HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, Vinay Parameswaran leads The Cleveland Orchestra in James Horner’s underscore to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, performed live-to-picture at Severance Music Center.
And at 7:30 in Oberlin Conservatory’s Warner Concert Hall, violinist Jennifer Koh (pictured) will be featured with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Tim Weiss, conducting, in Courtney Bryan’s Syzygy and Vijay Iyer’s Trouble.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
French composer Olivier Messiaen was born on December 10, 1908 in Avignon.
Probably his most-performed work, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. ChamberFest Cleveland has featured it on at least two occasions. Click here for a performance in Mixon Hall at CIM by Cohen with Yura Lee, violin, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Orion Weiss, piano in June, 2013. Franklin Cohen talked about the piece in a promotional video before a later performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Hall.
Messiaen was also a keen ornithologist who incorporated bird song into such works as his Oiseaux exotiques, which won pianist Angeline Chang, conductor John McLaughlin Williams, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony a Grammy Award in 2007.
And of course, the composer was also an organist, who played at La Trinité in Paris for more than six decades. Hear him in some of his celebrated improvisations in this video.
Ready for a touch of the bizarre? Here’s a performance of “Dieu parmi nous” from the organ suite La Nativité du Seigneur played on bayan (accordion) by Ukrainian artist Artem Nyzhnyk, and an arrangement for accordion and theremin of the “Louange à l’Éternité du Jésus” from the Quatuor performed by Lydia Kavina and Roman Yusipey. Given Messiaen’s embrace of another electronic instrument, the ondes martinot, he probably would have approved.
