Hallelujah Chorus Manuscript (British Library)

Most years at least one of the major Northeast Ohio orchestras – the Cleveland Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, the Akron Symphony Orchesta, or the Canton Symphony – slates a November or December performance of Handel’s beloved oratorio, Messiah. This year (2011), though, none of them has programmed that famous oratorio. Nevertheless, you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to hear it.

Ross Duffin’s chorus, Quire Cleveland, is offering a Messiah performance as part of the Chagrin Valley Chamber Music Concert Series. They’ll sing with conductor Michael Gelfand and the Cleveland Virtuosi. Soloists: Dorota Sobieska, Lara Nie, Daniel Doty, and Brian Keith Johnson. It’s Saturday 3 December, 7:30pm, at Valley Lutheran Church, 87 East Orange Street, Chagrin Falls.

Orrville Community Chorus will present their 68th annual reading of Messiah on 4 December at 7pm. It’ll be performed at Central Christian School, 3970 Kidron Road, Kidron. The chorus and soloists will be accompanied by a 12-member chamber orchestra and piano.

This year’s will be the Cleveland Messiah Chorus‘s 90th performance of Handel’s famed oratorio. Virginia Wieland-Mast will conduct at Grace Lutheran Church, 13001 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights. It’s Sunday, 27 November, 7pm. As with public radio, the admission is free, but they’ll gladly accept your monetary offering.

Various area churches will present programs including excerpts and, in some cases, substantial portions of Messiah.

Some of them even invite you to join in. One such reading will be on 27 November, when Canton’s Christ Presbyterian Church, 530 West Tuscarawas Street, will offer their 3rd annual Messiah singalong. If you’ve sung Messiah, or if you’re a good sight-singer, you can take your score along and add your own voice. If you’d rather just listen, you can discover the heady feeling of immersing yourself completely in Handel’s music.

On 11 December at 5pm, Samuel Gordon will lead First Congregational Church’s Festival Choir, Singers Companye, and a chamber orchestra in Part One (the Nativity sequence) of Handel’s Messiah. First Congregational is located at 292 E Market St, Akron.

If you don’t mind a bit of a hike, the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus will offer Messiah on the 18th of December at 2pm. It’s at Cincinnati Music Hall, 1241 Elm St. The Toledo Symphony‘s reading will be at 8pm on the 3rd and 4th of December, at Peristyle Theater, 2445 Monroe Street. The Dayton Philharmonic‘s is set for Sunday 11 December at 4pm, at Dayton’s Westminster Presbyterian Church.

One of the more intriguing Messiah performances this year is the one being assembled by the Pittsburgh Symphony and Mendelssohn Choir. This dramatization of the work reportedly de-emphasizes the three sections’ religious interpretations – Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection – and re-imagines them as eras in American history – the 1950s, the present, and the years round the turn of the 20th century. PSO music director Manfred Honeck will conduct. As in an opera, soloists Laura Heimes, Lindsay Ammann, William Ferguson, and Philip Cutlip will be costumed on a set stage, and the orchestra will play from the pit. Performances are on 2, 3, and 4 December.

Know of a Messiah performance that I’ve missed? Add it in the comments below!

If you’re a book geek and library lover, you’d be in heaven in an orchestra’s library. It’s scores by the score (and parts too), on shelf after shelf.

The accumulated musical thoughts of the centuries are simultaneously inspiring and sobering. They also have an alluring aroma all their own. It’s as good as (but a bit different from) what you breathe in when you prowl the stacks of a good, well established public library.

Somebody has to take care of all that wisdom. Go to the website of any orchestra, large or small, and check out their list of musicians. Somewhere in there, among the violists and horn players, you’ll find a category for librarians.

Orchestra librarians are the folks who look after all these semibreves, crochets, and quavers (whole notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes).

But their job isn’t just handing parts out before rehearsals begin, and collecting them after the concert. Orchestra librarians have crucial behind-the-scenes roles before rehearsal can even begin. Here’s one example from the San Diego Symphony – complete with "bad attitude."

Matt Haimovitz

Cellist Matt Haimovitz has something of a reputation in the classical music world. He’s a champion of new music, but probably he’s best known for playing in unorthodox places, including clubs where you’d normally expect to hear jazz or alternative music.

