HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 6 pm, Cleveland Chamber Choir sings William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, English madrigals, and three pieces by Cleveland composer Judith Eckelmeyer, in the Donna and James Reid Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Also at 7 pm, an Akron Bicentennial Concert features Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony in E.J. Thomas Hall.
And at 7:30 pm, CIM Perspectives with Mike Block, cello, Yacouba Sissoko, kora, and Jamey Haddad, percussion, melds West African and American traditions in original compositions and folk repertoire in Kulas Hall.
Note: Tonight’s Oberlin Musical Theater debut is sold out.
INTERESTING READ:
Pianist and CIM professor Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who performed in Kyiv with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine over the weekend, published his account of visiting and giving a concert in a country during wartime. Click here to read his report in its entirety, which he shared on his public Facebook page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Italian luthier Nicola Amati was born on this date in 1596 in Cremona. The most prominent member of the Amati dynasty, Nicola is said to have greatly influenced the work of Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, although his cellos and violins appear more frequently in museum exhibits than in the hands of today’s artists.
Austrian composer Anton Webern was born on December 3, 1883 in Vienna, and died in Mittersill in 1945. An American soldier accidentally shot him when he lit up a cigar outside his daughter’s house during the postwar Allied occupation. Webern’s life and compositional history are impossible to describe in a few paragraphs.
Suffice to say that he came onto the scene writing late-Romantic music like the Langsamer Satz (played here in a follow-the-score performance by the Emerson String Quartet), and ended up crafting exquisite, pointillistic works like his Five Pieces (played here by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in April, 2018 — total performance time: six minutes). Cleveland’s BlueWater Chamber Orchestra played the Langsamer Satz during its recent collaboration with Verb Ballets.
And on this date in 1914, American composer Irving Fine was born in Boston. We marked the anniversary of his death in the August 22-23 diary last summer: “His music hasn’t been played often outside the Boston area, but his Serious Song, Lament for String Orchestra, composed in 1955, seems appropriate for the anniversary of his premature leave-taking. Listen here to a recording by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony from 1962.
Two more historical events pop up on December 3. That was the date in 1833 when Oberlin Colle,n nge opened its doors for classes, making the Ohio school the first “coed” institution of higher learning in the United States. And on this date in 1992 — for better or for worse — an engineer for the Sema Group used his personal computer to send the first-ever text message to a colleague over the Vodafone network.
