by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: Cleveland Trombone Seminar recital featuring Peter Ellefson (pictured)
•Announcements: a South Arts workshop on the role of arts in climate adaptation and migration, a fiddle workshop with Paul Kirk at The Music Settlement, University of Akron’s TubaSummer 2024, and a new face in the band program at U of A
•Almanac: Florence Price
by Daniel Hathaway
Pianist Michelle Cann freely admits she was as unaware as everyone else about the music of Florence Price until a trove of Price’s compositions turned up in the composer’s former summer home in Chicago in 2009.
Since then, Cann has become one of Price’s most enthusiastic advocates, as she made clear to the audience in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on August 11. Her program, part of Piano Cleveland’s PianoDays @CLE, wrapped works by Chopin, Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Margaret Bonds around Price’s Sonata in e and Fantasie Nègre No. 1, also in e minor. I heard the performance through the livestream. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: The Cleveland Orchestra features soprano Latonia Moore (pictured), and the Silver Hall series presents the Case Camerata Chamber Orchestra
•In the Industry: postcard campaigns for arts funding in Cleveland, a recent conversation at the Bop Stop, and a date for the Ohio Arts Professionals Network
•Educational opportunities from The Music Settlement, Piano Cleveland, and Tri-C
•Articles about cultural exchange and politics during wartime
•Our almanac, featuring Margaret Bonds and her partnerships with Florence Price and Langston Hughes
by Daniel Hathaway
Thanks (or no thanks) to the pandemic, Arts Renaissance Tremont will open its new season in mid-winter rather than the fall, and due to other circumstances will move its performances from Pilgrim to St. Wendelin Church. The series will also be under new management: the Cavani Quartet will take over its artistic leadership following the passing of its founder, Christine Haff-Paluck.
On Sunday, February 20 at 4:00 pm, pianist Michelle Cann will join the Cavani in a program of piano quintets by Johannes Brahms and Florence Price. Admission is free, but offerings will be gratefully accepted.
Cann, a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music who is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, is treating her visit as something of a homecoming.
I chatted with her earlier this week on her mobile phone while she was driving from Santa Rosa to San José in California for a recording session with a flutist friend. (Not to worry: Bluetooth was operational.) [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
It was March 20, 2020, when The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst gave their last concert as a complete ensemble before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live performances for more than a year. The Orchestra, with guest conductor Brett Mitchell, returned triumphantly to Blossom Music Center on July 3 and 4 to celebrate Independence Day. I attended on July 4.
by Mike Telin
After a year’s absence, The Cleveland Orchestra will return to the stage of Blossom Music on Saturday, July 3 and Sunday, July 4 at 8:00 pm. Under the direction of Brett Mitchell, the concerts will also mark the first time the full orchestra has performed in front of an in-person audience since March of 2020.
“The program is titled ‘An American Celebration,’ and while I’m certain there have been countless Fourth of July concerts over the decades with the same name, for me, this program feels truly American,”Mitchell said during a telephone conversation. “We’re certainly not going to ignore the holiday, so there will be the pieces that are associated with it — the 1812 Overture and Stars and Stripes Forever — but there was a desire to have the program be reflective of times that we are living in and that we have lived through since the Orchestra and audiences were last together.”
The playlist will also include Leonard Bernstein’s “Overture” to Candide, Mary D. Watkins’ Soul of Remembrance, Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement with pianist Michelle Cann, Adolphus Hailstork’s An American Fanfare, and Aaron Copland’s “Suite” from Appalachian Spring. Tickets are available online. [Read more…]
by Lilyanna D’Amato
In November, 1943, composer Florence Price began a letter to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky with a painful admission: “to begin with, I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”
Acutely aware of the classical tradition’s discriminatory leanings, Price was direct. She desperately needed Koussevitzky to program her compositions. The work of a woman composer is predetermined, she said, “to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility… add to that the incident of race — and I hope you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”
At that point in her career, she had already achieved unprecedented success. The first-prize winner of the 1932 Wanamaker music contest and the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, she was a distinguished member of the Black intelligentsia, fraternizing with the likes of W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She had received national acclaim for her nearly faultless virtuosity, and yet, she never heard back from Koussevitzky. [Read more…]