But when Haimovitz arrives in Cleveland on 17 May (2011), he’ll perform in a half-dozen area churches – not exactly known as unconventional spaces for classical music – and he’ll be playing works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Anton Arensky.

City Music Cleveland is sponsoring the series of six concerts, and some of their musicians will join Haimovitz and guest violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama. The program comprises Arensky’s second quartet, the Brahms sextet #1, and Beethoven’s opus 20 septet.

Performances are Tuesday 17 May through Sunday 22 May:

• Tue: Fairmount Presbyterian Church, 2757 Fairmount Boulevard, Cleveland Heights
• Wed: Mary Queen of Peace Church, 4423 Pearl Road
• Thu: St Noel Church, 35200 Chardon Road, Willoughby Hills
• Fri: St Ignatius of Antioch, 10205 Lorain Avenue
• Sat: Shrine Church of St Stanislaus Church, 3649 East 65th Street
• Sun: St Mary Church, 320 Middle Avenue, Elyria

The Tuesday through Saturday concerts are at 7:30pm, and the Sunday concert is at 2:30pm. Dinner reservations are available for the Thursday and Saturday concerts, and free child care is available on Tuesday and Thursday.

More information here.

Philadelphia Orchestra (Ryan Donnell / Philadelphia Orch)

Many nonprofit organizations have been working through lean times since the crunch of 2008. Some orchestras have had to program carefully to limit costs for soloists, music licensing, and supplemental personnel. They’ve cancelled tours and recording projects, taken pay cuts, laid off staff. They’ve reduced their number of concerts.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has gone farther. On Saturday they played Mahler’s Fourth just hours after their board had voted to send the orchestra to bankruptcy court. According to board chair Richard Worley, "We’re running low on cash, we’re running a deficit, and we have to put ourselves in a position to attract investment funds to help us."

The decision wasn’t unanimous. Several board members abstained, and all five musicians on the board voted against the resolution. Some of the musicians believe that the move is partly intended to force renegotiation of their contract. Management reportedly has been considering bankruptcy for more than a year, after deciding it could no longer afford to contribute to the musicians’ pension fund.

As board members entered the offices of their law firm Saturday, musicians were waiting for them. They handed the board members leaflets encouraging a "no" vote, as a string quartet played Schubert and Mozart.

The orchestra expects 2011 income of $33m against $46m in operating costs. The orchestra has a $140m endowment, but use of those funds is restricted.

Some observers blame simple mismanagement, but surely the causes are many. Attendance has been off, and in fact there were reportedly quite a few empty seats at Saturday’s concert. Critics have blasted the orchestra’s 9 year old home, the Kimmel Center, as visually rewarding but sonically cold. The orchestra’s board indicated that they’d be reviewing the rental fees for Kimmel as they try to emerge from bankruptcy later this year.

Although some smaller orchestras have had to seek shelter from creditors, to my knowledge, Philadelphia is the first major American orchestra to take this step. "We’re in a state of shock, really," said principal oboist Richard Woodhams. "I think it’s a very, very sad day for culture in the United States and the world."

Library of Congress Packard Campus

Each year, the US Library of Congress adds 25 significant audio recordings to the National Recording Registry, housed in the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia. These recordings can be of almost anything – speech, natural sound, and all kinds of music.

This week (the week of 4 April 2011) the LoC announced their selections for 2011, and they include two significant classical recordings – one of music from the Renaissance, one of music from the 20th century.

In 1545, Pope Marcellus responded to the Protestant Reformation with the Council of Trent. Over a period of 18 years, the Council met for a total of 25 sessions. Their findings were sweeping. Included were serious condemnations of church music.

Briefly, the Council suggested that liturgical music had become so complex that its structure obscured the text, defeating the music’s purpose as a form of teaching and worship.

Legend has it that Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina composed the Pope Marcellus mass in 1562 to demonstrate that sacred works could be both artistically and liturgically satisfying, and thus "saved church music."

Roger Wagner Chorale on a European Tour, 1953

Choral director Roger Wagner founded his chorale in 1947, initially as a group of 12 madrigal singers.

