HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, the Baldwin Wallace Symphony Orchestra premieres a new double concerto for violin and cello by faculty composer Clint Needham (pictured) in Gamble Auditorium.
Tonight at 7:30: The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus present Handel’s Messiah, Bernard Labadie, conducting, at Severance Music Center, and James Feddeck leads CityMusic Cleveland at Fairmount Presbyterian.
Note: Tonight’s Oberlin Musical Theater performance is sold out.
TRANSITIONS:
Gramophone reports that “As The Takács Quartet approach the end of their fiftieth anniversary, the ensemble has announced that cellist András Fejér will retire at the end of the 2025-26 season. Fejér is the last remaining member of the original Takács Quartet lineup, which formed in 1975. Read the story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1976, England and the classical music world lost one of its greatest composers when Benjamin Britten died in Aldeburgh, Sussex, at the home he shared with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and in the village where he and Pears had established the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 1948.
Britten’s operas are at the center of his compositional output, but he wrote in nearly every genre. He sat for an interview with the CBC in 1968 where he talked about his career as a composer.
As Christmas approaches, Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols remains one of his unique achievements. Written on the U-boat-infested high seas as he and Pears were returning from a sojourn in America during World War II, the cycle for treble voices and harp perfectly captures the spirit of its medieval texts. Watch a performance from St. John’s College, Cambridge here.
Another inspired setting of Medieval poetry is his 1930 A Hymn to the Virgin for chorus and semi-chorus, sung here by Quire Cleveland.
Cleveland performances of Britten’s music include his String Quartet No. 2, performed at ChamberFest Cleveland in 2013, and his setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Rosa Mystica, sung by Cleveland Chamber Choir under Scott McPherson at First Baptist Church.
Britten’s renown as a composer is reflected in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Listen here to a performance by the Baltic Sea Youth Philharmonic.
And on this date in 1993, iconoclastic American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa died of cancer at the age of 52 in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging career is too complex to sum up in a few sentences, but Zappa equally impressed amphitheaters-full of rock fans and symphony orchestra conductors like Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, and Pierre Boulez with his compositional prowess and guitar playing.
Listen to a performance of Zappa’s Perfect Stranger by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Matthias Pintscher, and to a France Culture retrospective, Zappa et la musique du XXe siècle.
And this is National Cookie Day in the United States, invented in 1976 by Sesame Street (and you know who) but “officially” moved to December 4 by proclamation of the San Francisco Blue Chip Cookie Company’s Matt Nader.
How to celebrate the ubiquitous cookie? (The name has been adopted into American English from the Dutch term koekie, but it’s spurned by the Brits, who call them biscuits). Bake them, buy them, give them, eat them. Bakers might like to try Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for “World Peace Cookies.” If anything works, these might.
