By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
All three of today’s events will take place in University Circle at 7:30 pm.
Guitarist Tal Hurwitz plays at the Maltz PAC under the banner of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in the premiere of Johannes Maria Staud’s Whereas the Reality Trembles featuring percussionist Christoph Sietzen plus Tchaikovsky’s “Ukrainian” Symphony, and saxophonist Steven Banks joins pianist Xak Bjerken for a recital in Mixon Hall at CIM. Check our Concert Listings for details of these and forthcoming events.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Oberlin has added another MacArthur Foundation award to its impressive list of thirteen previous winners. “Composer and pianist Courtney Bryan (pictured above), a 2004 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory whose works explore the African American experience through a range of musical and sociopolitical influences, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for 2023, one of the nation’s most prestigious and lucrative honors.”
Lucrative indeed. Her award includes an $800,000 stipend. Bryan, who is professor of music at Tulane University, told the New York Times that she “has been brainstorming plans for using the money to support musicians in New Orleans.
“I’m thinking about what to build that is a creative hub and that will give more opportunities for artists to take risks and be paid for it, too,” she said.
Read an Oberlin press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
A death and a birth stand out among the events that occurred on this date in classical music history.
The death: Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas in 1940 in Mexico City. Revueltas was championed by composer Carlos Chavez, who invited him to serve as his assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico until the two had a falling out over a commissioned work. His visit to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, sponsored by a leftist organization, ended with the victory of Francisco Franco, as did his musical career in Mexico not long afterward.
Revueltas, a member of a remarkable artistic family, is probably best known today as the composer of Sensemayá, based on the eponymous Cuban poem by Nicolás Guillén, which uses an Afro-Caribbean chant to evoke the ritual of killing a snake. A close runner-up is his suite La Noche de los Mayas, arranged from a film score. Click here to watch a performance by Semyon Bychkov and Cologne’s WDR Symphony from 2010.
The composer was also known for his sense of humor. Héctor Palencia Alonso cites his cameo appearance as a bar pianist in the film ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! for which Revueltas wrote the score. He’s playing La Cucaracha when shooting breaks out and holds up a sign reading “Please don’t shoot the pianist”.
And the birth: American composer and pianist Eleonor Sandresky in 1957. She describes herself on her website as “piano goddess, composer, inventor of the Wonder Suit, producer of film with live orchestra concerts, founder of the MATA Festival, and pianist with the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1991.”
Wonder Suit? She explains that further.
Working at the forefront of avant-garde concert-as-theater, Sandresky reinvented herself in 1999 as the original Choreographic Pianist with her groundbreaking composition A Sleeper’s Notebook (1999–2003), in which she explores her deep interest in how motion translates to emotion through sound. Out of this work, she invented The Wonder Suit, a remote set of wireless sensors worn and used to trigger sonic events through movement during live performance. These sonic events range from discrete processes to surface manipulations of pitch, and build on the concepts and ideas in her choreographed works. She has created large-scale works for The Suit, including A Space Odyssey (2016), which incorporates found sounds from NASA as a basis for the composition.
Explore a variety of Sandresky’s work in this YouTube playlist.
