by Daniel Hathaway
Whatever happened to the siblings of famous musicians?
That’s a particularly interesting question in the case of Marianne Mozart, Wolfgang Amadé’s beloved sister, nicknamed Nannerl, who in her youth was highly regarded as a pianist and composer, but whose works have completely disappeared.
On March 22 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Les Délices honored the music of Mozart’s sister in its absence with a fascinating recital of music by women composers from her era performed by fortepianist Mark Edwards and violinist Shelby Yamin.
Edwards is a celebrated harpsichordist and organist on the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory, but this performance marked his public debut as a fortepianist, as well as his inaugural appearance as a duo with Yamin.
In the 1670s, Louis XIV commissioned a series of 39 fountains for the Gardens of Versailles, each modeled on a story from Aesop’s Fables and intended for the education of the king’s young son, the Dauphin.
Navigating dementia — a common, yet devastating part of aging — requires confronting all sorts of complex emotions. People with memory loss, their caregivers, and the medical teams who interact with them all understand this well. So when Les Délices commissioned a piece tackling this difficult topic, they made a special effort to bring the music to those who would resonate with it the most.
“How wretched to forget,” sings the son in A Moment’s Oblivion — a character whose father now struggles to recognize members of his own family. “For all we were forms who we are.”
The Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute faculty concert on Tuesday afternoon, June 20 featured flutist Michael Lynn, harpsichordist Mark Edwards, and gambist Rebecca Reed in recently-discovered works by Marin Marais and Michel de la Barre.
Why is it that people never seem to tire of 18th-century Scottish folk songs? The moment we hear the poems of