by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Tonight at 7, CityMusic Cleveland presents the second performance of its “From the New World” program, this time at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, and Oberlin’s 7:30 pm Fridays@Finney series features violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson in Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann’s Mosoq for strings and electronics along with works by Haydn, Reena Esmail, and Enrico Chapela Barba.
Holiday concerts include Cleveland Opera Theater’s Amahl and the Night Visitors in Cleveland Heights at 7 (an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti that premiered on television in 1951), Summit Choral Society’s Candlelight Christmas program at St. Bernard in Akron at the same hour, and Christmas Concerts continue at Severance Music Center at 7:30 with Brett Mitchell and The Cleveland Orchestra.
Check our Concert Listings for details.
COVID UPDATES:
No Exit writes, “We have made the difficult decision to cancel the final performance of our Winter 2021 Concert Series at Praxis Fiber Arts [on Saturday, December 18] featuring music by ‘The Collective.’ Due to the escalating and evolving conditions of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we believe this is the best decision to guarantee the safety of our audiences and musicians.”
JOB OPENING:
Baldwin Wallace University is looking to appoint an assistant professor of music composition. Check out their expectations here.
INTERESTING INTERVIEW:
Musical America’s Susan Elliott talks with League of American Orchestras president Simon Woods in its One-to-One series “about the needs of the League’s 700 member orchestras when he first arrived [in September, 2020] and what they need now.” Click here to watch.
INTERESTING READS:
Anthony Tommassini, chief classical music critic for the New York Times, who is retiring after 21 years in the position, writes a valedictory essay with some thoughts “about what should be preserved in the field he’s covered for decades.”
Composer Matthew Aucoin talks with the Harvard Gazette about his debut opera, Walt Whitman. Whitman? Read the interchange here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two events that have importantly impacted music history pop up on today’s calendar. On this date in 497 B.C.E. the first Saturnalia — a festival celebrating Saturn — was held in Imperial Rome. When the early Christian church began adding its own holy days to events in pagan calendars in an attempt to co-opt their dates, Saturnalia turned into Christmas and calendar machinations eventually fixed its date as December 25.
And in 538, when Pope Paul III kicked England’s King Henry VIII and his subjects out of the Roman church, the Church of England was born — although some historians believe that Christianity had been well established in the British Isles long before Papal missionaries arrived. This excommunication hastened the Protestant Reformation in England and launched a new chapter for British music. Quire Cleveland’s programs earlier this month demonstrated the striking difference between pre- and post- Reformation music in Magnificats by Robert Fayrfax and Robert Parsons (review here). Click here to listen to a broadcast of the program on WCLV’s Ovations on December 22 at 8:00 pm.
More seasonally, December 17, 1890 witnessed the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. The libretto for the 2-act work was adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and the piece shared the program with a second commissioned work, the composer’s opera Iolanta. Tchaikovsky wrote parts of the score in Rouen, France, and suspended his work for three weeks to inaugurate New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Click here to view a much-praised concert version of Nutcracker performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Yannick Nezet-Seguin, recorded in December 2010 in De Doelen te Rotterdam.
Most famous works like The Nutcracker have spawned parodies, of which we’ll mention only two: Spike Jones presents for the Kiddies: The Nutcracker Suite (With Apologies to Tchaikovsky), which came out in 1945, and most recently, The Graham Cracker, a modern dance parody dedicated to choreographer Martha Graham.