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Cleveland Museum of Art to honor organist Karel Paukert on his 80th Birthday

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by Daniel Hathaway

PAUKERT-KarelOn Sunday, January 25, the Cleveland Museum of Art will present organist Karel Paukert, former and long-time curator of musical arts at the museum, in a special recital in Gartner Auditorium. To mark his 80th birthday Paukert will revisit a work that he has played “at least annually” for decades, Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur (“The Birth of Christ”).

In December of 2008, shortly after the launch of ClevelandClassical.com, we interviewed Karel Paukert about his forthcoming January performance of the Messiaen work at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. That performance observed the centenary of the famous French composer’s birth. Paukert’s reflections on La Nativité and on his own career, reprinted below, remain highly relevant six years later.

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Born in Prague, Karel Paukert came to the US by way of Reykjavík and Belgium. He taught and played organ in St. Louis and Evanston, IL before becoming a US citizen in 1972 and curator of musical arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1974. During his thirty years in that post he played more than 800 organ recitals, administered two highly respected concert series, founded the Aki Festival of new music and arranged for the personal appearance of Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in Cleveland in 1978. [Read more…]

CD Review: Messiaen: Harawi — Jacob Greenberg & Tony Arnold

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Harawi-CDOlivier Messiaen is unique in music history. He is perhaps the most intensely religious composer since J.S. Bach, despite living in the 20th century, when most artists and intellectuals abandoned faith. Yet his belief was anything but orthodox: sensual love and sacred mystery mix on a cosmic scale.

He was synesthetic, so that he heard chords as colors. And he originated total serialism, where pitches and rhythms are standardized, so that a specific note will always have the same articulation and duration in a piece. Serialism became the predominant compositional method during the 1950s. It is some of the most difficult and maligned music existent, but Messiaen’s use of it is comprehensible and attractive.

The solo piano piece Cantéyodjayâ (1949), with which pianist Jacob Greenberg opens his and soprano Tony Arnold’s excellent new CD of the song cycle Harawi (New Focus Recordings), is a case in point. [Read more…]

Preview: Beethoven’s Mass in C at Severance Hall — a conversation with Cleveland Orchestra Choruses director Robert Porco

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by Mike Telin

PORCO-Robert“Beethoven’s Mass in C is a wonderful piece and under-performed in my opinion — at least in this country,” Cleveland Orchestra Director of Choruses Robert Porco told us by telephone. “And I don’t know exactly why that is. People like to do the Missa Solemnis, which is an entirely different kind of piece and was written some fifteen years later.”

On Thursday, October 31 and Saturday, November 2 in Severance Hall, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in performances of Beethoven’s Mass in C and Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine. Also included on the program is Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue.

The Mass in C was commissioned by Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II. “He was the same person for whom Haydn wrote his wonderful masses. I only mention this because the late Haydn masses are not performed that often either.”

According to history, Esterházy did not like the work — which caused Beethoven to leave abruptly. “Esterházy wrote letters about how much the piece embarrassed him. People have asked me why he thought that and I can’t really answer that either except that he was very accustomed to hearing what Haydn had written.” In his The Life of Beethoven, (1998) musicologist David Wyn Jones recounts, “Nikolaus later wrote to Countess Henriette Zielinska, ‘Beethoven’s music is unbearably ridiculous and detestable; I am not convinced it can ever be performed properly. I am angry and ashamed.'” [Read more…]

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