by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 noon, Oberlin second-year student Owen Metz, who is double-majoring in organ performance and mathematics, will play Louis Vierne’s Third Symphony on the Church of the Covenant’s Tuesday Noon Organ Plus series. Attend in person or click here for the live stream.
And tonight at 7:30 on Akron’s Tuesday Musical series in E.J. Thomas Hall, pianist Aaron Diehl (pictured) will play solo piano works by Duke Ellington, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, before joining bassist David Wong and drummer Aaron Kimmel, the other members of his trio, in jazz selections.
Visit our Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
February 13 witnessed the baptism of Spanish composer Fernando Sor in Barcelona in 1778, the final curtain call for German composer Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in 1883, and the birth of American composer George Kleinsinger in 1914.
Sor is well-known to classical guitarists, who have probably improved their playing technique through the composer’s pedagogical works. Watch Jason Vieaux giving a lesson here on Sor’s Etude No. 6 in D, which requires “a spidery left hand.” And listen to Judicaël Perroy, who teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory and has performed in Northeast Ohio, play Sor’s Fantaisie élégiaque, Op. 59.
Wagner’s music is so ubiquitous that it hardly needs an introduction, and probably the less you know about the composer’s personal life, the better. Fans of Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas who would prefer hearing the music without singers have former Cleveland Orchestra music director Lorin Maazel to thank for assembling The Ring Without Words. Reviewing Maazel’s Telarc recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, a Gramophone critic wrote, “…audiophiles who like blazingly spectacular sound and plenty of adrenalin flowing in the music-making, should find this worth trying. Certainly the heavy brass sounds are very tangible.” Listen here.
And George Kleinsinger, born on this date in 1914 in California, was responsible for writing an unforgettable tune for the children’s classic Tubby the Tuba. Paul Tripp wrote the story in 1942 while serving in the Army, and Kleinsinger supplied Tubby’s luminous melody for a recording in 1946 that sold eight million copies. Read the story behind the story in a Library of Congress publication, and sing along here.
