by Daniel Hathaway

MOURNING THE PASSING OF BRUCE EGRE:

News has reached us of the death on Wednesday of Bruce Egre, founder of Cleveland’s Grammy-winning Azica Records and head of the audio recording degree program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, after a nearly two-year battle with cancer. An obituary and tributes will follow. (Photo: Egre with his Azica Records partner Alan Bise in the background.)

NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA VIDEO OUT TODAY:

Inspired by cellist David Alan Harrrell’s “Cleveland Bachs” project, more than a hundred Cleveland Orchestra musicians performed an excerpt from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony in sixteen locations around metropolitan Cleveland this summer. Locations include the steps of Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, Cleveland Botanical Garden, Holden Arboretum, Lake Erie shore, historic League Park, Progressive Field, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland Metroparks’s polo fields, Soldiers and Sailors memorial in Public Square, and President Garfield’s tomb in Lake View Cemetery. A 2018 performance of the Ninth at Severance Hall, led by Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, is used as the soundtrack. Watch the “Beethoven 9 Project” here.

MET OPERA TAKES A PASS ON 2020-2021 SEASON:

After originally planning to re-open its house for a New Year’s gala, New York’s 137-year-old Metropolitan Opera — the largest performing arts institution in the United States — has now cancelled its entire 2020-2021 season, simultaneously releasing an ambitious schedule of performances for 2021-2022. Read the New York Times article here.

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Tune in at 7 tonight to a virtual concert by the Cavani String Quartet live streamed from the Bop Stop at the Music Settlement. Annie Fullard & Catherine Cosbey, violins, Eric Wong, viola, and Kyle Price, cello will offer “Creating Common Threads, a musical tapestry program” featuring the music of Beethoven, Eric Gould and a few special surprises (one involves jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, whose birthday was celebrated yesterday). [Read more…]

by Jarrett Hoffman

KARAS & KERZE ON THE SILVER HALL SERIES:

Filling your appetite for live music today are violinist Ariel Clayton Karas and pianist Marina Kerze, who will perform a program of French, Spanish, and Armenian music tonight at 8 on the Silver Hall Series from the Maltz — streamed, with no audience present.

Local audiences might be familiar with Karas as director of Classical Revolution Cleveland and founder of Opus 216. That ensemble is known for its stylistic versatility — classical, jazz, improvisations, and all kinds of pop, from The Beatles to The Legend of Zelda and Game of Thrones.

Right up their alley was a recent project with vocalist Ashley Nemeh: “Elvis Presley Sessions.” Head to Opus 216’s Facebook page for a fun music-video medley of Jailhouse Rock, Can’t Help Falling In Love, and of course, Hound Dog. (Facebook is also a good resource to look out for Opus 216’s Front Yard Concerts.)

Check out this 2017 Q&A from Cleveland.com to learn more about Karas, including her background in Mesquite, Texas (she was “the orchestra geek” and editor-in-chief of her high school paper, while many of her classmates, she said, were more into squirrel hunting). On a more serious note, she spoke to Ideastream in March about the start of the pandemic and its effect on her work as a freelancer.

Also on the docket today: re-broadcasts from The Cleveland Orchestra (a collage of movements from the symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms) and the Met Opera (Manon Lescaut). Check our Concert Listings for more details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Several big names share anniversaries on September 23. Those who died on this date include Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35) and English composer Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006). On the less grim end of the spectrum, pioneering jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67) shares a birthday with a giant of the flute, Julius Baker (1915-2003), who was born in Cleveland.

Soon after completing his studies at Eastman and then at Curtis, Baker took up post as second flute in The Cleveland Orchestra from 1937-41. Short stints as principal flute with the Pittsburgh and Chicago Symphonies followed before he found a home for eighteen years in that position with the New York Philharmonic.

His powerful legacy extends from the orchestral side of the field to chamber music — he was a founding member of the Bach Aria Group — and pedagogy. He taught at Curtis, Juilliard, and Carnegie Mellon, and his many famous students include The Cleveland Orchestra’s own Joshua Smith and Mary Kay Fink. Baker’s dedication to teaching continued until the week he died at age 87 in 2003. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB TODAY:

The Cleveland Orchestra has released the third podcast in its second “On A Personal Note” series (there will be ten episodes in total). “Pulse” features an interview with Principal Percussionist Marc Damoulakis, who talks about “feeling the rhythm from an early age and what it means to keep time for The Cleveland Orchestra.” Watch here.

