By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Holiday concerts begin at 7 with Burning River Brass at St. Wendelin in Tremont and continue at 7:30 with *Apollo’s Fire’s Irish-Appalachian Christmas at St. Raphael, Bay Village, *The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus with Capathia Jenkins at Severance, the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra at the Maltz (pictured), and Summit Choral Society at St. Bernard, Akron. At 8 pm, *Cleveland Chamber Choir brings holiday music from the Iberian Peninsula to Oberlin’s Fairchild Chapel.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these performances, and see our Previews and Reviews for articles about starred events.
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA NEWS BRIEFS:
The Cleveland Orchestra will host its 44th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center on Sunday, January 14, at 7 p.m. The concert is free, but tickets are required and will become available on a first-come, first-served basis beginning on Saturday, January 6 at 10 a.m., through the Severance Ticket Office.
Emceed by journalist Danita Harris and led by the Orchestra’s assistant conductor Daniel Reith, the event will feature The Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus, an all-volunteer community chorus directed by Dr. William Henry Caldwell. The program will include the Cleveland Orchestra debut of violinist Amaryn Olmeda, who won both first prize and the audience choice award at the 24th Annual Sphinx Competition in 2021 at age 12.
Also, the Orchestra has announced that Jukka-Pekka Saraste will step in to lead Schubert’s Symphony No. 6 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 on the February 9, 10, and 11 concerts at Severance Music Center, replacing Herbert Blomstedt, who is being treated after a fall and has been advised by his doctors to cancel his concert engagements until further notice.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
December 15 in music history marks the births and deaths of some famous figures in the jazz and popular music world: Stan Kenton (born in 1911), Fats Waller (died in 1943), and Glen Miller (died in 1944), and the first performances of several notable classical works,
Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony was premiered on December 15, 1893 by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. (“A capacity crowd queued outside the Hall in the pouring rain to get a first listen,” according to an article from the venue.) Click here to listen to a recording by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra.
Ernest Bloch’s Violin Concerto was first performed on this date in 1938 by Dimitri Mitropoulos and The Cleveland Orchestra, with Joseph Szigeti as soloist. Listen here to a live recording made a year after the premiere, featuring Szigeti himself with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg.
And three thousand miles away, on that same day in 1938, Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemayá was receiving its first performance, with the composer leading a pick-up orchestra at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Click here to listen to a recording by that city’s oldest symphonic ensemble, the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM.
Otherwise, December 15 is memorable as the date when the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealed the 18th amendment, which had prohibited the sale, manufacture, and importation of alcoholic beverages. We’ll raise a glass to that during intermission.
