by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

Indoors on Saturday, Con Fuoco (Ann Yu, violin, Ryan Louie, cello & April Sun, piano) play Mendelssohn and Schoenfeld at 7 pm at Bop Stop. Outdoors on Sunday, Karina Canellakis (pictured) leads The Cleveland Orchestra in a 7 pm performance at Blossom featuring pianist Behzod Abduraimov and trumpeter Michael Sachs in Shostakovich’s First Concerto plus music by Dvořák and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. And the Akron Symphony Virtuosi perform works by Joplin, Amram, Handy, and Sousa in Akron’s Forest Lodge Park at 7:30 pm with Christopher Wilkins on the podium.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Four births to celebrate and three deaths to mourn — all more or less distinguished figures in the world of classical music.

On August 15, German inventor Johannes Nepomuk Maelzel, who developed the metronome, was born in Regensburg in 1772, African British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor entered the world in London in 1875, and French composer Jacques Ibert first saw the light of day in 1890 in the City of Light, as did Russian inventor Leon Theremin, creator of the pioneering electronic instrument that bears his name, but in St. Petersburg in 1896.

On August 14, 1972 American pianist Oscar Levant, who also worked as a composer, conductor, author, radio game show panelist, television talk show host, comedian and actor, checked out in Beverly Hills. On August 15, Hungarian violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, close associate of the Schumanns and Brahms, crossed the bridge into immortality in Berlin in 1907 at the age of 75, and Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, who first recorded Beethoven’s complete sonatas, bid this world adieu in Morschach, Switzerland in 1951 at 69.

That’s a potpourri of personalities that deserves an equally varied set of listening suggestions.

Here’s Oscar Levant playing Poulenc’s Pastourelle in 1945 (with a bonus: Vladimir Horowitz performing the same composer’s Presto in B-flat in 1947). Couple that with an episode of Levant on the Jack Benny Show in November of 1958 — dated in obvious respects, but showing the pointed wit of a multifaceted American figure who said of himself, “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”

For something on the more exalted side, click here to listen to Artur Schnabel play Brahms’ First Concerto with George Szell and the London Symphony in 1938.

And here’s a 2013 documentary about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s visits to the U.S. in 1904, 1906, and 1910, and his influence on the African American Civil Rights Movement.

Ending on a lighter, but perhaps creepy note, watch a historic video of Leon Theremin  playing one of the first electronic instruments to enter the concert world, or another video of an extraordinary gathering of 273 Theremin players going for a Guinness World Record in Japan in 2013.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS AND UPDATES:

Chagrin Arts’ 7:00 pm al fresco concert by the Callisto Quartet has been moved indoors at the Solon Center for the Arts. (Picture: before last year’s concert on a baseball diamond in Solon).

Keep an eye on weather updates for the Suburban Symphony’s 7:00 pm performance at the Church of the Western Reserve.

Also at 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition broadcasts the sixth and final session of its First Round, and the Oberlin Como Piano Festival features an interview with Dang Thai Son and master class performances.

And in Wooster, Ohio Light Opera’s Musical Magic features musical theater numbers and swing tunes at City Square Steakhouse.

Details in our Concert Listings.

NEWS BRIEFS:

This week’s WKSU Shuffle podcast with Amanda Rabinowitz features sounds and reflections from The Cleveland Orchestra’s first rehearsal since the shutdown, and a preview of the Orchestra’s summer schedule and beyond with ClevelandClassical.com founder and editor Daniel Hathaway. Listen here on Spotify.

Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács reports that his 2011 recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas has sold out and is being released with a new design by Cambria Master Recordings. Click here for more information.

Early Music America is seeking applicants for its 2021-2022 Emerging Professional Leadership Council. Students, performers, researchers and administrators under the age of 35 are invited to apply by August 9. Read the guidelines here.

