by Daniel Hathaway
AIRING TODAY ONLINE:
Timothy Weiss, Oberlin Conservatory professor of conducting and ensembles will give this year’s President’s Lecture tonight at 7. The livestreamed talk will center around the responsibilities of future classical music programming. In Weiss’s words, “We are not just inheritors and interpreters of a tradition. We define the tradition by the choices we make. And, we must use our agency for change to pass on an art form, both to audiences and students, that is broader, more inclusive, and more socially engaged than the one we inherited.”
CIM Piano Professor Daniel Shapiro continues his complete Beethoven sonata project tonight at 7:30 in a streamed recital featuring the three Op. 31 works and the Op. 13 “Pathétique.” sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Music
Tonight at 8:30, Oberlin State Left will broadcast a faculty recital devoted to music by William Grant Still, performed by violinists David Bowlin, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Francesca dePasquale, with pianists James Hoswmon.
And the nightly MET Opera stream is a production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov from October 2010, led by Valery Gergiev.
Check the Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1864 American music patroness and composer Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born in Chicago. Her generous advocacy for chamber music led to the founding of the Berkshire Music Festival in 1918, the precursor of Tanglewood, and she was responsible for the commissioning of a long list of important works for the Library of Congress, including quartets by Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, Schoenberg and Webern, a flute sonata by Poulenc, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Click here to watch Demarre McGill perform the Poulenc sonata with pianist Michael McHale.
English composer Philip Heseltine, who used the nom de plume Peter Warlock — a nice touch for Halloween weekend since he had a lively interest in the occult — was born on October 30, 1894 in London. A close friend of Delius since their boyhood at Eton, Heseltine was such a character that he appeared as himself in novels by such authors as D.H. Lawrence. “Classical Nerd” host Thomas Little devoted an episode to Warlock’s life.
Heseltine wrote musical criticism sporadically and composed a long list of songs and choral pieces significant for their eccentricity. Rumor had it that he attended an amateur choral society’s performance of his Three Carols in December, 1930, went home depressed, put the cat out, and gassed himself at the kitchen stove. The Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus programmed those pieces in 2015 without such a tragic after effect.
Listen to his popular carol Benedicamus Domino sung in 2013 by Quire Cleveland, and another carol, Bethlehem Down, performed by King’s College Choir. The latter resulted when poet Bruce Blunt and Heseltine decided to enter a newspaper contest for a new carol. They won, and had “an immortal carouse on the proceeds.”
On this date in 1934, Dutch flutist, musicologist, and virtuoso recorder player Franz Bruggen was born in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to him play his reconstruction of a Bach recorder concerto with the Orchestra of the 18th Century at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. For an explanation of the piece, scroll down to read the comment by Skip Sempé.
And on October 30, 1953, Hungarian-born operetta composer Emmerich Kálmán died in Paris. Click here to watch a virtual Kálmán Festival “from the Merry Widow Vaults,” produced by Ohio Light Opera, who have championed his works in Wooster during their summer seasons.