In 1951, the growing Roger Wagner Chorale recorded Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass. In selecting this recording for the National Recording Registry, Librarian of Congress James H Billington cited the Roger Wagner Chorale’s "rhythmic precision and tonal opulence."

The year 1954 brought with it the establishment of a record label dedicated not to maximizing profit, but to expanding the reach of newly composed music. Composers Recordings Inc (CRI), founded by Otto Luening, Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel, devoted its full attention to modern music by American composers.

George Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1929. From 1965 until his retirement in 1995, he taught composition at the University of Pennsylvania. His early years there were some of his most creative ones.

George Crumb (Sabine Matthes)

Crumb was profoundly affected by America’s military activity overseas. In 1970, this inspired Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land), a work for amplified string quartet with added percussion and vocalizations by the musicians. Richard Steinitz has called Black Angels a "strikingly dramatic, surreal allegory of the Vietnam War."

Two years after its composition, the New York String Quartet recorded Black Angels for CRI. This week, the Library of Congress selected this recording for their National Recording Registry.

Other additions this year include Edward Meeker’s Take Me Out to the Ballgame; Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man; a 1955 unauthorized recording of Mort Sahl’s At Sunset, considered the first recording of modern stand-up comedy; Voice of America broadcasts by jazz producer Willis Conover; the parlance of the last Yahi Indian in 1915; the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in 1944; and a recording from 1853 believed to be the first sounds ever captured. The Registry also added performances by Nat "King" Cole, Les Paul, Lydia Mendoza, Blind Willie Johnson, The Sons of the Pioneers, the Boswell Sisters, John Fahey, Steely Dan and De La Soul.

Works for the Registry are nominated by the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, and by members of the public online.

Further Reading and Listening:

Roger Wagner at Wikipedia

The Roger Wagner Chorale’s official website

Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass in the Roger Wagner Chorale’s 1951 recording, from Arkivmusic

George Crumb’s Black Angels at Wikipedia

Black Angels at George Crumb dot net

Black Angels as performed by the New York String Quartet in 1972, from New World Records

Black Angels in a performance by the Kronos Quartet, from Nonesuch and Arkivmusic

Black Angels Part 1 performed by an unknown ensemble at Youtube

Little Rock School Integration, 1957 (Will Counts/Arkansas Democrat)

In 1954, in the landmark case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the US Supreme Court found that separate but equal schools for white and African American children were unconstitutional.

It would be another 22 years before a federal district court decision in the case of Reed v. Rhodes would finally force the desegregation of Cleveland public schools. But by the mid-1960s, voluntary busing programs were in place. Although these programs didn’t always fully implement side-by-side classroom education of black and white students, they were still controversial.

Gerald Sindell today (Agency for Social Media)

In the mid-1960s, twenty-three year old Shaker Heights native Gerald Sindell decided that he wanted to "educate the world so that ignorance, war, and racism would end."

Sindell says, "Throughout my high school life in Cleveland, I had been concerned with what it would take to end racism in the country. The hope was that by integrating the schools, our cities could finally provide equal rights and equal opportunity to all our citizens. I was confident, in 1962, that within a few years racism would be a thing of the past."

Nor were social concerns Sindell’s only interest. In his childhood and youth, he’d been deeply immersed in music. He had seriously studied organ, flute, and piano, and played in a dance band. He’d grown up going to Cleveland Orchestra concerts, following a score as the orchestra played, sitting in a box right next to the Szells’.

But by 1967, Sindell had gravitated toward film as his medium of expression. With the help of his older brother Roger as co-writer and producer, he explored the issue of racial equality in an early independent film, Double-Stop.

Marrying his passions for social justice and music (double-stopping is the process by which a string player sounds more than one note at a time), Sindell built his story round a musical family. His protagonist is a fictional Cleveland Orchestra cellist, Mike Westfall (Jeremiah Sullivan). Westfall and his activist wife Katherine (Mimi Torchin) enroll their young son Pablo (Billy Kurtz; his character is named for the legendary cellist Pablo Casals) in a voluntary busing program.

When Westfall discovers the rough reality of conditions at his son’s new school, he pulls Pablo out, against the wishes of the more idealistic Katherine.

Daniel Domb (Larney Goodkind)

Sindell hired the entire Cleveland Orchestra to appear in his film. Music director George Szell declined to take part, so they were led by assistant conductor Michael Charry.