And the New York Chapter of the American Guild of Organists has named Paul Jacobs as its 2021 International Performer of the Year. “The only organ soloist ever to have won a GRAMMY Award — in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering Livre du Saint-Sacrèment — Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent champion of his instrument both in the United States and around the world.” Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Scottish composer James MacMillan was born on July 16, 1959 in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. I interviewed Chanticleer’s music director Tim Keeler yesterday for a preview of their forthcoming performance on the Tuesday Musical series in Akron on July 27, and one of the works he highlighted was MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn. It figures importantly in a program titled “Awakenings” that celebrates the re-emergence of vocal music as the pandemic loosens its grip on the choral world. “It’s a prayer to beckon the new day, a prayer for light to shine in darkness.” Listen here to the brief but moving piece as performed by Britain’s Apollo 5 at the VOCES8 Foundation in London, the former St. Anne & St. Agnes Church near St. Paul’s Cathedral that was designed by Christopher Wren.

And American musician and composer Stewart Copeland came onto the scene in Alexandria, Virginia on this date in 1959. Best known as the drummer for the British rock group Police, Copeland wrote his first opera on commission from Cleveland Opera. Holy Blood and Crescent Moon received its debut in the State Theater in October of 1989, directed by David Bamberger and conducted by Imre Palló. The New York Times ran John Rockwell’s candid review of the opening performance (read it here). Later, Anne Midgette mentioned the work in a 2013 Washington Post article about rock musicians who undertake writing opera — by now Copland had finished his fourth theater piece and was working on a fifth.

Midgette quotes the composer: “I think when you do something as engrossing as opera,” says Copeland, who approached his first opera commission in 1989 as a kind of a lark, “every time you figure something out, you want to get it better next time.” Watch his 2010 chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart — based on the Edgar Allen Poe story — here.

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES THIS WEEKEND:

Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell guest conducts encore broadcasts of Handel’s Messiah with St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Choral Artists this weekend (previously recorded). Click here to watch the free performances on Saturday at 9 pm and Sunday at 3 pm Cleveland time. And tune in 30 minutes early for a discussion about how Handel’s recently revealed financial connection to the transatlantic slave trade impacts performances of his works today.

Friends of sometime Clevelanders David Acres and Judith (Overcash) Acres can tune in to the annual Christmas concert of their Charleston, S.C. chorus, The King’s Counterpoint, on Sunday at 3:00. The broadcast originates at Old St. Andrew’s Parish Church where Acres is currently director of music.

Locally, this weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra on the Radio from WCLV revisits the audio portion of Nicholas McGegan’s recent concert with the ensemble (Saturday at 8) and Franz Welser-Möst’s account of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Sunday at 4).

The weekend ends a bit portentously with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung from the MET Opera on the eve of the Winter Solstice.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

French composer, organist, and harpsichordist Louis Nicholas Clérambault was born on December 19, 1676 in Paris. Oberlin Baroque performed one of his cantatas, Orphée, as part of Early Music America’s 2017 Young Performers Festival at the Boston Early Music Festival. Watch here.

268 years later, American harpsichordist and conductor William Christie was born near Buffalo, He moved to France to found Les Arts Florissants, becoming one of the principal gurus of French Baroque music of our time. Here’s a performance of Charpentier’s Te Deum that Christie led at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2017.

Among the events cancelled early on because of the pandemic was the March 13 premiere performance of American composer George Frederick Bristow’s Mass in C (1884-1885) by Choral Arts Cleveland. Bristow was born on December 19 of 1825, and was the subject of conductor Brian Bailey’s doctoral dissertation. I had interviewed Bailey for a preview just days before COVID-19 cancellations began flooding in. Hopefully that event — and the preview — will be rescheduled after the all clear is sounded.

And on December 20, 1958, Steven Isserlis, British “cellist, author, musical explorer and general enthusiast,” as he describes himself, was born in London. He studied at Oberlin before launching both a distinguished career and an enchanting website that chronicles his wide-ranging interests. Isserlis last performed locally in February, 2013 with fellow alum Jeremy Denk on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series. Watch him here performing a children’s concert from his living room with violinist Amarins Wierdsma.