Another Cleveland Orchestra principal, flutist Joshua Smith, plays a movement from a Mozart Concerto today on WCLV’s Lunchtime With The Cleveland Orchestra.

If you missed Les Délice’s SalonEra program “Recovering Roots” on Monday evening, the video is still available here.

And Puccini is the topic of the week on the MET Opera’s nightly streams. Does La Fanciulla del West qualify as a “Spaghetti Western?” Deborah Voigt stars in tonight’s rebroadcast of that title from January, 2011.

AND SPEAKING OF OPERA…

The New York Times’ Spain and Portugal correspondent reports that last Sunday’s Teatro Real performance in Madrid was cancelled after spectators spent more than an hour shouting and clapping to protest against what they said were insufficient social distancing measures in the opera house’s mezzanine levels.” Ironically, the opera was Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (“The Masked Ball”). Read about it here.

Meanwhile, in London, The Guardian’s critic bicycled to the Alexandria Palace to witness Europe’s first drive-in opera, the English National Opera’s La Bohéme. “Despite the drolleries of set design and costume, sublimity triumphs. As Mimi lies dead and grief-stricken Rodolfo flees between parked cars, as if towards the garden centre (mate, it’s closed for the night), the production contrives to be deeply moving, despite the fact that the communal pleasure of being in a live audience is almost entirely lacking. A spattering of applause is drowned out by car horns.” Read the review here.

In other news from the opera world, the New York Times reported today that fired Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine was paid $3.5 million in a settlement with the company that had not been previously disclosed.

In a related story, conductor Zubin Mehta, recovering from cancer surgery, told the Wiener Zeitung that he has invited both Levine and Placido Domingo to pursue “bold projects” at the Florentine opera house of which he’s honorary president. “We’ll leave the blacklists to American puritanism.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On September 22, 1989, Russian-American composer Irving Berlin died at the age of 101 in New York City, having contributed some 1,500 songs to the mythical Great American Songbook over his 60-year career. One of the most celebrated was “God Bless America,” indelibly linked to the singer Kate Smith, but sung by Berlin himself on the Ed Sullivan Show on May 5, 1968. For just another taste of Berlin’s classic tunes, here’s a performance of Blue Skies by Cleveland’s TOPS Swing Band from the Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert on November 13, 2013.

Polish-American violinist Isaac Stern died in New York City on this date in 2001 at the age of 81. In addition to his distinguished career as a soloist, Stern organized a campaign to save New York’s Carnegie Hall from developers in the 1960s. The main auditorium is named in his honor.

Stern interviewed Christoph von Dohnányi in 2000 when The Cleveland Orchestra was invited to open the 110th season of the hall. And conductor Michael Stern reflected here on his father’s life in music as part of the centenary celebrations of the violinist’s birth.

Before coming to Cleveland, I taught at Groton School in Massachusetts, where Isaac Stern was a favorite of the second headmaster and his wife. The story goes that they tried on several occasions to set up a concert for the students, but Stern’s management always turned them down. The solution: a rumor would be circulated that Mr. Stern would be “practicing” at a certain hour in the auditorium, and as if by magic, the entire school showed up to listen.

by Jarrett Hoffman

ONLINE TODAY:

Les Délices’ virtual SalonEra series continues tonight at 7:30 with “Recovering Roots,” featuring Cree-Métis baritone Jonathon Adams and violist da gamba Mélisande Corriveau. With music from the Métis Songbook and works by Marais, Purcell, and J.S. Bach, the program is billed as “a personal journey to reconnect to Indigenous roots while recovering a history of cultural exchange and musical migration in late 17th- and 18th-century New France.” It’s free, but a $10 donation is suggested. Click here at start time.

INTERESTING READ:

As Melinda Bargreen wrote in The Seattle Times, “There’s never been an opening night like this one.” The Seattle Symphony began its season on September 19 with a drive-in screening of a concert that had been recorded earlier in the week, with the music channeled into cars through the FM dial. Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

September 21 presents an interesting criss-cross of British and American music history. Let’s start with English organist and composer John Stafford Smith, who died in London on this date in 1836, and who wrote To Anacreon in Heaven.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you yet, hold tight: that official song of the Anacreontic Society, a London-based gentleman’s club of amateur musicians, was later joined with Francis Scott Key’s 1814 poem The Defence of Fort M’Henry to become The Star-Spangled Banner.