Some of the film’s music was composed expressly for the purpose by David Davis and James Streem, but the Cleveland Orchestra and chorus performed music from Bach’s Cantata #40. Cellist Daniel Domb, who was married to Sindell’s cousin and would later serve as the Cleveland Orchestra’s acting principal cellist, played the Bach cello suites for the soundtrack. He also modeled for shots of fingers on a cello’s neck.

Scene from Double-Stop

Visually, the film was ambitious and unusual. It was shot in the fall of 1967 in Cleveland, and all the hues – costumes, sets, accessories – were deliberately designed to suggest autumn leaves. Even the cars were painted.

When Double-Stop was chosen for the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, it looked as if Sindell’s movie was on its way to international distribution. But civil unrest cut the festival short, and Sindell’s distributor let him down. After a few more film festival screenings, Double-Stop was largely forgotten. Sindell made a few more films, then moved on to other pursuits. Today he operates a California-based PR firm, the Agency for Social Media.

Finally, over 40 years later – thanks in part to some help from the Cleveland Orchestra – Cleveland is about to see Sindell’s dream on the screen. WKSU’s Mark Urycki has more on the film, and the story of how Double-Stop was rescued from oblivion.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Double-Stop will play at the Cleveland Cinematheque, Aitken Auditorium in the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Gund Building at the corner of East Boulevard and Bellflower Road in University Circle. Screenings are Saturday, 19 February 2011 at 7:25 pm, and Sunday, 20 February 2011 at 8:40 pm.

Further Reading:

Double-Stop at Ohio.com

Double-Stop at the Cleveland Cinematheque

Philippe Quint (Arts Management Group)

During the 2005-2006 season, the Akron Symphony was led by candidates for their music director gig. These auditions were all musically satisfying. You’d expect that, since any finalist in such a selection process is going to have pretty good chops.

The October 2005 concert was given a further boost by the presence of a rising young violin soloist. He played Mozart’s Turkish concerto (#5) with a heady level of musicianship and precision.

This impressive fiddler was Philippe Quint. Since then his career has continued to blossom. In 2009, he recorded the Korngold concerto; the CD hit the Billboard classical top 20 in its first week on the market.

Now it’s taken an intriguing new trajectory. Quint has become an actor – at least for one film.

Downtown Express turns on the tension between the tux-and-tails world of the concert hall and the blue jeans attitude of popular music. Philippe Quint plays Sasha, a Russian violinist on scholarship to Julliard. From the time Sasha was a child, his traditional cellist father has been grooming him for a career on the concert stage.

But Sasha finds himself drawn to the gritty, raucous attitudes and rhythms of New York’s downtown music scene. Then he meets Ramona, a bohemian singer-songwriter. Soon he is a part of her band – and her life.

Afraid of his father’s censure, for a time Sasha tries to live both lives – the concert violinist and the pop fiddler. A crucial recital looms. Which path will he choose?

“I was instantly swept away by this story because it mirrored my life,” says Quint. He was born in Russia and defected to the US as a teenager, to avoid army service in Russia and to study with Juilliard’s Dorothy DeLay.

Many musicians have appeared in films as themselves or as famous virtuosi of the past. However, it’s not at all common for a classical musician to play a fictional character. To prepare for his role, Quint has been studying with producer and acting coach Sondra Lee.

Downtown Express is based on a true story. It was filmed on location in New York last summer (2010). Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay plays Ramona, the street musician. The director is David Grubin and the producer is Michael Hausman (Brokeback Mountain, Gangs of New York, Amadeus).

Does this mean an end to Quint’s concert hall careeer? Not likely, given the success that’s been bringing him. He has a full schedule ahead, including a 17-city US tour this month (February 2011) with the Cape Town (South Africa) Philharmonic; March 2011 appearances with the Wichita Philharmonic and at the Mexico Festival, Mexico City, where he is artistic director; and other performances in coming months with the Pacific Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra. In August 2011 he’ll play the Brahms Double concerto with Alisa Weilerstein in Mexico City, and appear at the Moritzburg Chamber Festival in Germany.

No release schedule for Downtown Express has been announced.

