By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today from 2-4pm, WRUW airs Eric Charnofsky’s weekly broadcast, Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music. Today’s edition spotlights Karel Husa’s Five Poems (woodwind quintet), Albert Glinsky’s Toccata-Scherzo (violin and piano), Bohuslav Martinů’s Symphony No. 4, Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (arr. for brass quintet), Julia Wolfe’s Oxygen, for 12 flutes & Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Three Russian Songs for Chorus and Orchestra. Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.
Click here to visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page for more information.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Cleveland Chamber Choir will present three pairs of concerts next season, led by its recently-named artistic director Gregory Ristow. Read a press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Czech-American composer Karel Husa (pictured above) was born in Prague on August 7, 1921. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, and taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years. In a January, 2017 New York Times obituary, Steve Smith writes
Mr. Husa created works in most of the standard concert-music forms apart from opera, including two symphonies, several concertos, four string quartets and three ballets.…
In “Music for Prague 1968,” a response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire.
The piece, given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, became one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date.
Click here to listen to a retrospective of Husa’s music, including Music for Prague, from a 2005 symposium in which the composer participated.
