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.”
Rarely is there a program title as accurate as Les Délices’ “Winds of Change.” The program embraced the new and different in a variety of ways — referencing both specific events, like the French and Haitian revolutions, and broader ideas, like advocacy for composers of color. Originally presented as an online offering last season, on October 23 the concert proved it was certainly worth hearing live.
Ailurophiles rejoice! There’s a new opera in town, created as many French Baroque titles were back in the day, out of bits and pieces of existing material, and the principal character is a large feline. (It’s actually a princess seeking to be rehumanized through the traditional heroic means of fulfilling a series of impossible challenges or quests.)
For centuries the fairy tale of Puss in Boots, the wily cat who stops at nothing to gain power and wealth for his penniless master, has been a source of inspiration for composers and choreographers.
Parallel revolutions in France and Haiti have inspired the second episode of this season’s online concert series from Les Délices. “Winds of Change,” which went live on November 18 and is available both on subscription and as a single performance, includes late 18th-century music by Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), Karl Bochsa, and Luigi Boccherini, and the premiere of a commissioned piece, Haitian-born composer Sydney Guillaume’s A Journey to Freedom.