by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: BW hosts pianist Yaron Kohlberg (left)
•Announcements: Keith Fitch wins 2023 Composer Award, Assembly for the Arts releases list of “key learnings” after listening sessions and surveys
•Interesting read: a violin concerto by a “nearly forgotten” Ukrainian composer, revived by Joshua Bell, Dalia Stasevska, and the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv
•Almanac: Henri Dutilleux, Petr Eben, Marc Blitzstein, Mac computers, and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 7, pianist Yaron Kohlberg plays a free Guest Artist Recital at BW’s Gamble Auditorium. (And tomorrow at 3 he leads a master class with BW Conservatory keyboard students, also in Gamble.)
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
CIM composition department head Keith Fitch (right) has been named a winner of the 2023 Composer Award from the Maine-based Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. The prize comes with a $50,000 commission for the Bangor Symphony Orchestra to be premiered in spring 2025, and a residency in Bangor and Rockland during the 2024-25 season.
After conducting listening sessions and online surveys in August and September last year, Assembly for the Arts has released a list of the “key learnings” guiding the organization’s work going forward. Read here.
INTERESTING READ:
Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska, American violinist Joshua Bell, and the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv recently traveled to Warsaw to perform the Violin Concerto of “virtually forgotten” Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann, as Charlotte Higgins writes for The Guardian. “The work — as well as other Ukrainian pieces the orchestra are preparing to perform in Warsaw — represents a discovery, and an assertion, of a Ukrainian classical musical heritage that is only now, in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, beginning to be fully realised.” Read the article here. (The performance will be streamed on medici.tv on January 28, and the recording will be available in the summer.)
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
Today’s birthdays include French pianist and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916) and Czech composer and church musician Petr Eben (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzstein died on January 22, 1964.
Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.
Cleveland organist Karel Paukert has frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)
And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.