by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: OLO’s Camelot, the flutes of Idle Twittering, and new music ensemble The ____ Experiment
•Announcements: honors for an Oberlin student and a CIM alum
•Almanac: Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, including cantatas that received their U.K. premiere this past weekend, 300 years after being written
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2:00 pm, Ohio Light Opera continues its run of Camelot at Freedlander Theatre in Wooster. Tickets here.
At 7:00 at Cain Park’s Alma Theater, the Local 4 Music Fund presents Idle Twittering, a tribute to flute music through the ages on flutes of all shapes and sizes, featuring George Pope, Jane Berkner, Kyra Kester, and Linda White. It’s free.
Also at 7, Midwest-based ensemble The _____ Experiment (pronounced “The Blank Experiment”) visits Kaiser Gallery, bringing music by composers including David Heinick, Everette Michew, Andrew Reinkemeyer, Adam Kennaugh, and Cara Haxo. Tickets are available here.
More details in our Concert Listings.
HONORS:
Violinist Sarah Ying Ma, a student at Oberlin Conservatory, won second prize at the 2023 Dallas International Violin Competition earlier this month for her performance of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto.
And Nathaniel Heyder (pictured), a 2021 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, has won the inaugural Cabrillo Festival Emerging Black Composers Prize. Heyder will be commissioned to write a new orchestra piece to be premiered by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in 2024, when he will also be the festival’s composer-in-residence.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
French harpsichordist, organist, vocalist, and composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, who began her career as a child prodigy and ended it as one of the most respected musicians of her time in all of France, died on this date in 1729 in Paris.
Born into a musical family, de La Guerre performed for Louis XIV at the age of five, went on to become a court musician in her teens, and drew notice as a composer beginning with her first published collection: the 1687 Pièces de clavessin, a rare example of harpsichord music in France at that time.
De La Guerre broke new ground in several areas. Her 1694 Céphale et Procris made her the first French woman known to have written an opera. Her 1695 set of trio sonatas represented an early example of French experimentation in the Italian genre of the sonata. And her 1707 Sonates pour le violon et pour le clavecin were some of the first accompanied harpsichord works.
Toward the end of her career, she devoted herself to a series of inventive cantatas, including the Cantates Biblique, three of which received their U.K. premiere only this past weekend in performances by feminist opera company Hera. As artistic director Toria Banks writes in The Guardian, in several of these works “the women of the Hebrew Bible tell us their stories, taking on all the roles — fathers, lovers, harassers, soldiers — as they go.”
Listen to the cantata Susanne here, performed by Aisling Kenny (soprano), Sarah Groser (viola da gamba), and Yonit Kosovske (harpsichord and artistic direction) at the Limerick City Gallery of Art in Ireland in 2021.
Other figures with anniversaries on this date include American pianist-composer George Walker (born in 1922 in Washington, D.C.), Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg (born in 1958 in Helsinki), and American composer Jack Gallagher (born in 1947 in New York City).