by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
On Friday, Trobár presents “Mothers and Sisters of the Veil,” CityMusic plays at East Mount Zion Baptist Church, CIM features faculty performers in “Ravel at 150,” and CUSP hosts the Tendrils Bassoon Trio.
On Saturday, No Exit Presents Patchwork with Anika Kildegaard, Cleveland Repertory Orchestra plays Chamber Music masterpieces, Trobár repeats Friday’s program at St. James, Lakewood, Canton Symphony features pianist Reed Tetzloff, Firelands Symphony & Chorale perform Beethoven’s 9th in Huron, CityMusic stops in at St. Stanislaus, & The Cleveland Orchestra plays Tchaikovsky with Yuja Wang.
On Sunday, Music from the Western Reserve hosts Les Délices in “The Poet & the Prodigy,” CityMusic performs in Rocky River, and Yuja Wang and The Cleveland Orchestra end the weekend on their home turf.
INTERESTING READ:
In a preview interview about part two of her Martha Redbone Roots Project at Oberlin, the vocalist (pictured above), who was raised in rural Kentucky and New York City, told Stephanie Manning, “ We play gospel music, we play blues, ballads, mountain hollers, we sing poetry from William Blake — we do all kinds of things.” Redbone and pianist Aaron Whitby, joined by violinist Charlie Burnham and bassist Fred Cash, Jr., will bring their cross-disciplinary performance to Oberlin on April 6 as part of the Artist Recital Series. Read the article here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Friday:
We already raised a stein to Johann Sebastian Bach over the weekend, whose birthdate coincided with the arrival of spring, so we’ll be brief and just mention two important performances of ninth symphonies that debuted on this date.
On March 21, 1825, Beethoven’s Ninth received its first London performance, barely a year after it was first heard in Vienna. And in 1839, Schubert’s Ninth was played for the first time in Leipzig a decade after its completion, conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. Robert Schumann had a hand in that debut, having given Mendelssohn a score of the work which Schubert had finished some three years before his death in 1828.
What did the critics think of these two new works?
In “Mixed. A Judgment from London of Beethoven’s Last Symphony.” the correspondent for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote:
The new symphony of Beethoven, composed for and purchased at a liberal price by this society, was now first publicly produced. In our last number we mentioned it, and we see no reason for altering the opinion we there offered. We must, however, correct our statement as to its duration. At a rehearsal, where so many interruptions occur, it is next to impossible to ascertain exactly the length of a piece: we now find this to be precisely one hour and five minutes; a fearful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience, to a severe trial.
In the present symphony we discover no diminution of Beethoven’s creative talent; it exhibits many perfectly new traits, and in its technical formation shews amazing ingenuity and unabated vigour of mind. But with all the merits that it unquestionably possesses, it is at least twice as long as it should be; it repeats itself, and the subjects in consequence become weak by reiteration.
In quitting the present subject, we must express our hope that this new work of the great Beethoven may be put into a produceable form; that the repetitions may be omitted, and the chorus removed altogether; the symphony will then be heard with unmixed pleasure, and the reputation of its author will, if possible, be further augmented.
It’s a good thing that the writer hadn’t yet encountered Schubert No. 9, whose “heavenly length” Schumann celebrated in an essay where he also wrote,
The brilliance and novelty of the instrumentation, the breadth and expanse of the form, the striking changes of mood, the whole new world into which we are transported—all this may be confusing to the listener, like any initial view of the unfamiliar. But there remains a lovely aftertaste, like that which we experience at the conclusion of a play about fairies or magic. There is always the feeling that the composer knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it, and the assurance that the gist will become clearer with time.
Saturday — by Jarrett Hoffman
Before batons, a conductor would keep time for an ensemble by tapping a roll of paper against something, or sometimes beating a lengthy staff into the ground.
Unfortunately, it was the latter method that Jean-Baptiste Lully — Master of the King’s Music under Louis XIV — used in 1687 when leading his own Te Deum to celebrate the king’s recovery from a recent illness. Lully mistakenly struck his own foot, the wound became gangrenous, and as a dancer, he refused amputation. He died two months later.
The incident is captured in a dramatic scene from the 2000 film Le Roi danse. Thanks to the internet, you can zero in on that one clip, whose title on YouTube can only be described as pure poetry: “Jean-Baptiste Lully stabs himself in his foot and dies.”
On an exclusively musical note, watch a performance of the Te Deum by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants here — the unnamed soloists are fantastic, as are the double chorus and orchestra.
And finally, an idea for a particular brand of historical performance. Will some ensemble out there embrace theater to “recreate” that ill-fated 1687 Te Deum? No harm done to any conductor, of course — no one would ever wish for that. The music wouldn’t even have to suffer: it could continue while the conductor — doubling as a good actor — limps offstage. And in this case, for the sake of the concert, why not brighten up history? The conductor could return fully healed in just a moment, do a short dance in honor of Lully, and then climb back onto the podium and finish things out, back from the dead, to uproarious applause.
Sunday:
Three very different organist-composers to honor today: German Kappelmeister Johann Gottfried Walther who died in Weimar on this date in 1748, German Romantic composer Julius Reubke, born on March 23, 1834 in Hausneindorf, and Eugène Gigout, born ten years later in Nancy.
J.S. Bach’s cousin and almost his exact contemporary, Walther authored an important Lexicon, the first German-language encyclopedia of music, as well as some 132 organ works that include both elaborations of chorales and transcriptions of Italian orchestral concertos that were popular in Germany during his era.
His variations on Jesu, meine Freude are among his best. Listen here to a performance by Tom Anschütz on the 17th-century Hoffmann organ in Langenhain (near Frankfurt), rebuilt by Knauf in the 18th century, and by Kutter (ongoing) in 2020.
Walther’s Concerto el Signr. Meck is mislabeled — it’s actually a concerto by Vivaldi, but it remains one of Walther’s most popular reworkings. Hear it played by Dutch artist Jacques van Oortmerssen on the organ at the Smarano Organ Academy in Italy, and then in an arrangement of an arrangement — for two marimbas, played by Marimbazzi, the young Polish percussion duo of Paweł Dyyak and Jakub Kołodziejczyk.
Reubke died at 24, which didn’t give this disciple of Liszt much time to compose, but he left two relatively monumental works to posterity. Listen to his Piano Sonata played by Austrian pianist Til Fellner here, and to his Sonata on the 94th Psalm played by American organist Nathan Laube here (at a Pittsburgh regional convention of the American Guild of Organists).
And two pieces stand out among French organist Eugène Gigout’s works for the instrument. His Toccata in b minor is quintessentially French (Jonathan Moyer plays it here on the organ at Cleveland’s Church of the Covenant), while his Grand Choeur Dialogué lends itself to various call-and-response echo treatments. Jonathan Scott plays it here in its original organ solo format on the Pascal Quorin organ at Évreux Cathedral, in Normandy, France.
And now the fun begins. If you have two players and two organs at your disposal, you can play it like Peter Eilander and Jaap Eilander do at the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. If it’s just you and you have organs in multiple locations, you can arrange the work like Michael Hey did at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Or go all out and add brass and percussion as Michael Murray and the Empire Brass did in their over-the-top Telarc recording at Boston’s Church of the Advent.
