by Nicholas Stevens
Strange things happen to art amid mass violence. During World War II, Beethoven’s Ninth resounded at festivals in honor of mass murderers, who were proud to count the composer as a compatriot. Yet elsewhere, Allied soldiers were using the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth — three short notes, one long: Morse code for the letter V — to signify victory. So it was that, in 1943, the Nazis forced the musicians of the Theresienstadt concentration camp to perform Verdi’s Requiem for an audience of human rights inspectors, before shipping them off to gas chambers at Auschwitz. So it is that last week, CityMusic Cleveland honored the memory of those musicians and all of those lost in the Holocaust, with a performance of that very piece. [Read more…]
Last Saturday night the Youngtown Symphony opened its season with an excellent concert of Romantic audience favorites. The evening’s highlight was a scintillating performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43 by the gifted Japanese pianist Tomoki Sakata. Sakata was a finalist and the youngest competitor at the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas.