by Daniel Hathaway
HONORED AT THE GRAMMYS:
Last night, and for the second year in a row, Elaine Martone received a Grammy Award in the category Producer of the Year, Classical.
And Oberlin alum Sullivan Fortner took home a Grammy for his Southern Nights in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.
INTERESTING READ:
In the New York Times, the former president and chief executive of Opera America writes, “When the Washington National Opera announced its decision to leave the Kennedy Center last month, many interpreted the move as a repudiation of President Trump and his efforts to seize control of the arts complex.
“In fact, the repudiation came from the Kennedy Center. By imposing an economic model on the company that makes opera impossible to produce, it was effectively disowning the art form and by extension all nonprofit performing arts and their profound contribution to our national life.” Read the guest essay by Marc A. Scorca here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1594, Italian polyphonic master Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina died in Rome and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican where he had served in various important positions, most notably as maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia. The quality of his counterpoint marked the culmination of Italian Renaissance church music.
Cleveland choirs have regularly programmed Palestrina’s masses and motets, including Quire Cleveland (who sing Sicut cervus under guest conductor Jameson Marvin here), and Contrapunctus Cleveland (watch them sing Super flumina Babylonis here, led by David Acres).
Other Palestrina works, not so expressive as those two, can seem a bit cold in their perfection. Some of his later pieces tend toward the freer Baroque style — like O magnum mysterium, performed here by The Sixteen with a follow-along score.
Just a birthday nod today to two celebrated violinists who need no introduction — Fritz Kreisler, born in Vienna in 1975, and Jascha Heifetz, born in Vilnius, Lithuania (then part of Russia) in 1901.
And then on to celebrate the birth of American pianist Ursula Oppens in New York in 1944, and the departure of American composer Lou Harrison in 2003.
Oppens (interviewed here by vocalist Tony Arnold in 2020) has an affinity for contemporary music, as she demonstrates by joining Jerome Rosenthal in Frederic Rzewski’s Four Hands at the Spectrum Rzewski Festival in 2018. For something completely different, watch her interpretation of Ravel’s La Valse.
Lou Harrison’s music was featured in a centennial concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art in October of 2017. Read two articles in ClevelandClassical.com about that event — a preview by Jarrett Hoffman, and a review by the late Timothy Robson.
A similar tribute took place that year at New York’s Trinity Church, Wall Street. Click here to watch organist Chelsea Chen and the Rutgers Percussion Ensemble perform Harrison’s thrilling Concerto for Organ, Percussion. and Strings.
