by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At Noon, organist Natalie Mealey plays music by Storace, J.S. Bach, Buxtehude & Frescobaldi at the Church of the Covenant, and at 5:30, Jim Riggs and Tyler Young offer a 50-minute rush hour program of music for organ and saxophone at Fairmount Presbyterian Church.
Tonight at 7:30, Cleveland Chamber Music Society presents cellist Steven Isserlis & pianist Connie Shih at Disciples Church, and the CIM Orchestra pays a visit to Severance Music Center with guest conductor Leonard Slatkin.
Click here to visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page for more information.
INTERESTING READS:
British Cellist Steven Isserlis returns to Northeast Ohio tonight, where he studied with Richard Kapuscinski at the Oberlin Conservatory from 1976 to 1978, to play a recital on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series with pianist Connie Shih.
This is a good time to have a look at the multi-talented musician’s biography and involvements, richly detailed on his website. Among them, his writings. Click on “Steven’s Books” to read about Why Handel Waggled His Wig, the sequel to Why Beethoven Threw the Stew.
And check out his humorous “About the Author” note on the same page:
Interestingly, Steven Isserlis was born knowing the cures to all known diseases, and the answers to all the major scientific problems that have perplexed mankind for the past few thousand years. Unfortunately, however, he forgot all of this vital information just before he learnt to speak, so it was rather wasted.
Instead, at the age of six he decided to learn to play the cello; and has spent the years since trying to do so.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Some big names to mention for February 27: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, born either on the 27th or the 25th in 1873 in Naples, Russian composer Alexander Borodin, who died during a ballroom concert in St. Petersburg in 1887, German soprano Lotte Lehmann, born in Perleberg in 1883, and Texas pianist Van Cliburn, who lost his struggle with bone cancer in Fort Worth in 2013 at the age of 78.
Cliburn helped take the chill off the Cold War in 1958 when he won the inaugural Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Cheered by Muscovites and given the first New York ticker tape parade for a classical musician when he returned to the U.S., Cliburn founded his own competition in his hometown of Fort Worth later that year.
Click here to listen to a live recording of his winning performance of Tchikovsky’s First Concerto. And a 58-minute film by Peter Rosen on Medici-TV documents that event for subscribers (watch a free trailer here).
And this date in 1947 saw the premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Piano Concertoby The Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell conducting, with pianist Jesús Maria Sanromá.