There are conflicting accounts about the date To Anacreon in Heaven was composed, but Smith likely wrote it in the 1770s, perhaps ‘73 or ‘76. (If it was 1776, the same year when the Declaration of Independence was issued on July 4, that sure would be a nice and ironic cherry on top for the story of America — if it’s not ironic enough already that our national anthem includes a British melody.)

Taking that story a little bit further, American statesman, author, and composer Francis Hopkinson was born on this day in 1737 (that’s according to the old style of dates, before the shift to the Gregorian calendar in the 1750s). Not only was Hopkinson one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, among his many positions of leadership in the birth of the U.S., but he also contributed to the musical life of 18th-century Philadelphia in several ways.

Hopkinson was a harpsichordist and organist, and composed the earliest surviving American secular piece of music (the song “My Days have been so Wondrous Free”). And of most relevance here, he wrote one of the early parodies of To Anacreon in Heaven — in a way, setting the stage for the original text to be switched out for Key’s poem down the line.

Connecting all of this to Northeast Ohio is a 2014 performance by Quire Cleveland and founder Ross Duffin. As he told us in April of that year, there are no choral arrangements of The Star-Spangled Banner until the mid-19th century. “And to my surprise,” Duffin said, “there are four stanzas in the original.”

As Daniel Hathaway wrote in the preview article, Duffin’s four-part choral arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner draws both on a solo song version with accompaniment and on that original glee, To Anacreon in Heaven. Listen to Quire’s 2014 performance at Historic St. Peter’s Church here on YouTube.

by Daniel Hathaway

OUTSIDE THIS WEEKEND:

The weather is trending autumnal, but plenty of sun will shine on two Sunday al fresco events. Tuesday Musical notes that places are still available for its 1:00 and 3:00 pm performances by the Black Squirrel Winds at Akron’s Historic Barder House, and listeners will have all of University Circle at their disposal to enjoy a 4pm guest carillon concert by Patrick Macoska from the McGaffin Tower.

If indoors is your preference, Apollo’s Fire tells us that there are still a few seats available for its 3pm Baroque Bistro at the Music Box Supper Club (just drinks, no food), and at 4pm, baritone Michael Kelly and guitarist David Leisner will perform Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin in Leisner’s arrangement at Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church while Kevork Mourad creates live images. (You can attend the free event in person — health protocols in effect — or watch a live stream).

And if you missed Friday evening’s live stream from Trinity Cathedral, the video is available for on-demand viewing here. Donations to a COVID-19 relief fund for musicians are welcome.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

On September 19, 1972, French pianist Robert Casadesus died in Paris. Known especially for his interpretations of Mozart’s concertos, he recorded a number of them with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra (sometimes credited as “The Columbia Symphony” for contractual reasons). Listen here to nos. 21 and 24 in recordings remastered in 2018. Beginning in 1975 and for its first ten seasons, the Cleveland International Piano Competition was known as the Casadesus Competition.

In 1957, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius died in Jarvenpaa on September 20 at the age of 91, having composed most of the symphonies and tone poems that made him famous by the mid-1920s. The Cleveland Orchestra has played his works under all of its music directors, but we’ll feature restored live performances of his violin concerto with Christian Ferras in 1965, and of his Second Symphony in Tokyo in 1970, both led by George Szell — the Tokyo performance shortly before he died of cancer.

And French organist and composer Henri Mulet died on September 20, 1967 in Draguignan. Having served at the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre and a number of Parisian churches, in 1935, he burned his manuscripts and moved to Provence where he was organist of Draguignan Cathedral and lived in seclusion in a convent. His organ works are exemplars of the French Romantic style. Click here to watch the flamboyant Diane Bish perform his Carillon Sortie, and here to watch a performance of his Toccata: Tu es Petra from Byzantine Sketches — inspired by the architecture of Sacré-Coeur — played by English organist Gillian Weir.

Posting of this weekend’s Diary was delayed by a day-long internet outage on Spectrum.

by Daniel Hathaway

ABOUT THAT MISSING PICCOLO CONCERTO:

Cleveland Orchestra piccoloist Mary Kay Fink — and her fans — were looking forward to the premiere last April of a concerto commissioned for her from composer Oded Zehavi, an event that was upended by the novel coronavirus. The Orchestra has now released audio of a chamber version of the work performed by the Cleveland Chamber Collective on March 1 at Disciples Christian Church (we reviewed the concert here). The performance is part of a video that includes a conversation about the creative process with Zehavi, Fink, and Cleveland Orchestra Chief Artistic Officer Mark Williams. Watch and listen here.

