by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S EVENTS AND UPDATES:
Chagrin Arts’ 7:00 pm al fresco concert by the Callisto Quartet has been moved indoors at the Solon Center for the Arts. (Picture: before last year’s concert on a baseball diamond in Solon).
Keep an eye on weather updates for the Suburban Symphony’s 7:00 pm performance at the Church of the Western Reserve.
Also at 7:00 pm, the Cleveland International Piano Competition broadcasts the sixth and final session of its First Round, and the Oberlin Como Piano Festival features an interview with Dang Thai Son and master class performances.
And in Wooster, Ohio Light Opera’s Musical Magic features musical theater numbers and swing tunes at City Square Steakhouse.
Details in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
This week’s WKSU Shuffle podcast with Amanda Rabinowitz features sounds and reflections from The Cleveland Orchestra’s first rehearsal since the shutdown, and a preview of the Orchestra’s summer schedule and beyond with ClevelandClassical.com founder and editor Daniel Hathaway. Listen here on Spotify.
Oberlin piano professor Peter Takács reports that his 2011 recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas has sold out and is being released with a new design by Cambria Master Recordings. Click here for more information.
Early Music America is seeking applicants for its 2021-2022 Emerging Professional Leadership Council. Students, performers, researchers and administrators under the age of 35 are invited to apply by August 9. Read the guidelines here.
And the New York Chapter of the American Guild of Organists has named Paul Jacobs as its 2021 International Performer of the Year. “The only organ soloist ever to have won a GRAMMY Award — in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering Livre du Saint-Sacrèment — Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent champion of his instrument both in the United States and around the world.” Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Scottish composer James MacMillan was born on July 16, 1959 in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. I interviewed Chanticleer’s music director Tim Keeler yesterday for a preview of their forthcoming performance on the Tuesday Musical series in Akron on July 27, and one of the works he highlighted was MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn. It figures importantly in a program titled “Awakenings” that celebrates the re-emergence of vocal music as the pandemic loosens its grip on the choral world. “It’s a prayer to beckon the new day, a prayer for light to shine in darkness.” Listen here to the brief but moving piece as performed by Britain’s Apollo 5 at the VOCES8 Foundation in London, the former St. Anne & St. Agnes Church near St. Paul’s Cathedral that was designed by Christopher Wren.
And American musician and composer Stewart Copeland came onto the scene in Alexandria, Virginia on this date in 1959. Best known as the drummer for the British rock group Police, Copeland wrote his first opera on commission from Cleveland Opera. Holy Blood and Crescent Moon received its debut in the State Theater in October of 1989, directed by David Bamberger and conducted by Imre Palló. The New York Times ran John Rockwell’s candid review of the opening performance (read it here). Later, Anne Midgette mentioned the work in a 2013 Washington Post article about rock musicians who undertake writing opera — by now Copland had finished his fourth theater piece and was working on a fifth.
Midgette quotes the composer: “I think when you do something as engrossing as opera,” says Copeland, who approached his first opera commission in 1989 as a kind of a lark, “every time you figure something out, you want to get it better next time.” Watch his 2010 chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart — based on the Edgar Allen Poe story — here.
