by Daniel Hathaway
MANY ONLINE CHOICES (& A FEW IN-PERSON):
Saturday’s packed schedule begins with the 2:00 pm Bach recital by Jason Vieaux and Colin Davin sponsored by the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, and continues with pianist Liam Kaplan’s Oberlin Honors Recital (Bach’s Goldberg Variations), L.A. Opera’s production of a rarity by Joseph Bologne, a conductorless Youngstown Symphony concert in memory of its late conductor, Randall Craig Fleischer, and the latest Oberlin Stage Left episode featuring the Conservatory’s large ensembles.
Sunday is just as busy, including a four-hour Bang on a Can Marathon, a BW Faculty recital by guitarist Bryan Reichert, “The Sunday Boizz” on the Sacred Heart Series from Oberlin, Cleveland Baroque violinist Julie Andrijeski streamed from Atlanta, a CIM composers’ concert, an online cabaret by members of Good Company, Kent keyboard students, an encore performance of Apollo’s Fire’s “Resilience” program on the Music from the Western Reserve series, and a nightcap from the Met Opera — Thomas Adès The Exterminating Angel.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Lots of observances to attract our attention here as well.
Birthdays on Saturday: Mozart’s father Leopold in 1719 in Augsburg, German composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel in what is now Bratislava, Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny in 1805 in Hamburg, American composer Aaron Copland in 1900 in Brooklyn, and American composer and Moog synthesizer Wendy Carlos in 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Departures on Saturday include Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1946 in Argentina), and English composer Richard Addinsell, composer of the Warsaw Concerto (1977 in London).
And on November 15, French organist and composer Michael Delalande was born in Paris in 1657, and German opera composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck and Hungarian-American conductor Fritz Reiner checked out, the former in Vienna in 1787, the latter in New York in 1963.
The musical possibilities are legion, but at this point in the pandemic, some lightness and maybe a touch of the bizarre seems to be in order. So here goes!
Leopold Mozart figured in the first Hoffnung Festival at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1956, when the splendid British hornist Dennis Brain gave a memorable performance of the third movement of an unmemorable piece by Mozart’s father’s on the “Hosepipe” — a length of garden hose with a French horn mouthpiece attached.
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel wrote four large works in 1831, including a cantata to mark the end of a Cholera Epidemic in Berlin. Her Choleramusik, just rediscovered in 1982, was performed by Cappella Clausura in March 2019 at Eliot Church in Newton, Massachusetts. View the program here.
One of the most charming of Aaron Copland’s settings of Old American Songs, “I Bought Me a Cat,” was performed by the BBC Singers with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus — plus others who join in a remote sing-along — conducted by Marin Alsop at the Last Night of the Proms in 2015. Astute listeners will notice that at least one verse has been left out.
In tribute to Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach of 1973, created on the Moog, Carey R. Meltz made his own synthesized version of Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 “with fairly basic instruments reminiscent of her style.”
