by Mike Telin
If you follow the stream of distinguished chamber music ensembles that tour Northeast Ohio each year, you get the feeling that many of them are making the area their second home. However, when the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet made their fifth appearance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series on February 8, their splendid, refined performance made you wish they would come through town more often. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When the excellent Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet plays the last regular season concert of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at Plymouth Church on April 30 at 7:30, they’ll repeat the Pavel Haas Quintet they played here in 2010. The rest of the program will be devoted to music by Jean Françaix (Quintet No. 1), Czech composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster (Quintet in D, op. 95) and three curiosities by Mozart: the three Fantasies for mechanical organ, K. 594, K. 616 and K.608 as arranged by the quintet’s flutist, Michael Hasel, who studied the organ before he took up the flute.
Mankind has been fascinated with producing music by mechanical means since the middle ages, and a fine collection of its most clever inventions can be seen and heard at the Museum Spielklok (Musical Clock Museum) in the Dutch city of Utrecht, ranging from street organs to recording grand pianos to a device that cleverly plays multiple violins that lean into a circulating bow.
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were all persuaded to write music for mechanical organs, Haydn for a real musical clock (thirty-two lovely miniatures), Beethoven (a potboiler, the Battle Symphony) for the “Panharmonium” built by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who invented the metronome. [Read more…]