by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, CIM Museum Melodies presents a one-hour program featuring pianists from the Cleveland Institute of Music at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Tonight at 7, Heights Arts hosts a Gallery Concert featuring the piano duo of Ralitsa Georgieva and Caroline Oltmanns. And at 7:30, Cleveland Chamber Symphony presents the Antigone Music Collective (pictured) in works by Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Gregory Rowland Evans, Liza Lim, and Kaija Saariaho, as well as Pauline Oliveros’s sonic meditation Earth Ears at Murray Hill Galleries.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of upcoming performances.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Violin Channel reports that, according to the Springfield News-Sun, a letter to Wittenberg University’s students and staff from university leadership revealed that 24 faculty positions will be removed. “The letter adds that the school’s academic major programs in music, music education, German, Spanish, and East Asian studies will be eliminated after the current school year.”
Wittenberg is a 179-year-old private liberal arts university in Springfield, Ohio with 1,288 undergraduate students and 45 graduate students as of fall 2023.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Passing over the demise of French composers Jean Philippe Rameau and François Couperin and the marriage of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, here’s a local figure to celebrate on September 12. Cleveland is a hub for musical talent from all over, but many fine musicians were born and raised in the city itself. Such is the case with Johann Heinrich Beck, who was influential in the Cleveland music scene in the late 1800s.
Born on September 12, 1856, Beck honed his composing and performance skills abroad at the Leipzig Conservatory before returning to his hometown. A violinist, he frequently performed with the Schubert String Quartet and its successor, the Beck String Quartet.
The latter group performed Beck’s own pieces, including his String Quartet in C Minor, and also gave the Cleveland premiere of Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-Flat Major in 1891. Listen to a 2011 performance of the Schubert from Janine Jansen, Torleif Thedéen, and Itamar Golan on YouTube.
As a conductor, Beck led a variety of local orchestras before the inception of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1918. One of these was the Cleveland Grand Orchestra, where he worked together with conductor and oboist Emil Ring, another prominent figure in the local music scene.
Today, visitors to the Fine Arts Division of the Cleveland Public Library are greeted with a bust of Johann Heinrich Beck (pictured above) — inside is a large collection of his music manuscripts, letters, and other memorabilia.
