by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Stay home today and enjoy the latest episode of Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, hosted by Eric Charnofsky and broadcast online from WRUW, Case Western Reserve University, from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
Host Eric Charnofsky celebrates the birthdays of Franz Schubert and Philip Glass with an arrangement of a Schubert Piano and Violin Sonata for flute and strings, and Glass’s orchestral piece The Light, written on commission from CWRU. Other music includes Gian Carlo Menotti’s Violin Concerto, and George Tsontakis’s Ghost Variations for piano. Click here to listen to the internet feed.
And at 7:30 pm, the latest episode of Les Délices’ SalonEra will be guest hosted by multi-instrumentalist Daphna Mor. “Ottoman Influence” explores eastern cultural influences on western music in the 17th and 18th centuries and beyond and features oud player Kane Matthis and Turkish violinist Ceren Turkmenoglu. Watch a trailer here. Register and watch online free (donations welcome). Available on-demand after debut.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Double bassist Kebra-Seyoun Charles and violinist Jonathan Okseniuk have placed first in the senior and junior divisions of the 25th Annual Sphinx Competition for young Black and Latinx String Players. The finals were streamed online from Detroit on January 29. Charles, from Miami, studies at Juilliard with Joseph Conyers. Okseniuk is a student of Jing Zeng at the Arete Preparatory Academy in Mesa, Arizona. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
The big names to remember today are Austrian composer Franz Schubert and American minimalist composer Philip Glass, both born on the last day of January, in Vienna (1797) and Baltimore (1937), respectively.
Glass is topical in Cleveland this week: John Adams will lead the “Facades” movement from his 1982 suite, Glassworks, on Cleveland Orchestra concerts this weekend. Scored for two soprano saxophones, synthesizer, viola, and cello, it was originally intended for the film score of Koyaanisqatsi. Ultimately omitted, it’s frequently performed as a separate piece.
After his larger concert and stage works, the composer was interested in creating what he called a more popular, “Walkman-Suitable” work, “specially mixed for your personal cassette player.” Click here to listen to Louisiana State University percussion professor Brett William Dietz play his own solo version of “Facades.”
From what are myriad possibilities, let’s choose to salute Schubert with settings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (“The soul of mankind is like water”), a poem which seems both to have obsessed him and proved problematic. One is for unaccompanied male chorus, an entirely different setting that the composer left unfinished adds piano, and the remarkable third version — again completely different — adds an ensemble of low strings. Listen to No. 3 as performed in 2011 by the Norwegian Soloist Choir and the Oslo Camerata, directed by Grete Pedersen.
And does anybody remember the American tenor Mario Lanza? Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza on this date in 1921 in Philadelphia, he was discovered by Louis B. Mayer, who made him a movie star in the 1940s, and nearly simultaneously by Serge Koussevitzky, who groomed him as an opera singer. Click here to watch a centennial celebration of Lanza’s vocal talent created in 2021.
