by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, Cleveland Orchestra clarinetist Daniel McKelway (pictured) will be featured in the Mozart concerto with the Baldwin Wallace Symphony Orchestra in Gamble Auditorium.
Four events all begin tonight at 7:30:
Cleveland Jazz Orchestra celebrates Sean Jones in “The Sean is You” (Maltz PAC),
The Cleveland Orchestra led by Lawrence Loh marks Hallowe’en with a screening of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (Severance Music Center),
The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Timothy Weiss, conductor, presents harpist Rosanna Moore, cellist Nick Photinos, percussionist Ross Karre, and the Oberlin Percussion Group in works by Han Lash, Pamela Z, Christopher Stark, and Carlos Carrillo (Warner Concert Hall, live stream available), and
The Resonance Project hosts mezzo-soprano Kameryn Lueng and pianist Irwin Shung in “Dreams and Disillusionment: Songs of Love” (Forest Hill Presbyterian Church).
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Violin Channel reports that soprano Renée Fleming has been named director of Cincinnati’s 2025 May Festival. The article includes the interesting news that since its founding in 1873, “…choral works that have premiered at the Festival include J.S. Bach’s Magnificat, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, and Britten’s Gloriana.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
American composer Kent Kennan died on November 1, 2003 in Austin, Texas, where he had spent the majority of his career on the faculty of the University of Texas — though he also taught briefly at Kent State and Ohio State.
Kennan’s best-known work is the widely performed and widely recorded Night Soliloquy, written in 1936 — a special year for him, given that it also marked his graduation from the master’s program at Eastman (where he studied with Howard Hanson) and his Prix de Rome.
Night Soliloquy was originally written for flute and string orchestra, a version you can hear on YouTube in an important performance of the work: by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in 1943 (the soloist goes unnamed). It was later transcribed with piano accompaniment, and with wind ensemble — listen here with flutist Denis Bouriakov and pianist Ji-Yoon Kim, and here with flutist Betsy Hill and “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, led by Jason K. Fettig, where the clarinets of the band beautifully capture the timbre of the mysterious, pulsating opening.
It’s interesting to compare that piece, which displays the Romantic and Impressionist influences from early in Kennan’s career, to another well-known work from later on: his Sonata for Trumpet and Piano (1956, rev. 1986), which conveys clear admiration for Hindemith’s strain of neo-classicism.
Cleveland Orchestra trumpeter Jack Sutte joined his Baldwin Wallace colleague, pianist Christine Fuoco, in advocating for the piece in their album Mettle: SonataPalooza I – Vol. I. The variety of compositional tools and moods evident in the work have lent it a wide appeal, both among students and professionals. Those aspects also serve as an excellent proving ground for a trumpeter to display several virtues of their playing, as Sutte does in the recording, showcasing, as we wrote in our review, “melodic grace,” “punchy articulations,” “smooth legato,” and a “spectrum of tone colors, from razzle-dazzle to warmth.”
Kennan’s legacy as a teacher of composition and theory is equally strong. If you’ve ever studied those topics, you may well have encountered his books Counterpoint and The Technique of Orchestration.
Pieces of music that continue to be played, pieces of text that continue to be read — for the creatively talented, there are indeed many ways to defy death.
