by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2 pm, Ohio Light Opera presents a matinee performance of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (pictured) in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.
For details of upcoming concerts, visit our Concert Listings page.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Les Délices has announced details of its 2024-2025 season, which includes an all-Mozart program featuring a band of period-instrument wind players (October 3-6), music by visionary 14th-century composers with vocalists Sophie Michaux and James Reese (November 22-24), Baroque cantatas sung by tenor Nicolas Phan plus a new work by Viet Cuong (February 22-23), and The Mermaid featuring Irish bouzouki player Seán Dagher and soprano Elena Mullins Bailey (April 25-27). Three of the programs will be filmed and released via Vimeo as Virtual Concerts. Read the press release here.
The Violin Channel reports that “The Spanish violist Cristina Cordero has joined the Casals Quartet (Cuarteto Casals), succeeding violist Jonathan Brown, who will be departing the group after 22 years to pursue other music projects. Read more here.TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Belgian composer, violinist and conductor Eugène Ysaÿe was born on this date in 1858 in Liège. His solo sonatas are popular encore pieces, and you can see why in James Ehnes’ performance of his Third Sonata on an occasion that the YouTube uploader hasn’t bothered to identify. Any clues?
Scottish composer James MacMillan was born on July 16, 1959 in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. It’s probably his Veni, Veni Emanuel percussion concerto that brought both MacMillan and Evelyn Glennie to international attention. Here’s a live performance by Glennie and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in 1994 led by Sian Edwards.
Many of MacMillan’s works, like those of Olivier Messiaen, reflect his devout Roman Catholicism. Click here to watch a performance of his Stabat Mater in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in April of 2018 by Harry Christopher and The Sixteen with the Britten Sinfonia.
Also on this date in 1959, American musician and composer Stewart Copeland came onto the scene in Alexandria, Virginia. Best known as the drummer for the British rock group Police, Copeland wrote Holy Blood and Crescent Moon on commission from Cleveland Opera. His first foray into the world of opera received its debut in the State Theater in October of 1989, directed by David Bamberger and conducted by Imre Palló. The New York Times ran John Rockwell’s candid review of the opening performance (read it here). Later, Anne Midgette mentioned the work in a 2013 Washington Post article about rock musicians who undertake writing opera — by then Copeland had finished his fourth theater piece and was working on a fifth.
Midgette quotes the composer: “I think when you do something as engrossing as opera,” says Copeland, who approached his first opera commission in 1989 as a kind of a lark, “every time you figure something out, you want to get it better next time.” Watch his 2010 chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart — based on the Edgar Allen Poe story — here.
