by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Doug Droste conducts the Baldwin Wallace Symphony with violist Ashley Gordon, founder, Castle of our Skins (Gamble Auditorium, at 7), Les Délices presents Moonlit Mozart — wind band music including serenades and opera selections (First Methodist in Akron at 7:30), Canton Symphony musicians join rapper Marcus Smith for a hip-hop and R&B-influenced program at The Auricle, and a huge cast of performers including the Tulsa Ballet, Cleveland Ballet, Cleveland Pops, tap dancers, and vocalists will invoke the golden age of Hollywood (7:30 at Key Bank State Theater).
Visit our Concert Listings for details of upcoming performances.
NEWS BRIEFS:
WFMT reports that “Giancarlo Guerrero has been announced as the new artistic director and principal conductor of Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival. The appointment is effective immediately, and begins with the programming of the cherished summer festival’s 2025 season.” Guerrero, who is in his final season as music director of the Nashville Symphony and will also be taking on the music directorship of the Sarasota Orchestra, succeeds Carlos Kalmar, who held the post for 25 years before stepping down.
The Canton Symphony has named Alison Norris and Alicia Lieu as Conductor Fellows for the 2024-2025 season. The fellowships are designed for recent Master’s graduates in orchestral conducting seeking to advance their careers. Read more about the program and this season’s fellows here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Here are two American composers to raise a glass to today on their birth anniversaries: Zenobia Powell Perry, born in Boley, Oklahoma in 1908, and Steve Reich, who made his personal debut in New York on this date in 1936.
Composer, poet, pianist, and educator Zenobia Powell Perry studied privately with R. Nathaniel Dett in Rochester while Dett was teaching at Eastman. She moved on to work with Darius Milhaud (pictured above), and with William Dawson at the Tuskegee Institute, and participated in the teacher training program for Black Americans headed by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Her Underground Railroad opera Tawawa House, written in 1985, was restored and revived in 2014 at the Gallo Center for the Performing Arts in Modesto California. Watch a documentary about the work here, and click here for a performance of an orchestral suite from the opera by the Southeast Symphony in Los Angeles, conducted by Anthony Partner.\
In 2015, ChamberFest Cleveland programmed two of Reich’s works, New York Counterpoint (for amplified clarinet and tape, featuring Franklin Cohen in CIM’s Kulas Hall) and Nagoya Marimbas (played by Scott Christian and Alexander Cohen at The Wine Spot).
Two of Reich’s CDs were reviewed by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette music critic Jeremy Reynolds for ClevelandClassical.com. Read his takes on the EP of Electric Counterpoint here and Third Coast Percussion | Steve Reich here.
