Be sure to come early for this week’s service! Special music before and during our service this Sunday, October 29th.
Be sure to come to church early this Sunday to enjoy special music beginning at 10:00 a.m.! Guest musicians Ann Yu (violin), Kiarra Saito-Beckman (violin), Anna Kuo (cello), and Mikhail Grazhdanov (harpsichord) will be joined by UUCC Music Director Mike Carney and our Chancel Choir. Music of Georg Frideric Handel, Arcangelo Corelli, Arvo Part, Antonio Vivaldi, and Johann Sebastian Bach will be featured before and during the worship service. Don’t miss out on this wonderful musical treat!
Music Notes – Sunday, October 29th:
This Sunday’s musicians are Ann Yu (violin), Kiarra Saito-Beckman (violin), Anna Kuo (cello), Mikhail Grazhdanov (harpsichord), UUCC Music Director Mike Carney, and our Chancel Choir
About our guest musicians:
Praised for her “full-bodied, rich and warm tone” (Cleveland.com), violinist Ann Yu is an accomplished soloist, chamber, orchestral, and session musician and educator whose versatility, excellence in artistry, and collaborative spirit has secured her as one of the most coveted musicians throughout Northeast Ohio’s artistic communities. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music studying with Jaime Laredo, Jan Sloman, and William Preucil, where she was the 1st prize winner of the 26th Annual Darius Milhaud Competition and Concerto Competition and the recipient of the Fortnightly Musical Award. She has soloed with the Cleveland, CIM, and National Repertory Orchestras and attended prestigious programs such as Thy Masterclass, Kneisel Hall, Perlman Music Program, New York String Orchestra Seminar, and the Credo Festival, where she now teaches. Locally, you can find her performing at the Candlelight Concerts, Severance Hall with the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, and teaching through the Cleveland Orchestra’s Crescendo Program at the Cleveland and Dike School of the Arts. Ann finds great joy in exploring other genres and styles of playing the violin. Currently she studies Baroque violin with Julie Andrijeski, Old Time fiddle with Paul Kirk, performs with blues band Crazy Marvin and the Blues Express at the Treelawn, and jams with local bluegrass and old time musicians. She is also a gifted violist. Outside of music, she enjoys dancing lindy hop and blues, training in krav maga, and volunteering for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
Kiarra Saito-Beckman is a Vietnamese-American violinist from Cleveland. She received her Graduate Artist Diploma, Graduate Diploma in Performance, and Master of Music degree from McGill University, and her Bachelor of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying with Jaime Laredo and Jan Mark Sloman.
Kiarra has won numerous awards and competitions. Her accolades include being a quarterfinalist in the 2019 Sendai International Music Competition, a prize-winner in the 2017 Thomas & Evon Cooper International Violin Competition, and a semifinalist in the 2016 Stulberg International String Competition. Nationally, she placed first in the 2015 Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Senior Strings Competition, and was named the PepsiCo National Young Artist of the Year as the first-prize winner of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra’s National Young Artist Competition in South Carolina in 2014.
Kiarra has appeared as a guest soloist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Las Colinas Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Arlington, Garland Symphony, Coeur d’Alene Symphony Orchestra, Central Oregon Symphony, and an orchestra composed of members of the Oregon Symphony and the Oregon Ballet Theater Orchestra. Kiarra has been a featured guest on NPR’s From the Top, TedX, Oregon Public Broadcasting, as well as a number of local and regional radio stations.
In addition to performing standard repertoire, Kiarra’s interests lie in championing music of female and contemporary composers, as well as exploring other genres of music.
Mike Grazhdanov is a student at Case Western Reserve University pursuing a D.M.A. in Historical Performance Practice (harpsichord, fortepiano, organ). He holds a specialist degree in piano performance from Moscow Conservatory and Master of Music degree in piano performance from Cleveland Institute of Music.
Anna Kuo is an award-winning cellist and versatile artist who has performed across the nation. She has appeared as soloist, chamber, and orchestra musician in venues across the world, including Carnegie Hall and Severance Hall. She has performed on various concert series including Schneider Concerts in New York and is a prize winner in the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. Passionate about chamber music and chamber orchestras, Anna has served as principal cellist of CityMusic Cleveland and The Ballet West orchestra, and performs regularly with Opus 216 among other ensembles across Northeast Ohio. She earned her Master’s degree at The Cleveland Institute of Music studying with Grammy nominated cellist Sharon Robinson, and her undergraduate degree studying with Merry Peckham.
Pre-Service Music (beginning at 10 AM):
Trio Sonata 1 in A Major, HWV 396, Op. 5 No. 1 (Handel)
Trio Sonata in D Major, Op. 3 No. 2 (Corelli)
This pair of movements by Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) are both considered Trio Sonatas, a genre especially popular during the Baroque Period. This instrumental genre originated as an adaptation of the three-part texture commonly used in Italian Renaissance vocal music. Trio Sonatas feature two melody instruments over a lower part known as the continuo, which provides rhythmic and harmonic support for the upper lines and is typically played by a cello or bass along with a keyboard instrument such as harpsichord or organ.