HAPPENING TODAY:

The third COVID-19 Benefit Concert presented by Music & Art at Trinity Cathedral goes live online in real time at 7 pm. Music by the “Three Bs” — Boulanger, Britten and Brahms involves organist Nicole Keller, countertenor John McElliott, tenor JR Fralick, pianist Todd Wilson, violinist Andrew Sords and pianist Elizabeth DeMio. Hornist Richard King is featured in Strauss’ First Concerto on Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, guest carilloneur Patrick Macoska gives a free lunchtime recital in University Circle, and the MET Opera continues its Bel Canto Favorites Week with Bellini’s I Puritani (featuring Anna Netrebko — who is said to be recovering nicely from COVID-19 in a Russian hospital).

INTERESTING READ:

The Harvard Crimson offers its readers a current undergraduate’s view of how many symphony orchestras are missing opportunities to draw young people into the classical music fold. Read chemistry major Leigh M. Wilson’s “Who Belongs at the Orchestra” here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1818 (or perhaps on September 17), French composer Charles Gounod was born in Paris. Known today principally because of two of his twelve operas (Faust and Romeo et Juliette remain solidly in the repertory), he also wrote much religious music (he thought about becoming a priest). One of his most charming works is the Petite Symphonie for winds, viewable here in a 2017 performance by Camerata Pacifica at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California.

And on September 18, 1943, Austrian cellist and composer David Popper was born in Prague. Watch a slightly fuzzy video of his Requiem for three cellos and piano from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2010 featuring Kathryn Brown, piano, with Matt Allen, Melissa Kraut and Alex Cox, celli. And for cellists, CIM graduate Joshua Roman took on the regimen of recording one of his Etudes every week for 40 weeks, “wherever Joshua and his laptop happen to be.” Here, he takes on Etude No. 4.

by Daniel Hathaway

CYO APPOINTS INTERIM CONDUCTOR:

The Contemporary Youth Orchestra has announced the appointment of Chia-Hsuan Lin as interim music director. Born in Taiwan and trained as a percussionist, she earned a doctorate in conducting at Northwestern and currently serves as associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony. Read the press release here. She fills the position recently vacated by founder Liza Grossman, who led the organization for 25 years.

ROSS DISCUSSES WAGNER BOOK WITH MIDGETTE:

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and Listen to This, has just had his third book published. He’ll discuss Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music in a free online conversation with former Washington Post critic Anne Midgette this evening at 6:00 pm sponsored by the Wagner Society of Washington D.C. Register here (where you can also order the book). “Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.”

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Did we mention Wagner? WCLV includes the Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger as well as Brahms’ First Symphony on today’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra. This afternoon, tune in to a virtual recital from the University of Akron and a convocation recital from Baldwin Wallace. This evening, Bop Stop and the Local 4 Music Fund of the Musicians’ Union present a live stream of a concert by pianist Jackie Warren, bassist Aidan Plank, and drummer Jim Rupp. And the MET Opera continues its 27th week of free streams from its archives with Rossini’s La Cenerentola during its Bel Canto Favorites week. Check the Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Going way back, on this date in 1179, the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen died at the monastery she had founded in Rupertsburg. Known as the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” the medieval polymath wrote a large body of chant, including one of the first morality plays, Ordo Virtutum. Click here to watch a full performance by the Polish women’s choir Flores Rosarum.

On September 17, 1803, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, student of Mozart and Salieri who was entrusted by Mozart’s widow with the unenviable task of completing his teacher’s Requiem, died in Vienna. That’s how we remember Sussmayr today, but in his own era, he was a well-regarded composer who wrote church music and opera, as well as a concerto for Mozart’s favorite clarinetist, Anton Stadler, left unfinished but later completed by Michael Freyhan. Give Sussmayr’s piece a listen here in a performance by Dieter Klökker and the English Chamber Orchestra.

American composer, pedagogue, and pianist Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born on this date in 1884 in Elmira, New York, and died of influenza in New York City during the 1918 pandemic. He became a leading American exponent of impressionism as exemplified in his orchestral works White Peacock, (a 1915 piano work he orchestrated in 1919), The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, (1912, revised in 1916), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). Like Gustav Holst, he wrote music in his spare time while teaching at a private school. Listen to a 2012 performance of Kubla Khan with the Texas Festival Orchestra at the Round Top music Festival, led by Micahel Stern.

On September 17, 1931, RCA Victor made history by introducing the first 33-⅓ rpm long playing record in a demonstration at the Savoy Hotel in New York, years later to be upstaged by Columbia Records, who released an improved version in 1948.

