by Nicholas Stevens
Over the centuries, the music we now gather under the umbrella of the “classical” tradition has had many benefactors and venues. While universities have long incubated modern music and civic concert-presenting organizations have sustained Romanticism, religious institutions dominated patronage from the earliest musical notation through the dawn of the 18th century, and houses of worship often served as concert halls.
by Nicholas Stevens
Among all the chronically underrepresented instruments and voice types in the classical tradition, the harp suffers from some of the most persistent pigeonholing. Stereotyped as a shorthand for the dreamy, magical, and aquatic, its repertoire spans more time and covers more aesthetic ground than such associations may imply. In a recent concert on Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert Series, harpist Parker Ramsay presented a packed hall with sounds both expected and surprising. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
How can a faith mourn its greatest loss while still gesturing toward the resurrection that follows — and set it all to music? Last year, Trinity Cathedral’s choristers and instrumentalists presented Arvo Pärt’s Passio on their annual Good Friday concert. A vast, austere retelling of Christ’s Passion, the work exerts an almost grueling gravity. This year, however, Trinity artistic director and organist Todd Wilson presented not a monument, but a colorful mosaic of grief, farewell, and hope in the form of two English Requiem settings. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Over his keys the musing organist, | Beginning doubtfully and far away, | First lets his fingers wander as they list, | And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay: | Then, as the touch of his loved instrument | Gives hopes and fervor, nearer draws his theme, | First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent | Along the wavering vista of his dream.
Thus begins James Russell Lowell’s The Vision of Sir Launfal (1867), a poetic description of an organist improvising at the keyboard — an act of instantaneous musical creation that had all but disappeared except from organ lofts, usually French, by the dawning of the 20th century.
Improvisation is now on the rise again, not only through the fingers of organists. “It’s now infecting other musicians as well,” Todd Wilson said in a recent telephone conversation. “Chamber music groups, orchestras, everybody’s doing it.”
Wilson, who is music director at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, professor of organ at the Cleveland Institute of Music, curator of Severance Hall’s E.M. Skinner organ, and a well-known concert organist, is an enthusiastic improviser whose talents are expressed not only during church services. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Stevens
The story of Jesus of Nazareth’s final hours is necessarily an unpleasant one, concluding hints of optimism aside. But the Passion can be beautiful in its own way, as Trinity Cathedral’s Good Friday Concert demonstrated. Suffering and salvation, grit and grace, horror broken by a spark of hope: under director Todd Wilson on March 30, Trinity’s Choir and Chamber Orchestra incorporated all of these into a program built around Arvo Pärt’s monumental Passio. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
For four decades, Trinity Cathedral has presented an evening concert on Good Friday, often dedicated to a setting of the Passion of Jesus drawn from one of the four Gospels.
On Friday, March 30 at 7:30 pm, music director Todd Wilson will lead the Cathedral Choir, soloists, and members of Trinity Chamber Orchestra in a particularly striking setting of the Passion according to John by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Completed in Austria in 1982, Passio was the culmination of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, and in many ways harks back to the liturgical passion settings of the middle ages.
In one of several near-mystical statements explaining that style of composition, Pärt wrote on his website,
Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers — in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it?
by Mike Telin
Since the BrownBag Concert Series at Trinity Cathedral presented its first concert in January of 1978, it has firmly established itself as an integral part of Cleveland’s vibrant music scene. Today the series hosts over 5,000 guests annually, from newborns to centenarians.
On Wednesday, October 4 at 12:00 noon, Music and Art at Trinity will kick off the 40th anniversary of the free series with a concert featuring the Trinity Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Todd Wilson and a return visit by the dynamic saxophone duo Jake & Sarah. The program includes music by Handel, Quantz, Glazunov, and Koch, as well as the world premiere of Nathan Hall’s Forces of Change, a concerto for solo saxophone and string orchestra.
“It’s a remarkable achievement for any concert series to go on for 40 uninterrupted years, and with such a high degree of success,” Todd Wilson, the Cathedral’s organist and director of music, said during a telephone conversation. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Clavier-Übung III is arguably the greatest collection of organ works of all time. Comprised of twenty-one chorale preludes and four duets, and bookended with a prelude and fugue in E-flat major, the Clavier-Übung III is the final distillation of Baroque organ counterpoint. American organist Jonathan Ryan played Bach’s longest, most complex, and most difficult organ work Tuesday evening, March 21 on Trinity Cathedral’s 1977 Flentrop organ. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Despite its unassuming title, the idea of the Clavier-Übung — a collection of pieces exploring the practice of keyboard music — inspired a number of Baroque composers to some of their best compositional efforts. First among them was Johann Sebastian Bach, whose four-part published collection included the Six Partitas (collected in 1731), the Italian Concerto and French Overture (1735), the German Organ Mass (1739), and the aria with thirty variations we’ve nicknamed the “Goldberg Variations.”
Organist Jonathan Ryan, who pursued his undergraduate studies with Todd Wilson at the Cleveland Institute of Music before moving on to Eastman, will play the German Organ Mass, or Clavier-Übung III, on the Flentrop Organ in Trinity Cathedral on Tuesday, March 21 at 7:30 pm. [Read more…]
by Robert Rollin & Mario Buchanan
This past week, Northeast Ohio hosted two performances of the classic horror film Nosferatu — one in Youngstown’s Stambaugh Auditorium and one in Cleveland’s Severance Hall.
Both were accompanied by organ scores and performed on restored E.M. Skinner organs. [Read more…]