by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducts The Cleveland Orchestra, with violin soloist Stefan Jackiw (pictured). The program includes Carl Nielsen’s Overture to Maskarade, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto & Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
R.I.P. BURTON FINE, 94
Longtime Boston Symphony principal viola Burton Fine, who trained as a violinist as well as a chemist and whose first job was with the government agency in Cleveland that became NASA, passed away on November 15 at the age of 94 at his home in Newton, Massachusetts.
The Violin Channel writes, “…when a position opened up in the second violin section of the Boston Symphony in 1963, he took the day off to practice and auditioned the very next day — and was ultimately offered the role. After a year in the job, he switched to the viola section, serving as the orchestra’s principal violist until 1993 and playing in the section until his retirement in 2004.”
Click here to read more about Fine’s life and career in his daughter Elaine’s personal blog.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Henry Purcell neatly timed his all-too-early demise at the age of 36 — and younger than Mozart — for the eve of the Patron Saint of Music’s feast day on November 21, 1695. That makes this an appropriate time to listen to one of the composer’s Odes written in honor of St. Cecelia. Here’s a performance of Hail, Bright Cecelia by the Dunedin Consort led by John Butt.
And on this date in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sank the Nantucket whaling ship Essex 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. That event inspired Herman Melville’s 1851 more-than-a-novel, Moby-Dick, and in turn, moved American composer Jake Heggie to write his opera of the same name on commission from Dallas Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, the State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera. I saw the premiere in Dallas in April, 2010 along with colleagues from the Music Critics Association of North America.
Heggie talked about the process of composing the work in a University of California TV interview in 2012. No time like the present to crack open Melville’s magnum opus, which just might be one of those classics you never get around to reading. Melville’s novella Billy Budd also inspired an eponymous opera by Benjamin Britten.
