by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S UPDATES AND NEWS:
Cleveland Chamber Music Society releases its first Front Row program from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center today, an episode available for viewing through October 27. Featuring pianist Michael Brown and friends, the concert includes music by Barber, Mendelssohn, and Brown himself. Click here to watch on demand.
And in the latest Cleveland Orchestra podcast in its On a Personal Note series, cellist Paul Kushious revisits the excursion he and his wife took to Switzerland to follow “in the footsteps of Richard Strauss.” Listen here.
After consulting the weather forecast, Oberlin College Choir has postponed its Friday evening outdoor concert to Saturday, October 24th at 7:30 pm at the Oberlin Seeley G. Mudd Learning Center Patio off of Wilder Bowl.
New to the calendar: Trinity Cathedral music director Todd Wilson plays a live-streamed recital tonight at 7:30 pm from Christ Church in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Music by Dupré, J.S. Bach, Bizet arranged by Lemare, Gerre Hancocki, and Widor, and improvises on a submitted theme. Details in the Concert Listings.
In the market for a piano? Catherine Brulport of Steinway Gallery Cleveland writes that their Boston Heights warehouse is teeming with “an unexpected high number of used instruments as trade-ins from colleges and universities.” The Gallery is also offering recent Steinway-designed instruments at used piano prices during a three-day sale from October 29-31. Viewing is by appointment only: call or text 234.788.1678.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Russian choral director and composer Alexander Andreyevich Archangelsky was born on (or near) this date in 1846. A niche figure in the greater stream of Russian music, he mainly wrote Russian Orthodox Church music, including an All Night Vigil and masses, and led a choir that made successful tours of Russia and Europe, eventually transitioning from all-male voices to male and female singers.
Listen here to his chilling anthem about the day of judgement, and here to his setting of the Song of Simeon or Nunc Dimittis. Note the octave doublings of the bass line (octavism), which are such a unique feature of Russian choral music.
And American composer and diarist Ned Rorem was born on this date in 1923 in Richmond, Indiana. A prolific composer of art songs, he penned a few operas as well — listen here to a performance of his musical version of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Baldwin Wallace produced the work in 2010.
Rorem’s tell-all diaries have tended to overshadow his compositions. The New Yorker published The Ultimate Diary, a wicked parody of his writings in 1975, and The Paris Review wrote about them in 1999. Rorem sat for an interview with New Music USA’s Frank J. Oteri in 2006. Watch “Ned Rorem at Home” here.