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité on the Holtkamp organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, in Cleveland Heights.
The weekend will conclude on Sunday at 7 pm in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center with another long-standing tradition: The Cleveland Orchestra’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Concert. This edition will be led by Taichi Fukumura, and features Latonia Moore, soprano, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Chorus.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S FEATURED ARTICLES:
Terence Blanchard to curate The Cleveland Orchestra’s fourth annual Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival May 15–24 (Orchestra Press Release)
Piano Cleveland to present Concerts Around Town (Web Page)
Semyon Bychkov Appointed Music Director of Paris National Opera (The Violin Channel)
Béla Fleck cancels Kennedy Center shows (NY Times)
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
On January 8, 1713, Italian composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli died in Rome at the age of 59 and was honored with burial in the ancient Pantheon. His violin sonatas and concertos helped codify those musical forms and were admired, imitated, and arranged by such composers as Bach and Handel.
On January 8, 1957, American composer David Lang was born in Los Angeles. He describes himself in his biography as “Passionate, prolific, and complicated, David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention; he is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.” One of the founders of Bang on a Can and the author of Little Match Girl Passion, Lang conceived Lifespan, an installation that involved members of The Crossing blowing on a suspended 4 billion-year-old rock at the Cleveland Museum of Art in January, 2017. Watch here.
And on January 8, 1998, British composer Sir Michael Tippett died in London at the age of 93. Regarded along with Benjamin Britten as one of the preeminent British composers of the 20th century, and like Britten, a pacifist, Tippett is remembered today for his operas and for the oratorio A Child of Our Time, which he began composing in 1939. The subject was inspired by the murder of a teenaged Jewish refugee in Paris that set off the events of Kristallnacht in November, 1938. Basing its structure on Handel’s Messiah, the oratorio used African American spirituals as commentary in the same way that J.S. Bach used Lutheran chorales in the Passions.
Simon Rattle talked about the work with Andrew Sachs in this interview. Watch a complete 2011 performance by the Concertkoor Haarlem and the Promenade Orkkest here.
The chorales are frequently performed by themselves, as they were by Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Chorus and Orchestra on the Last Night of the Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall in September, 2011. Slatkin chose to program them in place of the usual end-of-Proms revelry due to the 9/11 attacks that happened only days before. Watch here.
