By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Four events at 7 pm: Cleveland Jazz Orchestra plays at BLU Jazz+ in Akron, The Gesualdo Six (pictured) from the U.K. sing at Christ Presbyterian in Canton, Les Délices celebrates the release of two new CDs at Waterloo Arts & the Baldwin Wallace Symphonic Wind Ensemble plays Clint Needham’s “Liturgy” in Gamble Auditorium.
The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble performs in Warner Concert Hall at 7:30, and at 8, Oberlin Opera Theater continues a four-performance run of Benjamin Britten’s comic opera, Albert Herring, in Hall Auditorium. Read a preview here.
For details of these and other events, visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German organist and composer Samuel Scheidt was baptized on this date in 1587 in Halle, where he spent his whole career after studying in Amsterdam with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Click here to hear Hespèrion XX play his Ludi Musici under Jordi Savall, and here to watch a performance by Paolo Crivellaro of Scheidt’s Cantio Sacra: Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz on the organ of the Jakobikirche in Lübeck.
Italian bel canto opera composer Vincenzo Bellini was born on November 3, 1801, in Catania, Sicily. There’s a film about the composer’s brief life (he died at 33) that takes its name from one of Bellini’s most famous arias — from Norma. Click here to watch Carmine Gallone’s romanticized 1954 film Casta Diva, unfortunately only available in Italian. For the aria itself, obvious choices are performances by Maria Callas and Leontyne Price, but for visual as well as aural splendor, you probably can’t beat Renée Fleming’s performance in the Palaces of the Czars in Saint Petersburg.
And on this date in 1939, the body of French organist and composer Charles Tournemire was discovered in a bog in Arachon — he went out for a walk and never returned. A student of César Franck, Tournemire succeeded his mentor at the organ of the Basilica of St-Clotilde in Paris, and in addition to a eight symphonies, four operas, piano works and chamber music, wrote L’Orgue Mystique, a set of 51 suites for each Sunday of the Ecclesiastical year.
Oberlin alumnus Nicholas Capozzoli recorded the suite for the feast of the Epiphany live at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York in January, 2013, and the famous Belgian organist Flor Peeters appears in a unique video made at Sint Rombouts Cathedral in Mechelen performing the suite for the Octave of the Ascension — which the composer dedicated to him.
