by Daniel Hathaway

CELEBRATING MEMORIAL DAY THIS YEAR:

Parades and mass gatherings normally take place on Memorial Day — originally “Decoration Day,” a tribute to those who fell in the American Civil War that was first established in 1868 and grew into a national holiday assigned by Congress in 1968 to the last Monday in May. At a moment when the nation is opening up at various rates of speed and with different levels of confidence, how to mark the occasion?

One way is getting outside, while observing safety protocols, of course. Relatively balmy temperatures encourage us to emerge into fresh air and open spaces. In Northeast Ohio, Lake Erie beckons, and it’s a great time to remind ourselves of the enormous resources we enjoy by living in the Great Lakes region. Click here to watch a brief Nature Conservancy video, Incredible by Any Measure…The Great Lakes, and here to see a live performance of Part I of Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer’s oratorio, Voice of the Lake (the other three acts can be found close by).

On the other hand, some rain is in the weekend forecast, so here are suggestions for indoor watching based on anniversaries that fall on these three days.

Charles Ives captured the special qualities of Decoration Day in the middle movement of his Holidays Symphony. Click here to watch an episode in the San Francisco Symphony’s “Keeping Score” series with Michael Tilson Thomas. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

AT HOME WITH KIDS? A VIDEO FOR YOU:

Today’s 2:00 pm Detroit Symphony Watch Party is an educational program featuring two of the Orchestra’s percussionists in Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and excerpts from Andrew Norman’s Play, which reimagines orchestral music as levels in a video game. Cristian Mačelaru conducts the Norman and percussionists Joseph Becker and Andrés Pichardo-Rosenthal provide the hands for the Reich. Watch here.

ALSO STREAMING TODAY:

On today’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, WCLV 104.9 Ideastream marks Richard Wagner’s birthday with The Ride of the Valkyries plus some Bartók and Beethoven. CIM’s archives yield an interesting arrangement of J.S. Bach’s E-minor Lute Suite for marimba performed by James Leonard. And James Morris and Joan Sutherland star in the MET Opera’s Don Giovanni from a performance way back in 1978. Details here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1874, Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem was first performed at the church of San Marco in Milan, ending a long requiem saga for the composer, who had originally proposed a collaborative work by several Italian composers to honor Gioachino Rossini after his death in 1868. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

CARNEGIE HALL REMEMBERS LYNN HARRELL:

This afternoon’s Live with Carnegie Hall program is a tribute to Lynn Harrell, the celebrated cellist who died unexpectedly at the age of 76 on April 27. The event features Gautier Capuçon, Evelyn De Silva-Maisky, Amanda Forsyth, Zlatomir Fung, Alban Gerhardt, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Yo-Yo Ma, Mischa Maisky, Johannes Moser, Daniel Müller-Schott, Christian Poltéra, Jan Vogler, and Alisa Weilerstein, with pianist Inon Barnatan.

Click here to watch Harrell’s appearance in one of Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. On the broadcast of March 19, 1961, the 16-year-old cellist played the last movement of the Dvořák concerto.

Two years later, in an audition arranged by his godfather Robert Shaw, Harrell played the Dvořák for George Szell. As Donald Rosenberg writes in The Cleveland Orchestra Story, the young cellist didn’t receive a warm reception from the autocratic music director. “He took one look at the robust cellist before his Severance Hall audition and said, ‘I’ve heard so much about you. I’m bound to be disappointed.’” [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1896, Clara Wieck Schumann died in Frankfurt am Main. The pianist, teacher, and wife of Robert Schumann was known principally as a concert pianist, a career she pursued for more than six decades — four of them after Robert’s death in 1856.

She also composed sporadically through most of her life, including two piano concertos (the second unfinished), choral and vocal pieces, and other occasional works. Two chamber works stand out: her Three Romances, op. 22 and the Piano Trio in g, written in 1846 just before she turned 27.

Click here to watch a performance of the Romances by Rebecca Benjamin and Christine Hill in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and here for a performance of the g-minor work by the Atos Trio (Annette von Hehn, violin, Thomas Hoppe, piano, and Stefan Heinemeyer, cello) in a live concert at the Konzerthaus in Berlin. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S FEATURED VIDEO:

While on exile from Severance Hall, Cleveland Orchestra musicians are keeping up their chops at home in interesting ways both musical and technological. Assistant Principal Trombone Shachar Israel has produced a delightful video featuring seven players that passes the prelude from J.S. Bach’s Third Cello Suite off seamlessly from Mark Kosower to Alan Harrell, Max Dimoff, Brian Thornton, Israel himself, Derek Zadinsky, Jonathan Sherwin, and back to Kosower. The Bach suites provide primary practice, warmup, and interpretational material for a variety of instrumentalists, but some of these performances may surprise you. Watch here (and enjoy other episodes of the Orchestra’s Living Room Concert videos nearby).

