by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
The young violinists of the Cooper International Competition begin taking the stage at Oberlin Conservatory today. The annual competition, staged in January this year, kicks off with Round 1, Session 1 this afternoon and evening.
From 2:30 – 5:45 pm and again from 7:30 – 10:00 pm, the first half of the nineteen hopefuls will perform 30-minute recitals in Warner Concert Hall. All rounds will also be streamed live at oberlin.edu and via The Violin Channel.
Learn more about this year’s competition here, in Mike Telin’s interview with competition director and jury chair Sibbi Bernhardsson.
For more details and to check out what else is coming up this week, visit our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READS:
Two recent articles discuss how classical music is attracting younger audiences. For CBC News, this article by Jackson Weaver points to the appeal of cross-genre performances and the rise of classical streaming — with the latter mentioning The Cleveland Orchestra’s partnership with the boutique classical streamer IDAGIO.
Weaver also discusses the successes of social media, as does Michael Andor Brodeur for The Washington Post. Through 15-second clips of pieces like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Brodeur writes, classical music “has become part of the cultural fabric of TikTok, even as it’s shredded to bits.” Read that opinion piece here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
In Western Christian communities, January 6 marks the Feast of the Epiphany or the visit of astrologers from the East to worship the baby Jesus, bringing symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The story, told only in the Gospel according to Matthew, has spawned a rich mythology and inspired multiple works of art.
Visit the YouTube playlist of 130 titles of music for the Epiphany here, including Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1951 made-for-television opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors.
And on this date in 1838, German composer Max Bruch was born in Köln (Cologne), the ancient city on the Rhine river where — incidentally — legend has it that the Three Kings are buried under the high altar of the cathedral.
Author of some 200 works including three violin concertos and a late-in-life octet, Bruch bucked the trend toward modernism and wrote in a traditional German romantic idiom.
Click here to listen to a performance of Bruch’s first concerto by Hilary Hahn and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada from December, 2016, and here for a performance of the Octet from the Round Top Music Festival in 2017.
