by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, Apollo’s Fire’s latest itinerary continues at Rocky River Presbyterian before moving on to St. Paul’s Episcopal in Cleveland Hts. (Feb. 8 at 7:30 & Feb. 9 at 4). The topic is virtuosic Baroque works by Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi, and the virtuosi include Daphna Mor, recorder, and Alan Choo, Emi Tanabe & Chloe Fedor, violins.
Also at 7:30, The Cleveland Orchestra is back home at Severance Music Center to begin a three-concert set led by Thomas Guggeis and featuring principal cello Mark Kosower in Henri Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain… Read Mike Telin’s interview with Guggeis here.
And tonight at 8, in a concert presented by Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project, sound artist Ipek Eginli gets together with harpist Stephan Haluska & cellist Liam Battle at Calicchia Gallery Studio in Cleveland.
For details of upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Piano Cleveland has announced its collaboration with the Kent State University College of the Arts in creating a new Arts Entrepreneurship Residency Program designed to help emerging artists develop an entrepreneurial mindset to enhance their careers. The residency will see 2024 Cleveland International Piano Competition Fourth Prize winner Giuseppe Guarrera and Semi-Finalist Antonio Chen Guang return to Cleveland in 2026 and 2027 respectively to be in residence at Kent State where they will present master classes and performances, as well as workshops on the arts ventures they will have created as part of the residency.
Founder & Artistic Director Jinjoo Cho has announced that ENCORE Chamber Music Institute will celebrate its 10th anniversary season from June 1 to 23 with its 2025 ENCORE-Gates Mills Music & Ideas Festival: “By Leaps and Bounds — a dance-infused celebration of movement, music, and artistic synergy” for which tickets will go on sale in April. Cho also reminded string players that the application deadline for ENCORE’s Summer Academy is February 9 at 11:59 pm EST. Information here.
ALMANAC FOR FEBRUARY 7:
February 7 marks the birth in 1897 of American composer Quincy Porter in New Haven, Connecticut, the first performance of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto in 1941, and the death in 1994 of Polish composer and conductor Witold Lutosławski in Warsaw.
Porter taught on two separate occasions at the Cleveland Institute of Music, as well as serving on the faculties of Vassar, the New England Conservatory, and Yale. Cleveland Orchestra violist Eliesha Nelson chose to include his 1948 Viola Concerto on her 2009 all-Quincy Porter album. Listen to her performance here with John McLaughlin Williams and the Northwest Sinfonia, and click here to hear the violist and the conductor field some questions.
Click here to listen to the official premiere performance of the Barber Concerto with violinist Albert Spalding and the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy from the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on February 7, 1941.
And in 1990, before Lutosławski permanently left the stage, the BBC joined other news sources to produce a documentary about his life and work. Watch his conversation with Krzysztof Zanussi here.
When the composer fled Warsaw in 1944, he left most of his manuscripts behind, and those were lost in the almost complete destruction of the city by the Germans. His 1954 Concerto for Orchestra established his prominence as a composer. Listen to a Cleveland Orchestra performance of the work under Christoph von Dohnányi here. (The recording pairs the Lutosławski piece with Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.)
