by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE TODAY:
This weekend, and for the first time since 1933, the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival will be presented as a series of online events, beginning tonight at 7 with a virtual concert honoring cello professor Regina Mushabac (pictured), who will retire at the end of her 46th year at BW.
At noon, sit in on a master class by multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey via a Zoon webinar from Youngstown State University.
Two broadcasts from New York’s Carnegie Hall include Reiner Moritz’s documentary about Shostakovich (at 3:00 pn) and Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli in “American Voices,” a program of works by Black and Native American composers (at 7:00 pm).
Buffalo Symphony music director JoAnn Falletta leads the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in a 7:00 pm online concert of works by Nathaniel Heyder (a premiere), Debussy, Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer (The Art of Sailing at Dawn) and Stravinsky.
And this evening’s events conclude with opera: a 2017 production of Dvořák’s Rusalka from The MET, and Caroline Shaw’s We Need to Talk from Opera Philadelphia.
Check our Concert Listings for links and connect!
INTERESTING READS:
The Detroit Symphony was uniquely situated to move to an online presence when the pandemic reached our shores a year ago, having made its first foray into webcasting on April 10, 2007 as part of the strategy for renewing itself after a six-month work stoppage. Read about what took place over that decade in the Orchestra’s news article “Precedented Times: 10 years of Webcasting at the DSO.”
Organist Paul Jacobs, featured in the Poulenc Concerto in The Cleveland Orchestra’s In Focus 8, is highlighted this week in a newsletter from the public relations firm of Hemsing and Associates. Follow the links to read Jacobs’ recent Wall Street Journal article about contemporary music for the organ, and to catch up on his activities.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Among its many quirks, the ClevelandClassical.com Diary is a rich source of cultural trivia. Did you know that American silent film icon Charlie Chaplin was actually born in England on this date in 1889, composed most of the music for his own films, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975? (“Sir Charles!”)
Or that American composer Henry (Enrico) Mancini was a native Clevelander, born on this date in 1924 in Little Italy, whose first instrument was the piccolo? Or that he auditioned (successfully) for Juilliard in 1942 with a Beethoven sonata and an improvisation on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day?” Or that he made a cameo appearance in the first season of Frasier as a call-in patient to Dr. Frasier Crane’s radio show, followed by the playing of Moon River?
Tuck those useful factoids away while celebrating Chaplin’s life in this 90-minute documentary and viewing his 1931 film, City Lights, for which The Cleveland Orchestra played Chaplin’s score under the big screen in Severance Hall in March of 2021, William Eddins conducting.
Tunes from Mancini’s scores to such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther are surely still circulating in our ears. The latter is played here by a combo with the composer at the piano, and Swiss organist Guy Bovet was moved to make the theme into a cheeky polyphonic piece in his Fuga sopra un sogetto.
Final tribute of the day: the birth of Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks in Aizpute on this date in 1946. Cleveland Orchestra solo English horn Robert Walters performed his concerto for that expressive instrument with Andrey Boreyko and the Orchestra in February of 2011, and talked about it in a preview. And Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla, who has appeared twice on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series, plays Vasks’ The Sonata of Loneliness here.