by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1976, England and the classical music world lost one of its greatest composers when Benjamin Britten died in Aldeburgh, Sussex, at the home he shared with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and in the village where he and Pears had established the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 1948.
Britten’s operas are at the center of his compositional output (the MET opera will broadcast an archive performance of Peter Grimes on December 9), but he wrote in nearly every genre. He sat for an interview with the CBC in 1968 where he talked about his career as a composer.
As Christmas approaches, next Wednesday noon, Trinity Cathedral will broadcast an archive Brownbag performance of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Written on the U-boat-infested high seas as he and Pears were returning from a sojourn in America during World War II, the cycle for treble voices and harp perfectly captures the spirit of its medieval texts.
Another inspired setting of Medieval poetry is his 1930 A Hymn to the Virgin for chorus and semi-chorus, sung here by Quire Cleveland.
Recent Cleveland performances of Britten’s chamber music include his String Quartet No. 2, performed at ChamberFest Cleveland in 2013, and his Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, recorded on the Severance Hall stage this summer by physically-distanced Cleveland Orchestra musicians.
Britten’s renown as a composer is reflected in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Listen here to a performance by the Baltic Sea Youth Philharmonic.
And on this date in 1993, iconoclastic American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa died of cancer at the age of 52 in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging career is too complex to sum up in a few sentences, but Zappa equally impressed amphitheaters-full of rock fans and symphony orchestra conductors like Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, and Pierre Boulez with his compositional prowess and guitar playing.
Listen to a performance of Zappa’s Perfect Stranger by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Matthias Pintscher, and to a France Culture retrospective, Zappa et la musique du XXe siècle.
And this is National Cookie Day in the United States, invented in 1976 by Sesame Street (and you know who) but “officially” moved to December 4 by proclamation of the San Francisco Blue Chip Cookie Company’s Matt Nader.
How to celebrate the ubiquitous cookie? (The name has been adopted into American English from the Dutch term koekie, but spurned by the Brits, who call them biscuits). Bake them, buy them, give them, eat them. Bakers might like to try Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for “World Peace Cookies.” If anything works, these might.
ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:
Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church offers an Advent Procession with Carols, Case Western streams the Case Symphony Orchestra from the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the University of Akron features its flute choir, Kent State broadcasts its Jazz Ensembles, and the Western Reserve Chorale reaches into its archives for the first of three 30-minute Friday evening programs. Details in the Concert Listings.
