by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Since its inception at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 2012, Giving Tuesday has marked the fifth day after Thanksgiving as an occasion for supporting non-profit organizations in the middle of the holiday shopping season.
ClevelandClassical.com, Northeast Ohio’s premier online classical music journal, supports the activities of some 90 organizations through calendar listings, previews, reviews, and our daily Diary, in a user-friendly format — a one-stop source for information about the vibrant classical music scene in our region.
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TODAY’S EVENTS:
At 12 Noon, organist Jonathan W. Moyer plays Advent music at the Church of the Covenant, Apollo’s Fire revives its production of WASSAIL! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas in Willoughby Hills, and Tuesday Musical presents mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato with Kings Return at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Austrian composer Anton Webern was born on this date in 1883 in Vienna. An American soldier accidentally shot him when he lit up a cigar outside his daughter’s house in 1945 during the postwar Allied occupation.
Webern’s life and compositional history are impossible to describe in a few paragraphs. Suffice to say that he came onto the scene writing late-Romantic music like the Langsamer Satz (played here in a follow-the-score performance by the Emerson String Quartet), and ended up crafting exquisite, pointillistic works like his Five Pieces (played here by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in April, 2018 — total performance time: six minutes).
And on this date in 1914, American composer Irving Fine was born in Boston. His music hasn’t been played extensively outside the Boston area, but his complete orchestral works are available on a Youtube channel thanks to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. And his 1944 four-piece suite The Choral New Yorker is worth a listen. I conducted and sang his “Design for October” around the world with the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society in 1967, a piece that has been among the most requested at subsequent reunions of the 90-member Asian Tour group.
Two more historical events pop up on December 3. That was the date in 1833 when Oberlin College opened its doors for classes, making the Ohio school the first “coed” institution of higher learning in the United States. And on this date in 1992 — for better or for worse — an engineer for the Sema Group used his personal computer to send the first-ever text message to a colleague over the Vodafone network.