Opening Hymn: #1001 Breaths – Barnwell/Diop
“Breaths” (#1001 in Singing the Journey) is adapted from the poem of the same title by Senegalese poet Birago Diop. The music was written by Ysaye Barnwell (b. 1946), a UU songwriter, activist and former member of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In Barnwell’s own words: “Hearing this poem…affirmed my world view which includes and reveres my ancestors. When I heard the poem a second time years later, it began to sing itself to me, and I am glad that I have been able to share what I heard with you. (from uua.org)
Centering Music: Trio Sonata 1 in A Major, HWV 396, Op. 5 No. 1 – Handel
Sunday’s Centering Music will be another excerpt from the Trio Sonata No. 1 in A Major by German-English composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). Without question, Handel was one of the most important and influential figures of the Baroque Era, and although he is most famously known today for his dramatic large vocal-instrumental works such as Messiah, Handel also wrote a wide variety of smaller-scale vocal and instrumental compositions throughout his long career, including several chamber music works. Handel’s seven Trio Sonatas (Opus 5) were first published in London in 1739.
Offertory music: Trio Sonata in D minor, Op. 1 No. 8, RV 64, 1. Preludio (Largo) – Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was one of the most important composers of the Baroque period. A native of Venice, Vivaldi’s career followed a different path than that of most composers. He began studying to become a Catholic priest at the age of 15 and was ordained a few years later. However, a chronic respiratory condition made it nearly impossible for Vivaldi to deliver Mass, so he began serving in a Venetian orphanage as a music educator – in fact, most of his early compositions were written for the young residents of the orphanage. The same respiratory condition had prevented Vivaldi from playing wind instruments, so his musical training was focused on string and keyboard instruments, and by the age of 25, Vivaldi had become well-respected as a virtuoso violinist. Due to his red hair and original career in the clergy, Vivaldi became known as “Il Prete Rosso” (“The Red Priest”). His most famous and influential works were instrumental concerti, and Vivaldi is considered to be the primary architect of the Baroque concerto style and had a profound influence on the instrumental works of Bach, Handel, and many other composers of the era. Vivaldi’s collection of 12 Trio Sonatas was his first published work, and were highly influenced by the work of Arcangelo Corelli, who we heard from in today’s pre-service music.
Special Music: Spiegel im Spiegel – Pärt
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is an Estonian composer who has written symphonies and other orchestral works, chamber music, and choral/vocal works. Pärt’s compositional style has evolved over time, shifting from neoclassicism to serialism to minimalism, but his music is unique, experimental, and widely influential. Composed in 1978, “Spiegel im Spiegel” (literally meaning mirror within a mirror) is one of Pärt’s best-known chamber works. Although originally written for piano and violin, it has since been transcribed and arranged for numerous other instruments, including versions for cello, oboe, double bass, and flugelhorn (to name a few). “Spiegel im Spiegel” is considered a minimalist composition, but also incorporates tintinnabulation (bell tones), a compositional technique pioneered by Pärt, which utilizes broken triads accompanied by a gently moving diatonic melody from the same key center. In an interview with the French magazine L’Actu, Pärt described his technique in this way: “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? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away . . . The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.” In this Sunday’s service, “Spiegel im Spiegel” will be played by Ann Yu on violin and Mikhail Grazhdanov on piano.
Closing Hymn: #336 All My Memories of Love – Plainsong melody/Belletini
#336 in our Singing the Living Tradition hymnbook, “All My Memories of Love” is a setting of “Adoro te devote” (Humbly I Adore Thee), a 13th Century plainsong melody that is often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to St. Thomas of Aquinas. The lyrics in our hymnal were written by Rev. Mark Belletini, who served for many years as senior minister at the First Unitarian Church of Columbus, Ohio.
Postlude: “Freue dich, erlöste Schaar” from Cantata No. 30 (Bach)
Freue dich, erlöste Schar (Rejoice, redeemed flock), BWV 30, is a sacred cantata by Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Bach wrote the cantata in Leipzig, Germany in 1738, borrowing musical elements from Angenehmes Wiederau, a secular cantata he had composed during the previous year. The full cantata is approximately 35 minutes in length and includes an opening chorus followed by recitative-aria pairings featuring bass, alto, and soprano soloists, accompanied by a chamber orchestra. An unaccompanied chorale divides the work into two parts, and then the opening chorus is reprised to conclude the work. In this Sunday’s service, you’ll hear only the opening chorus, also titled “Freue dich, erlöste Schar”, sung by our Chancel Choir and accompanied by our special guest musicians. Here is the German text and English translation of Bach’s triumphant chorus:
Freue dich, erlöste Schar,
Freue dich in Sions Hütten.
Dein Gedeihen hat itzund
Einen rechten festen Grund,
Dich mit Wohl zu überschütten.
Rejoice, redeemed flock,
Rejoice in the tabernacle of Zion.
Your Annointed One has now
a firm and proper ground
on which to protect you with goodness.
-Mike Carney, UUCC Music Director