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

Today’s playlist includes Dvořák, J.S. Bach, and Debussy on WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, an Oberlin Stage Left conversation with four Oberlin Conservatory faculty members about teaching virtually this semester, Wagner’s Lohengrin from the MET Opera, and, a Live from Carnegie Hall episode hosted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s history at the New York venue. Details here. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

MISSING THE ART SONG FESTIVAL:

This would have been an “on” year for the biennial Cleveland Art Song Festival at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and its cancellation has been made more poignant because of the passing earlier this year of its founder, George Vassos (read a remembrance here).

One of the featured artists who would have given master classes and a recital this week is countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. Watch his interview in Episode 43 of Cleveland pianist and host Zsolt Bognár’s Living the Classical Life series. Costanzo describes “how he stumbled into singing and acting, what is unusual and powerful about falsetto singing, and what it feels like to be naked on stage, literally and figuratively.” And catch him in action here in a masterclass last February at the Manhattan School of Music, of which he’s an alumnus.

TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s final concert of the season will be live streamed without audience from West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church tonight. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

MISSING LULU:

Today, May 16, would have seen the first of three Cleveland Orchestra concert performances of Alban Berg’s Lulu, in the two-act version premiered in 1937. Berg’s opera, with soprano Barbara Hannigan as the title character, was to have been the centerpiece of the “Censored: Art and Power” mini-festival featuring pianists Aaron Diehl and Conrad Tao, and soprano Audrey Luna. Those plans were scuttled by the pandemic, but this may be a good moment to revisit Alban Berg. Click here to watch a 1972 Berg documentary produced by BBC 2 with Helene Berg, Pierre Boulez, Willi Reich, Alfred Kalmus, Jascha Horenstein, Jean-Rodolphe Kars, the BBC Symphony, and the Delme String Quartet. Note: the last eight minutes are missing.

THIS WEEKEND ON THE WEB (AND AIRWAVES):

On Saturday, the Berlin Philharmonic Brass Ensemble performs live ($), the MET opera streams Verdi’s Rigoletto, the Cincinnati Symphony replaces its 150th anniversary concert with a physically-distanced live stream, and WCLV rebroadcasts The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus with Jakub Hrůša. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:

Principal Flute Joshua Smith is featured in Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 on today’s 12 Noon Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV104.9 Ideastream, and also in the latest edition of the Orchestra’s podcast series, which is now available for listening. In “The Boy With the Dragonfly Tattoo,” Episode 5 of On a Personal Note, Smith explains how performing Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen left a lasting impression, and why the dragonfly just may be his favorite insect. Listen here.

Also on today’s agenda: Brahms from CIM’s archives with violist Tess Krope and pianist Alicja Basinska, and Lucia de Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland from the MET Opera vault. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:

It’s a busy Thursday. Consult our Concert Listings for details about WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, Silvia Berry’s live noontime fortepiano recital, Oberlin’s Stage Left (subject: Broadway), Claire Chase’s four-hour live new music marathon, an all-Vivaldi Detroit Symphony Watch Party featuring Nicholas McGegan, the MET Opera’s 2008 production of Peter Grimes, and fp Creative’s third Long Distance Live concert.

 

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona either on this date or May 15 in Cremona. Put a marker in your calendar for the release next week of the composer’s Vespers of 1610 in Apollo’s Fire’s “Music For the Soul” series. Part 1 comes out on May 19, Part 2 on May 22 (subscribe to the whole series here.) [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1842, composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan was born in London. As the musical half of the Gilbert & Sullivan team, he joined librettist William Schwenk Gilbert in skewering many elements of British society in fourteen comic operas produced by Sir Richard D’Oyly Carte — many of them at London’s Savoy Theater. As a good Victorian, he also wrote oratorios and church music (most of that forgettable, including the triumphalist hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” and the hyper-sentimental The Lost Chord).

Gilbert and Sullivan got skewered themselves by British comedienne Anna Russell in her sketch, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera,” captured along with other famous parodies during her live performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1984. Watch here, or listen just to that individual sketch here.

Also on today’s date in 1949, British conductor and composer Jane Glover was born in Helmsley, England. [Read more…]