by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE TODAY:
The Oberlin Trio, the Conservatory faculty ensemble founded in 1982, goes online today at 7:30 pm from Warner Concert Hall with a new cellist — recently-appointed Dmitry Kouzov. The free concert includes works by George Walker, Haydn, and Schumann. Read a preview by Erich Burnett here.
A rare, in-person event tonight at 7:00 pm at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus features CityMusic Cleveland chamber players in “A Women’s Sampler.” It’s free, but only 100 audience members can be present (RSVP here), with face masks and social distancing in effect. The concert, which includes music by Florence Price, Ethel Smyth, and Amy Beach, will be repeated on Saturday in a live stream from the Maltz Performing Arts Center.
At 7:00 pm, the Cleveland Institute of Music will present the Catalyst Quartet in works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and Coleridge Taylor Perkinson.
Cleveland personalities will be involved today in two online programs from Philadelphia. At noon, a collection of ten Italian Opera duet scenes adapted for the virtual stage by Cleveland Opera Theater director Scott Skiba airs from the Curtis Institute. And at 6:00 pm, guitarist Jason Vieaux shares a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concert with cellist Clancy Newman.
Details and connection links in our Concert Listings.
HEMIDEMISEMIQUAVERS:
Do any of our readers remember the Sunday New York Times column of short news items named after the British term for 64th notes? Worth reviving! Here are our bits of information for Friday.
Les Délices has released a Sneak Peek at its forthcoming “Games & Grounds” subscription concert.
Piano Cleveland has announced a piano and keyboard donation program.
Pipa player Wu Man, who has performed on the Cleveland Museum of Art series, joins the New York chamber orchestra The Knights in Bits and Pieces from Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto.
Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin is featured in Sharon Isbin: Troubadour.
The Canton Symphony has posted Exploring Gender, Expanding Music Scholarship with guest Destinee Siebe, the most recent podcast in its “Orchestrating Change” series.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Today’s birthdays include French pianist and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916), Czech composer and church musician Petr Eben (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzatein died on January 22, 1964.
Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.
Cleveland organist Karel Paukert has frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)
And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.