Further reading:

Downtown Express at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)

Philippe Quint at Arts Management Group

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Vivian Goodman)

After last weekend’s Severance Hall concerts, former Cleveland Orchestra Artist-in-Residence Pierre-Laurent Aimard takes Bartok on the road with the orchestra. This Tuesday (25 January 2011) they’ll perform Bartok’s challenging second piano concerto in the auditorium at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Then it’s on to Miami. There, on Friday the 28th, Aimard and the orchestra bid Bartok farewell in favor of the Schumann concerto. Tuesday will find them at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On Wednesday they land in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, home to the Chicago Symphony. Friday it’s Carnegie Hall in New York, though Aimard won’t perform on that concert. The Cleveland Orchestra’s mini-tour wraps up in Newark on the 6th of February. Franz Welser-Möst will conduct all the concerts.

WKSU’s arts reporter Vivian Goodman spoke with Aimard about the Bartok concerto.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a new album titled Bach: A Strange Beauty. She spoke with NPR’s Robert Siegal and told him that she discovers joy where Bach moves away from his orderliness. She tells us what exactly brings her joy in the music and what she hears as she plays.

Online at NPR.org.

The Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesu

What would you do if the tools you use to do your job cost you a half-million dollars?

This is the quandry that working musicians face. Responsive, sweet-toned instruments have never been cheap. Even 20 or 30 years ago, a good midrange historical violin would easily have cost an orchestra player a year or two’s worth of salary.

Since then, prices have soared. In 2006, a Stradivarius violin sold at auction for over US$3.5 million. This year (2010) a Chicago dealer is offering a Guarneri del Gesu once owned by composer Henri Vieuxtemps. The asking price: an eye-popping US$18 million.

Even for soloists of international stature, these instruments are simply out of reach.

The problem is that fine musical instruments are increasingly seen not as vehicles for musical expression, but as investments. They are slipping away from musicians and falling into private investors’ collections.

Thoughtful musicians treasure the living art from history’s great instrument workshops. They play them daily. They become one with these instruments. They share their art with us.

But increasingly, these artists are shut out. Many of those who didn’t or couldn’t buy – maybe I should say "invest" – in the 1980s or before may now never own an historical instrument.

What to do? For many, a modern instrument is the only answer. Fortunately, outstanding instruments are made in 21st century workshops all over the world, including right here in the US. And increasingly, students and those just beginning a career are turning to the world’s low-cost manufacturing center for help. Look inside the instrument, and the words “made in China” are on the label.

WKSU’s arts reporter Vivian Goodman recently spoke with musicians and instrument makers about the situation. Here’s her take on the story.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Further reading:

The Mona Lisa of Violins in The Guardian

A Modern Strad in WKSU Classical

A Nation of Pianos and Pianists in WKSU Classical

Sir Charles Mackerras (Z Chrapek)

Sir Charles Mackerras, noted for his thoughtful, lucid interpretations of Baroque and Classical-era music, died today (15 July 2010). He was 84.

Alan Charles MacLaurin Mackerras was American born – he began life in Schenectady on 17 November 1925 – but was raised in Australia. He studied oboe, piano and composition at New South Wales Conservatory in Sydney. His first gig was as principal oboist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Mackerras emigrated to Britain in 1947, and married the same year.

Though he was at home with every era of music, Mackerras was a pioneer in the early music movement. He wrote, "I was … thinking that the way Handel was performed at that time [1940s] couldn’t be right and why was it necessary to have such big orchestras .. The turning point really came when I … first saw the Boosey & Hawkes miniature scores that came out at the end of the War. And then I saw how different Handel’s own orchestrations were from the way [Hamilton] Harty had rearranged them."

Mackerras was, to my knowledge, the first modern conductor to record Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music with the instrumentation King George had demanded of Handel – no strings, all winds. Mackerras assembled his "band of warlike instruments" in 1959, on the 200th anniversary of Handel’s death. He had to record in the wee hours of the morning – the only time that he could assemble 26 professional oboists all in one place.

Mackerras opened even more eyes and ears in 1965 – still well before the HIP (Historically Informed Performance) movement really took root – when he endeavored to perform Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro as Mozart would have staged it. In the years that followed he took his interpretive ideas to several other opera companies, including the Hamburg, Bavarian, and Vienna State Operas; the Welsh National Opera; San Francisco Opera; and the Met.

