by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at 6 pm, the Friends of the McGaffin Carillon host a Summer Carillon Festival Concert by Elisabeth Wang at the tower in University Circle.
And at 7:30, the Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists continues with the first of two Semi-Final Chamber Round Sessions in Mixon Hall at CIM designed to evaluate how well contestants play with others.
For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
French composer and harpsichordist Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre entered the Elysian Fields in Paris on this date in 1729. Born into a prominent family of musicians and artisans, she was educated by her father on an equal basis with her brothers, and became an early favorite of Louis XIV at Versailles. She composed in all contemporary forms, although not all of her works have survived.
Click here to watch Cleveland’s Burning River Baroque perform her cantata, Judith. Soprano Malina Rauschenfels and harpsichordist Paula Maust are joined by Sarah Lynn, baroque flute, and Glenna Curren, baroque cello, for a concert in Foxburg, PA in March, 2019.
For a sampling of her keyboard music, listen here to Elisabetta Guglielmin’s performances of several suites for the clavecin. Follow along with the score to see how one harpsichordist realizes the notation of the prélude non-mensuré, a popular way of encouraging a quasi-improvisatory performance.
On July 27, 1924, Italian-German composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni died in Berlin. Known for his Romantic piano elaborations of Bach chorales, Busoni crowned his keyboard works with his immense Piano Concerto.
Pianist Garrick Ohlsson recorded it in the late 1980s with Christoph von Dohnányi, The Cleveland Orchestra and the men of the Orchestra Chorus. Thirty years later, Ohlsson revisited the piece with the Orchestra in February, 2019, and prefaced the performance with some of his thoughts. (Ohlsson recently opened the Summers at Severance Series with Rachmaninoff’s rarely performed first concerto. He talked about that here.)
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