by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two Baldwin Wallace events begin tonight at 7 pm: Handel’s Radamisto, the composer’s first opera for the Royal Academy of Music, at The Helen Theatre in Playhouse Square Center, and the Symphonic Band joins the Strongsville Community Band in Gamble Auditorium.
And at 7:30, Spanish pianist Gregorio Benítez (pictured) will play excerpts from Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux in Reinberger Chamber Music Hall at Severance Music Center.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett was born on October 11, 1882 in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls). He is especially famous for his choral and piano compositions based on African American spirituals and folk songs. Among his great works is his oratorio The Ordering of Moses, written in 1932 as his thesis at the Eastman School of Music, and premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony in 1937.
Listen here to a recording from 1968 by the Talladega College Choir under the direction of Frank Harrison, the Mobile Symphony Orchestra led by William Levi Dawson, and soloists Jeanette Walters, soprano, Carol Brice, contralto, John Miles, tenor, and John Work, baritone. (Head to the 15:08 mark to hear Dett’s powerful setting of Go Down, Moses.) And click here to read an article in The Guardian by tenor Rodrick Dixon ahead of the UK premiere.
And Austrian composer Anton Bruckner died in Vienna on this date in 1896. Among his best-known compositions are his massive symphonies, of which he wrote eleven. Watch a video of George Szell leading the Third Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1963 (Bruckner starts at 49:30).
