By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Church of the Covenant organists take the Tuesday Noon audience under the hood of the Covenant’s organs. “Here’s your chance to finally see up close what is behind those amazing facade pipes. How does it all work? Bring your curiosity, questions, and walking shoes, as Jonathan Moyer and Oziah Wales perform a little “organ surgery!”
And this evening at 7:30 in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, Tuesday Musical Association presents the Akropolis Reed Quintet in works by Ravel & Gershwin, plus “selections from some of the most exciting voices of today.”
For details of these and other events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
As part of The Unconscious, the next program in No Exit’s Surreality series, artists Leila Khoury and Kristen Newell have created a three-dimensional surrealist dreamscape at SPACES that will serve as an exhibit unto itself as well as a performing environment for the combined musicians of No Exit and Zeitgeist. The installation will be open to the public starting on November 10 and will run through December 15.
Film fans will want to mark their calendars for two Blossom Festival screenings next summer to be accompanied by live music played by The Cleveland Orchestra.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones and score by John Williams is scheduled for June 29 and 30.
“The Return of the King,” the final episode in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novels, will be presented on August 2, 3, and 4. The Blossom Festival Chorus and Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus will join the Orchestra for a live performance of Howard Shore’s score.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Three entrances and one exit to remember today.
On this date in 1877, British composer and promoter Henry Balfour Gardiner was born in London. His name pops up these days in Anglican music lists as the composer of the Evening Hymn (Te lucis ante terminum), a dramatic anthem often sung at Choral Evensong services. Listen here to a follow-the-score performance by The Sixteen, directed by Harry Christophers.
But Gardiner should also be remembered as an advocate for the works of such contemporary British musicians as Arnold Bax, Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger, and Roger Quilter, whose music was featured in concerts Gardiner underwrote at London’s Queen’s Hall in 1912-1913. Self-critical, he stopped composing in 1925 and devoted himself to an early ecological project, planting trees on his pig farm in Dorset.
On this date in 1926, the celebrated Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland was born in Sydney. Have a look at The Best of Joan Sutherland Live from the Sydney Opera House, a film produced by her husband-conductor Richard Bonynge.
And on this date in 1949, American composer Steven Stucky entered the scene in Hutchinson, Kansas. During his relatively short career (he died of a brain tumor in Ithaca, New York in 2016), Stucky was affiliated with a number of Orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic (resident composer from 1988–2009), the New York Philharmonic (host of its Hear & Now series from 2005–2009, and the Pittsburgh Symphony (Composer of the Year, 2011–2012).
One of Stucky’s most intriguing projects was The Classical Style, the comic opera on which he collaborated with the pianist Jeremy Denk, but died before its completion (Denk carried the piece forward). Based on Charles Rosen’s book The Classical Style, the work received its first full staging at Aspen in 2015, when Opera News wrote
At times the performance veered close to the sophomoric humor of an end-of-year fraternity or sorority review, but it never arrived there. The opera is hugely entertaining, not least because Steven Stucky is a parodist of genius whose knowledge of the language of classical music over the past 250 years is astoundingly detailed and seemingly infinite. The majority of the score is based on the music of the Big Three, and Stucky was clearly most at ease and enjoying himself as he parodied Mozart.
Today’s date in 1983 saw the departure of French composer Germaine Tailleferre in Paris at the age of 91, the only female member of the Group des Six, which included Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honneger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc.
Watch a performance of Tailleferre’s Petite suite pour orchestra by l’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France led by Mikko Franck.