As an orchestral conductor, Mackerras was associated with several ensembles, including the Czech Philharmonic (as principal guest conductor, 1997-2003) and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He was named principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 2002.

Mackerras made many highly regarded recordings, including a fine Mozart symphony cycle for Telarc with the Prague Chamber Orchestra. However, he never had a long-term contractual relationship with any label. This left him free to record the projects he chose, with whom he chose, when he chose.

Despite the cancer which had afflicted him for several years, Mackerras maintainted an active schedule. He was to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Mozart’s Idomeneo as part of the Edinburgh International Festival next month (August 2010).

Mackerras was knighted in 1979 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2003. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judy, and a daughter, Catherine. Another daughter, Fiona, died in 2006.

Further reading:

Sir Charles Mackerras Obituary at The Guardian

Listening:

Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Mozart Symphonies (complete): Amazon, Arkiv Music, CD Universe

Sir Charles Mackeras conducts a wind orchestra in Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music (1959): Amazon, Arkiv Music, CD Universe

WKSU receives no financial advantage from your use of any for-profit vendor cited above. Recordings are available from a variety of sources, both local and online. Links are provided solely for your information, and do not signify an endorsement of any kind.

London Street Piano

About a year ago I wrote here, more or less in passing, about London’s street pianos. Thirty-one they were, scattered round public places and provided complete with laminated songbooks.

This spring, they’ll be back – and at the same time, the Play Me I’m Yours project will also cross the ocean and invade New York.

Play Me I’m Yours is an installation, but you might say it’s also random performance art. It’s the creation of artist Luke Jerramo, whose other works include a plant orchestra at Cambridge Botanical Gardens – amplifying the sounds plants make as they take up moisture – and the acoustic wind pavilion Aeolus , soon to be sited on UK hilltops.

New York’s street piano adventure is to be carried out by the New York based artists’ activism group, Sing for Hope. Sixty public pianos will be available for anyone to play in public parks, streets and plazas from 21 June to 5 July (2010).

Further reading:

Street Pianos website

Sing for Hope website

Maria Sensi Sellner (sellner.org)

The Akron Symphony Orchestra has announced the new director of the Akron Symphony Chorus.

Maria Sensi Sellner studied with the noted choral director Robert Page. She holds Carnegie Mellon University graduate-level degrees in conducting and composition. She also has a degree in engineering.

Sellner is a conducting assistant for the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, which performs frequently with the Pittsburgh Symphony. The Mendelssohn Choir’s music director is Betsy Burleigh, who led the Akron Symphony Chorus from 1997 to 2002.

Sellner has also spent 8 seasons as music director of CMU’s All University Orchestra and String Theory Chamber Orchestra, and recently served as assistant conductor for productions of Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Otello with Opera Carolina.

Maria Sensi Sellner replaces Hugh Ferguson Floyd, who is leaving after a two-year tenure to accept a full professorship position as coordinator of choral ensembles at Furman University.

Matthias Pintscher (Cleveland Orchestra)

Next month (June 2010) you’ll have a rare opportunity. You’ll be able to hear one of the world’s most revered and lauded orchestras. Now, that’s not so rare for folks in Northeast Ohio; it’s been our privilege to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for decades. The rarity is that, this time, your ticket to Severance Hall will be free.

On Saturday 5 June 2010, the Cleveland Orchestra plays works of living composers in two evening concerts. At 7pm they’ll perform Susan Botti’s Translucence, originally commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra; and Johannes Maria Staud’s On Contemplative Meteorology. At 9pm they’ll return to the Severance Hall stage for Concertate il suono by Marc-André Dalbavie and Matthias Pintscher’s with lilies white. Pintscher will be on hand and will conduct all the works.

Botti and Dalbavie will also be in town – the former now lives in New York and the latter in Paris. They’ll take part in a 6pm pre-concert discussion about "creation, performance, and the role of new music for orchestras," moderated by CIM composition department head Keith Fitch.

