by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tuesday Noon Organ Plus Concerts at the Church of the Covenant resume today with a recital by organist Oziah Wales. If the weather turns out to be an impediment, you can click here for the live stream.
Tonight at 7:30, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society hosts pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet at Disciples Church for piano quintets by Florence Price and Antonín Dvořák, plus Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade. Come at 6:30 for a pre-concert lecture by Emily Laurance.
For details, visit our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
The New York Times reports today in both its digital and print editions on The Cleveland Orchestra’s performances last weekend at Carnegie Hall. Click here to read Oussama Zahr’s “Critic’s Notebook” entry “The Cleveland Orchestra Says a Lot, but Only Through Music.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
This date in 1894 saw the first performance of Antonin Dvorák’s own arrangement of Stephen Foster’s Old Folks at Home with vocal soloists Sissierette Jones and Harry T. Burleigh at a concert of African American choral music at Madison Square Concert Hall in New York City.Exactly one year later, American composer Edward MacDowell’s Indian Suite was first performed (and the composer left us on this date in 1908 at the age of 47).
The official debut of Edward “Duke” Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige Suite at Carnegie Hall followed a rehearsal performance on this date in 1943 at Rye High School, New York.
January 23, 2003 saw the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Orion by The Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, conducting, at Severance Hall.
January 23 births include American composers John Luther Adams (1953), and Mason Bates (1977), while the necrology includes bass Paul Robeson (1976) and composer Samuel Barber (1981 at age 70).
At the other end of his career, Barber visited Cleveland in 1937 to hear his first symphony premiered by The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, an event that inspired Mike Telin to visit the Cleveland Orchestra Archives to see what critics had to say about the work and its composer. Read his article here.
