by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Indoors this evening, Broadview Heights Baptist Church presents its Serenity Chamber Players with pianist Stephen Muzzi in excerpts by Beethoven and Brahms at 6:00 pm.
Outside, Tremont’s Arts in August brings Ashtabula’s Erie Heights Brass Band Sextet (pictured) to Lincoln Park for a wide-ranging program at 7:00 pm.
And Online, No Exit New Music Ensemble spotlights two of its musicians in a 7:00 pm program that will take just about 20 minutes to watch. Pianist Nicholas Underill will play Béla Bartók’s Sonata, and violinist Mari Sato will play Adam Robert’s 2008 solo piece Sinews.
Details in our Concert Listings.
Also online today: Gramophone’s Orchestra of the Year Festival returns for two days of online performances from the world-class ensembles nominated for the magazine’s 2021 Orchestra of the Year Award — including The Cleveland Orchestra. Each concert begins at 2 pm Eastern time on Friday and Saturday, and will be available to watch for 24 hours on the British magazine’s website.
NEWS BRIEFS
The Music Critics Association of North America has announced that Du Yun and Raven Chacon’s Sweet Land has won its fifth annual award for Best New Opera, to be presented next month at MCANA’s annual meeting in Detroit. Produced by The Industry, the experimental Los Angeles company founded by Yuval Sharon, the opera premiered in February 2020 and had a brief run until the pandemic shut down performances the next month. Read the press release here.
Apollo’s Fire announced today that proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 or proof of a negative PCR test within 72 hours of concert dates (or of an antigen text within six hours of concert time) will be required for admission to each of its events, in accordance with protocols rapidly being adopted by U.S. arts organizations that will remain in effect through December, 2021. Additionally, masks will be mandatory. Five of the seven programs this season will be available on the Orchestra’s Worldwide Watch-at-Home Virtual Series for patrons who prefer not to attend in person.
TODAY’S ALMANAC
English composer Eric Coates, born on this date in 1886 in Nottinghamshire (he died in Chichester in 1957) was both celebrated and denigrated during his career as a creator of “light music.”
Coates and his music attracted a certain amount of snobbery: The Times characterised his music as “fundamentally commonplace…but well written, easy on the ear and lightly sentimental…superficial but sincere.” In its obituary notice, The Manchester Guardian took issue with such a dismissal, and preferred the French attitude of cherishing petits-maîtres for what they were rather than condemning them for what they were not: “better to write second-class masterpieces than fail to be a second Beethoven.” One of Coates’s most important musical gifts was the ability to write memorable tunes — “a genuine lyrical impulse,” as The Manchester Guardian put it. On first meeting him Dame Ethel Smyth said, “You are the man who writes tunes,” and asked him how he did it.
(Speaking of snobbery, that paragraph appears in Coates’ Wikipedia article, a source that many treat with general suspicion, but it’s pretty obvious when the anonymous authors are demonstrating respectable scholarship.)
Click here to listen to Eric Coates’ London Suite (London Everyday) played by Guilhem Boisson and Orchestra Symphonique Opus 31, a French amateur ensemble based in Toulouse. The listener comments are worth reading.
Two other composers born on this date whose music could fall into the “light” category are Rayburn Wright (1922) and James Christensen (1935). Wright was professor of jazz studies and contemporary media at the Eastman School, and Christensen was associated with the Walt Disney empire for most of his career. Click here to hear Rayburn’s sketch, Eastman Arrangers Holiday, and here to enjoy Christensen’s Tribute to Elvis.
Also among the August 27 births, two relatively obscure figures: English composer Herbert Menges (1902), who wrote incidental music to all of Shakespeare’s plays, and Stanley Hollingsworth (1924), whose Piano Concerto was premiered in 1980 by Neville Marriner and the Detroit Symphony.