And on this date in 1998, American composer and organist William Albright died unexpectedly at the age of 53 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he had taught at the University of Michigan since 1970. Influenced by his studies with Oliver Messiaen in Paris, Albright contributed to the 20th century canon of organ music with solo works as well as with his introduction to The King of Instruments, played here by Painesville-born organist Tom Trenney and narrated by Oberlin alumnus Michael Barone at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2013.

Albright was also an enthusiastic performer of ragtime, having recorded many pieces by Scott Joplin and others. Here’s one of his own concert rags for the organ, Sweet Sixteenths, played by Frank Hoffmann at the Heiliggeistkirche in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2018.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Thanks to WCLV Ideastream, here’s your lunch crew for today at noon: Franz Welser-Möst, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, and The Cleveland Orchestra. After dinner, how about a live performance via stream? Coming to you from the Maltz at 8, Youngstown State piano professor Caroline Oltmanns plays music by Schubert, Debussy, Janáček, Griffes, Crumb, Chopin, and University of Akron composition professor James Wilding.

Oltmanns performed the same program this summer from her home as part of London’s Piano Week Online Edition. On her website, she shared a sample of the Griffes piece, “The Night Winds” from his Three Tone-Pictures, which is based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. She noted that “to set up the mood perfectly,” she loves to read a short passage of Poe before performing the piece — perhaps that will be the case tonight?

The pianist also recently caught up with Zsolt Bognár, host of Living the Classical Life, on his “Where Are They Now Wednesdays?” series on Instagram. They discuss “playing online and on ground,” staying healthy amidst the pandemic, and talking shop with Martha Argerich.

You can find more details about today’s performances, including the nightly Met Opera stream, in our Concert Listings.

NEWS FROM NO EXIT:

The Cleveland-based new music ensemble will begin its 12th season with a free, virtual concert on Friday, October 2 at 7:00 pm. Mostly made up of solo works, the evening will include music by Adam Roberts, Heitor Villa-Lobos, William Grant Still, and Harald Genzmer, as well as a world premiere written and performed by percussionist Luke Rinderknecht. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

With not a lot going on locally today, let’s mark some anniversaries with tributes by musicians both local and global.

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.

INTERESTING READS:

In a long New Yorker essay, “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music,” Alex Ross considers a thorny question with several dimensions. “Living with history means living with history’s complexities, contradictions, and failings…Attempts to cleanse the canon of disreputable figures end up replicating the great-man theory in a negative register, with arch-villains taking the place of geniuses. Because all art is the product of our grandiose, predatory species, it reveals the worst in our natures as well as the best.”

And in a WQXR article, Philadelphia Inquirer critic David Patrick Stearns muses about a new trend in curating classical recordings. “Fascinating, provocative, and bewildering, such discs subvert expectations — not just with names that wouldn’t normally be heard on the same disc. Instead of going deep into a single composer’s psyche, they go broad, reaching into distant centuries and ethnicities, but not superficially. Sure, there’s some gleeful perversity going on, but there’s also a lot of enterprise and thought that allows these interpretive artists a greater means of creative expression. Maybe they don’t compose the music, but they can compose the program, and do so around ideas that are important to them.” Read “Beyond High Concept, Beyond Algorithms: Classical Recording Artists Go ‘Off the Leash’” here.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB WITH O’BRIEN:

Vocalist Connor Bogart O’Brien joins Carl Topilow and the Cleveland Pops Jazz Ensemble tonight at 8 as part of the Silver Hall Series from the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Seats in the hall will be empty, but you can stream it live for free.

A native of Ashtabula, O’Brien is both a stellar performer and an incredibly fun person to talk to. In an interview with Mike Telin in 2015, O’Brien discussed his musical versatility (ranging from opera to musical theater to rock) and his experience learning an entire show in Mandarin, phonetically.

In 2017, he shared some of his thornier travel stories, and his journey into home renovation. (“My life is now a strange juxtaposition,” he said. “I’m either smashing out drywall at my house on the west side of Cleveland, or dressed in a tuxedo performing onstage for a couple thousand people.”)

And in 2019, O’Brien talked about finally singing his dream role of Tony in West Side Story — after having turned it down multiple times — and the unexpected setting where he proposed to his girlfriend: a ride on a gondola, yes, but in Dallas.

For more from the Pops, you can also check out this recent stream from the ensemble’s pianist, Rock Wehrmann, where Carl Topilow picks up his clarinet — or rather, clarinets.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

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. [Read more…]