by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 on the University of Akron’s Kulas Concert Series, Galen Karriker conducts the UA Wind Symphony with featured soloists Liam Teague, steelpan (pictured) and Hunter Ashcroft, saxophone, in Guzzetta Recital Hall.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Akron’s Tuesday Musical has announced the First- and second-place winners of its 2025 Scholarship Competition who will compete again in the Final Round/Winners Concert on Sunday, May 4 at 2:30 pm in Guzzetta Recital Hall at The University of Akron. Click here to see the participants.
“The audience will vote on the winner of the John M. Ream Jr. DDS People’s Choice Award of $500. Two additional performance scholarships — one for $1,000 and one for $2,000 — will also be awarded. This year’s judges are conductor Dean Buck, composer Margi Griebling-Haigh, and retired journalist and music critic Elaine Guregian.
“The adjudicated concert and post-concert reception are free and open to the public. No tickets are needed.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On April 28, 1954, composer Michael Daugherty was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Currently Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, during his time on the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory (1986-1991), he organized the 1988 Electronic Festival Plus Festival, which featured music from more than 50 composers. Strongly influenced by American popular culture, he shook up the classical world by writing works like Metropolis Symphony, based on tales of Superman (the superhero invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in Cleveland in 1938). Here’s a performance of “Krypton” by the Toledo Symphony, led by Alain Trudel.
And on this day in 1992, French composer Olivier Messiaen, who visited the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978, died in Paris at the age of 83. Among his most celebrated works is the Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German stalag in 1941 and first performed for his fellow prisoners-of-war. Watch a ChamberFest Cleveland performance from 2013 here, with Franklin Cohen, clarinet, Yura Lee, violin, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Orion Weiss, piano.
Like a number of Parisian composers, Messiaen was also an organist — from 1931 until his death, he served as titulaire at the Church of the Trinity, where he improvised music at masses as well as played his own compositions. Here’s a rare glimpse of the composer improvising on the Gregorian chant Puer natus.
