by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, The Cleveland Orchestra continues its Mandel Opera and Humanities Festival with the first of four performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, and staged by Nikolaus Habjan. The production makes use of giant puppets (pictured, the Queen of the Night), and featured singers include Julian Prégardien (Tamino), Ludwig Mittelhammer (Papageno), and Christina Landshamer (Pamina)., 11001 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. Tickets available online.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these and other events.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Obituary: “David Sanborn, influential saxophonist whose work spanned genres, dies at 78.” Read the L.A. Times article here.
Concertgebouw cancels Jerusalem Quartet Concerts. Due to planned demonstrations, the music hall said on Tuesday, two performances scheduled for this week by the Jerusalem Quartet, who were to have played music by Felix Mendelssohn, Claude Debussy and Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim, have been canceled. Read the story in the NL Times here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
American composer Richard Wilson was born in Cleveland on May 16, 1941. Having imbibed concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell at an early age, he went on to study at Harvard and Rutgers, then taught at Vassar from 1966 to 2016. Wilson was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1988.
He has a long list of compositions in every genre, so it’s worth wondering why we don’t hear more of his music in his hometown. For a taste of Wilson’s style, read about his “shaggy dog” opera, Aethelred The Unready, here, then watch a performance of the prologue of the opera conducted by the composer and directed by Drew Minter here.
by Jarrett Hoffman
Composer Juan Morel Campos was born on this date in 1857 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Campos was both prolific and versatile, writing in a wide variety of forms, from masses to marches, but it is his danzas — which make up about half of his output — that have made him most famous. Having studied with Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, “The Father of the Danza,” Campos eventually became known as the quintessential composer in that genre.
Campos frequently wrote for his own dance orchestra, La Lira Ponceña, and on that note, you can click here to listen to conductor Rafael Enrique Irizarry and the Orquesta Filarmonica de Puerto Rico perform two Campos danzas: Gloria and No me toques.
Campos also arranged his danzas for piano, and one valuable resource to listen to those versions is the YouTube channel of Luciano Quiñones, himself a pianist-composer who specializes in the danza. Click here to listen to his performance of Maldito amor, representing the composer’s oft-visited theme of tormented love.