In the hour between the performances, the orchestra will throw a party in Severance Hall’s Grand Foyer and outside on the terrace (if the weather cooperates). Refreshments will be offered for sale. The entertainment during this interlude will be an amplified performance of Workers’ Union, created in 1975 by the Amsterdam-based composer Louis Andriessen for "any loud-sounding group of instruments."

The concert really is free, as is the reception, but you’ll still need tickets. Get them through the orchestra’s website.

Paid parking is available in the orchestra’s garage behind Severance Hall. You may be able to find free parking elsewhere in University Circle, but remember, it can be a bit of a stroll. The orchestra’s parking is a reasonable deal at $10-14, especially if you have health or security concerns.

The concert is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Further Reading:

Louis Andriessen at Wikipedia

Susan Botti’s Website

Marc-André Dalbavie at NPR

Matthias Pintscher, The Radical Conservative at The Guardian

Johannes Maria Staud: Fifteen Questions at tokafi

Listening:

Andriessen’s Workers’ Union at Youtube, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars

Dalbavie’s Concertate il suono, music download at Amazon, performed by Radio France Philharmonic

Alicia de Larrocha

Pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s latest Mozart recording — the 23rd and 24th concertos — landed on my desk Monday. She’s accompanied by the Cleveland Orchestra, continuing a partnership which has lasted well beyond her 2002 – 2007 residency with the orchestra.

Though I never expect to see Mitsuko Uchida at the keyboard of a classical fortepiano, or playing in front of the Academy of Ancient Music, her career trajectory has in some ways paralleled that of the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement. She was winning prizes in the early 1970s, at about the time the (modern) Academy of Ancient Music played its first concerts. Her New York debut was in 1985, the same year that Cleveland’s Early Music America was founded.

I went straight to the second movement of her Mozart 24th, that gorgeous, wistful respite Mozart gave us between the dense, dark outer movements of his c-minor concerto. As I listened to Uchida’s lucid, gentle, and thoroughly unsentimental playing, I opened my computer’s web browser and discovered that another great Mozart interpreter had left this world.

Alicia de Larrocha, who died last Friday (25 September 2009) in Barcelona, her birthplace, came from the generation before Uchida’s. Make no mistake, she brought to the table much of her own generation’s musical sensibility. When she recorded the Beethoven concertos in the mid-1980s, for example, she didn’t play Beethoven’s own cadenzas. She used the late-Romantic-era cadenzas of Carl Reinecke – the ones she grew up playing.

She wasn’t particularly glamorous, and she was rather shy. But by God she could play the piano.           – Herbert Breslin

The world recognizes de Larrocha for pushing Spanish keyboard music into the Classical mainstream. To name only one example, a quick glance at one of the online CD retailers shows nearly 4 dozen current recordings of the Suite Iberia by Isaac Albeniz, a cycle she first recorded in the late 1950s. Would there be half as many choices today, had she not championed the work? If she’d accomplished nothing else, that would have been enough.

She performed and recorded plenty of full-bore romantic music — Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt. But it’s for her Mozart that I remember Alicia de Larrocha best. Well before the HIP movement, she was infusing Mozart (and Haydn and Beethoven) with a luminous delicacy that few other pianists could match.

So what am I leading up to here? That Mitsuko Uchida is heir to a mantle that Alicia de Larrocha wore, one with a badge that says "Mozart Pianist"? Not at all. Both of them would have to share that garment with too many other fine pianists.

But I do think we should remember de Larrocha as part of that generation of musicians who rethought the way we approach early music. She wasn’t a Steven Lubin or a Gustav Leonhardt, of course. That wasn’t her way. But she still helped lay the groundwork for a kind of music making that assigns great importance to discovering and communicating not just the musician’s own interpretation of the music – though that’s vital – but also the composer’s intent.

She will be missed.

So what about that Mozart concerto, the one Mitsuko Uchida has just released? Alicia de Larrocha recorded it too, for RCA, back in 1991, with Colin Davis and the English Chamber Orchestra. Do the two recordings help us draw a line from the older pianist to the younger? Not on your life! All it takes is a few bars of that middle movement to telegraph how differently she and Mitsuko Uchida viewed Mozart and his 24th concerto. Bravo for that – we’re richer for having both. Listen for yourself.

Alicia de Larrocha	Mitsuko Uchida
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.	Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.