by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon on Tuesdays at the Covenant series, organist Bernhard Klapprott (pictured left, from Weimar, Germany) will play 17th and 18th century music on the Newberry organ in the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. Click here to view the concert program.
And at 7:30 pm, the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra will travel down the street to Severance Music Center, where Jake Taniguchi will lead a program of Beethoven, J.S. Bach, and Florence Price, featuring violinists Jaime Laredo and Jessica Lee.
BOP STOP TURNS TEN:
The BOP STOP will celebrate its tenth anniversary with a week of performances from October 15-20 including innovative jazz, local and national acts, experimental works and fan favorites. Donated to The Music Settlement in 2014, BOP STOP schedules more than 300 concerts and events each season in its Hingetown venue that reach some 12,000 audience members and engage more than 7,000 local and national artists.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German composer Heinrich Schütz was born in Bad Köstritz on this date in 1585. Renowned for his evocative settings of texts, Schütz’s vocal music comes in all shapes and sizes, from two-part motets that reflected the decimation of choirs during the Thirty Years War, to Italian madrigals and splendid polychoral works he wrote after study trips to Venice. It’s a pity that his only opera, Daphne, has been lost.
Listen here to Concerto Palatino perform his astonishingly expressive motet Anime mea liquefacta est from the Symphoniae Sacrae, and here to his funeral cantata, Ein Musikalische Exequien, a Protestant requiem commissioned long before it was needed by a patron who wanted to enjoy it while he was still alive. Lionel Bringuier leads the Belgian choir Vox Luminis, who sang at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland in October, 2018.
French organist and composer Louis Vierne was born on this date in Poitiers. Legally blind, Vierne served as organist of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris from 1900-1937, collapsing at the console just before playing a recital.
Among Vierne’s legacy are his six organ symphonies, which were recorded by Pierre Cochereau between December 1975 and May 1976 at Notre-Dame, where Cochereau was Titular from 1955 to 1984. Listen to all four hours’ worth here.
On this date in 1930, Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo. Two of his nature-inspired compositions are available in performances by the CIM New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch, director. Click on the links to watch Water-ways (from a November, 2015 concert), and Rain Spell (from February, 2018).
And Australian composer Carl Vine was born on October 8, 1954 in Perth. His Piano Sonata No. 1 was among the works that Cleveland International Piano Competition laureate Spencer Myer played in the 2005 contest. Watch those performances here and here.
