by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
To celebrate its 75th Anniversary, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society has booked Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art for five evenings and has engaged the Jerusalem Quartet to play all fifteen of Dmitri Shostaktovich’s string quartets in chronological order, creating something of a timeline of the composer’s life in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Tonight’s 7:30 program includes Quartets 1-3, and each evening will be preceded by a 6:30 lecture by James Wilding
For details of these and other events, please visit our Concert Listings page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On April 21, 1749, a public rehearsal of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music took place — against the composer’s wishes — at London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Obviously not respecting social distancing, an impressive crowd of 12,000 turned out, causing traffic jams for three hours on London Bridge. The eventual premiere performance on April 27 in Green Park was something of a disaster — one of the pavilions caught fire, rockets went astray, and other effects fizzled due to rain. Click here to listen to a not historically informed performance by the London Symphony led by Cleveland’s own George Szell — he also leaves out the 101 cannons called for at the work’s debut.
And on this date in 1899, composer Randall Thompson was born in New York City. Best known for his choral music, although he also wrote symphonies and an opera, his Alleluia has been sung by choirs around the world. Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitzky commissioned it for the 1940 opening ceremony of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, requesting a piece that could be learned and sung by international musicians in a single, short rehearsal.
Watch a Boston Symphony video in which the composer “discusses the commissioning of the piece, the world events that shaped his writing, why he chose “Alleluia” as the subject, and what kind of “Alleluia” he hopes to express through the piece.”
Click here for a decidedly international performance by Stockholm’s S:t Jacobs Chamber Choir at the Basilica di San Pietro in Perugia, Italy — a fitting tribute to Pope Francis, whose death over the Easter weekend is at the top of today’s news,
