Baroque in Cleveland

A great concert by the master Ton Koopman with the Cleveland Orchestra... My review from ClevelandClassical.com



http://www.clevelandclassical.com/111811tconov17rev

The Cleveland Orchestra.  Severance Hall, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011. Ton Koopman, guest conductor. Music of J. S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BWV 1046; "Wedding" Cantata, "Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten," BWV 202, with Teresa Wakim, soprano; Sinfonia in B minor from Cantata 209, "Non sa che sia dolore," BWV 209; Sinfonia in D minor from Cantata 42, "Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats," BWV 42; Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068.

 

Nicholas Jones

While Bach is primarily known as a composer of music for the church, there is more to that multi-faceted genius. Thursday evening, under the spirited direction of guest conductor and baroque specialist Ton Koopman, the Cleveland Orchestra gave us the secular Bach, a playful and inventive composer free from the restraints of the weekly church service, writing music by turns courtly, sensual, introspective, and exuberant.

A snapshot of music in New York

A weekend is, it goes without saying, a blip in the musical spectacle of New York City. But sometimes a blip is better than nothing. It signaled to me the excitement -- call it frenzy? -- of that stream of classical events that can be heard there. How do the natives figure out where to choose?

Listening to Handel and Vivaldi

Just wrote a review on Cleveland Classical of a concert by Apollo's Fire, Cleveland's baroque orchestra. It featured the wonderful singing of male soprano/countertenor Michael Maniaci. See a sample of that singing! 

Jenny Lin

What a fabulous recital I just heard at Lorain County Community College! Or, to be honest, the first half of the recital, as I had to leave to get some work done. Jenny Lin, a very charismatic pianist, played three "triplets," as she called them: interveavings of works by Shostakovich and Bach, selections from those composers' Preludes and Fugues.

It turns out that Shostakovich, inspired by a recital in Germany of Bach, went home to dash off 24 Preludes and Fugues a la Bach, apparently not in the chromatic order that Bach did them, but obviously derived from Bach's manic sense of cyclicity.

She, Jenny, obviously loves these works, and was trying to get us to see the 1950s Soviet writer in the same framework as the great 1730s (?) German. If Bach invented modern music, as a friend of mine asserted this morning, this Shostakovich was a worthy consequence to his invention.

The Shostakovich pieces were warm, funny, biting, passionate by turns. The great revelation for me, she saved to the last, the Shostakovich Number 24 (the last in his cycle, apparently), a passionate prelude followed by an incredible fugue with a disarmingly simple subject of open fifths, almost childlike in its repetitions, but then... amazing in its potential for development. It seemed to me as if the fugue went through all the keys; as if saying farewell to the project of the Preludes and Fugues, which, at least in Bach, set out deliberately to do just that, go through all the keys. Here's a video of a pianist named David Jalbert playing it. You'll notice that the same theme that in the Prelude is heroic becomes the simple fugue theme.