by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, Canadian organist Ken Cowan, professor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, will play works by Franz Liszt, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Iain Farrington, Gaston Litaize, and Edward Elgar on the restored 1927 E. M. Skinner organ in the Helen Rockwell Morley Memorial Music Building in Painesville.
At the same hour, CIM Opera Theater will present the final performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Mimi Ohio Theatre, Playhouse Square.
Tonight at 7:30, Les Délices will present “The Mermaid,” a program of traditional sea shanties and country dance tunes, plus music by Henry Purcell and Franz Joseph Haydn at Akron Civic Theater.
Also tonight, guest conductor Kazuki Yamada and pianist Francesco Piemontesi join The Cleveland Orchestra for Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25, and the Orchestra completes the 7:30 program with Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center.
For details of these and other events, please visit our Concert Listings page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On April 25, 1861, Italian composer Marco Enrico Bossi was born in Salò (he died while crossing the Atlantic in 1925, returning from an organ concert tour to New York and Philadelphia). While serving as director of conservatories in Venice, Bologna, and Rome, he found time to write some 150 compositions, including this Concerto in a for organ, string orchestra, horns and timpani.
You can also hear him play — from beyond the grave — his much-performed Scherzo for organ, thanks to an Aeolian player roll he recorded in 1925.
Also on this day, in 1906, New England composer John Knowles Paine died in Cambridge, MA, where he had been appointed Harvard’s first University Organist and Choirmaster in 1861, and later, America’s first Professor of Music. A member of the “Boston Six” along with Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, George Chadwick, and Horatio Parker, he was a popular guest conductor of the Boston Symphony.
For a taste of America’s musical styles of the time, listen to Paine’s 1861 Concert Variations on “The Star-Spangled Banner” for solo organ, played by Andrew Meagher. Or to his Symphony No. 2 in A (“Im frühling”) from 1879 with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. Or to his celebrated Mass in d from 1860 in a recording by Gunther Schuller with the St. Louis Chorus and Symphony (former CIM voice professor Vinson Cole is among the soloists).
