by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
It’s the Winter Solstice, the longest night and shortest day of the year. (Left: the sun rises over Stonehenge in England.)
At 7 pm, Arts Renaissance Tremont hosts Burning River Brass — a longstanding tradition — for a holiday pops concert at St. Wendelin Church.
At 7:30, Cleveland Chamber Choir presents a concert centered around David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, a modern day retelling of the 1845 Hans Christian Andersen story, influenced by Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, at the Cleveland School of the Arts. Read a preview article here.
Also at 7:30, Sarah Hicks presides over a Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concert featuring vocalist Jimmie Herrod, the Orchestra Chorus, the Youth Chorus Chamber Ensemble, and The College of Wooster chorus at Severance music Center.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BYTES:
The Hohens International Piano Competition has released the names of the 51 pianists who will compete in its quarterfinal rounds in Calgary, Alberta. Cleveland piano fans will recognize at least three of them: Maxim Lando, Evren Ozel, and Yuanfan Yang.
Berlin’s VAN Magazine features an interview with senior titular organist Olivier Latry, who talks about his role in the re-opening of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and the “awakening” of its grand organ, as well as his normal duties in the post.
And congratulations to Baldwin Wallace bassoonist Derek Schraufstetter, who has been selected as one of only two bassoonists in the nation to participate in the prestigious New York String Orchestra Seminar at New York’s Carnegie Hall at the end of December. Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
A dive into December 20th in classical music history brings to the surface a pair of composers (John Harbison and André Jolivet) and a pair of pianists (Mitsuko Uchida and Arthur Rubinstein). Two of those are living musicians who are celebrating their birthdays — our focus today.
New Jersey-born composer John Harbison, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Music and teaches at MIT, turns 86 today. Harbison is a prolific composer who has written four operas and a huge amount of orchestral, choral, chamber, and solo vocal music. Several of those categories come together in his Pulitzer-winning The Flight into Egypt, written for solo soprano and baritone, chorus, and chamber orchestra. Click on the link to listen to a recording by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Cantata Singers and Ensemble with soloists Sanford Sylvan and Roberta Anderson.
Turning 76 today is Japanese-born British pianist Mitsuko Uchida — we should say Dame Mitsuko Uchida, damehood being one of her many honors, which also include two Grammy Awards. One of those came for a 2009 recording that represents two of her specialties: the music of Mozart (here the Piano Concertos Nos. 23 and 24), and the skill of conducting an orchestra from the piano. In this case, that ensemble was The Cleveland Orchestra, with whom she has developed a long relationship. Listen to the first movement of No. 24 here from that recording.
