by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ENTRIES:
. Walker, Ives, and Furtwängler on today’s “Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music”
. Update on Cliburn gold medalist Yunchan Lim, Youth Wind Symphony joins CSU
. Almanac features Happy Birthday composer & piano sonatas by George Walker on his natal anniversary
ON TODAY:
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm – Radio Broadcast: Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, Eric Charnofsky, host. George Walker’s Five Fancies for clarinet and piano four hands, William Bland’s Sonata No. 4 for guitar and piano, Charles Ives’ Turn Ye, Turn Ye for choir and pipe organ, and Wilhelm Furtwängler’s second symphony. WRUW, Case Western Reserve University. Click here to listen to the internet feed.
To check out live concerts happening this week in Northeast Ohio, see our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Update: Last week, we reported that at the age of 18, South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim won first prize at the 16th Van Cliburn International Competition in Fort Worth with Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. We added that Lim, who takes home a cash prize of $100k, came in second at the Cleveland International Competition for Young Artists in 2018.
We should have noted that Lim also won Third Prize at the 2018 Oberlin Cooper Competition, and split the Audience Prize with another finalist.
Fans of Yunchan Lim can retrace his itinerary at the Cliburn competition in a collection of YouTube videos here, culminating in his performance of the Rachmaninoff with the Fort Worth Symphony led by Marin Alsop. The video has to date been viewed 3,109,300 times.
Cleveland State University’s School of Music will become the new home of the Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony this fall, allowing CSU music students and CYWS members to perform and share opportunities together.
The premier youth wind ensemble in Northeast Ohio, CYWS serves 150 to 200 middle and high school students drawn from more than 50 school districts throughout the region. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1859, American composer, organist and pianist Mildred Hill first saw the light of day. Her signal contribution to Western music was the song Happy Birthday to You, the reworking of a children’s “Good Morning” song with lyrics by her younger sister Patty Smith Hill that first appeared in print in 1912 and has become one of the world’s most recognizable and frequently-sung ditties. It’s also become a favorite tune for improvisations and variations both serious (Teddy Abrahams,’ inspired by Beethoven’s late piano sonatas) and silly (Victor Borge’s, from a 1996 concert in Copenhagen — if your Danish isn’t up to snuff, make sure the supertitles are turned on).
And on June 27, 1922, American composer and pianist George T. Walker was born in Washington, D.C. A Wunderkind who graduated from Oberlin at the age when most of us were receiving our high school diplomas, Walker achieved many more firsts as a Black composer at the Curtis Institute and the Eastman School.
Walker’s five Piano Sonatas span his long career, the first dating from 1953, the fifth from 2003. University of Michigan professor Matthew Bengtson discusses them and plays excerpts in this video. Roman Rabinowitz played the fifth sonata recently at a ChamberFest Cleveland performance, and ChamberFest (and Gilmore) rising star Evren Ozel recorded the work for The Gilmore’s 2020-2021 virtual recital series in Kalamazoo’s Wellspring Theater. Watch the video here.
