by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ENTRIES:
. Continuing: Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music. Launching: The Cleveland edition of the Lev Aronson Cello Festival with Haimovitz recital
. Birthday candles and listening suggestions for the anniversaries of Sir John Stainer, Aram Khachaturian, and Vincent Persichetti
TODAY’S EVENTS:
At 2:00 pm, tune into the radio broadcast, “Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music” with host Eric Charnofsky. Today’s focus is on “Classical One-Hit Wonders and Their Neglected Gems,” including music by Pachelbel, Lehar, Dukas, Humperdinck, Satie, and Orff, as well as music by Aram Khachaturian in celebration of his 119th birthday. WRUW, Case Western Reserve University. Click here to listen to the internet feed.
At 7:00 pm the Lev Aronson Cello Festival — usually held in Dallas, this year in Cleveland — will present a recital by Matt Haimovitz (pictured), with pianist Elizabeth DeMio. The program in Mixon Hall of the Cleveland Institute of Music features works by female composers including a premiere, along with film clips by Emmy Award-winning storyteller Ty Kim. You’ll need tickets.
To check out concerts happening this week see our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READS:
To guarantee that your remarks in an interview will get published, make them outrageous — a technique that worked for Igor Stravinsky. Read a throwback article by Edgar lstel in Musical America from November, 1921 where some of his more memorable comments are collected. (“The Germans do not understand, and never have understood music.’ And “I do not deny that Beethoven is a genius. But he created no music.”)
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
June 6 marks the birthdays of English composer, organist, and musical scholar Sir John Stainer (1840 in London), Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903 in Tiflis), and American composer Vincent Persichetti (1915 in Philadelphia).
Perhaps least well-known of this troika is Stainer, until you take a closer look at the origin of Christmas carols you hear or perhaps sing yourself every December. Among the 70 carols published in Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old in 1871, a collection that played an important role in the revival of that musical form, his arrangements of “What Child Is This,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “The First Nowell,” and “I Saw Three Ships” became standard. (Arthur Seymour Sullivan contributed arrangements to the second edition the following year). View or print the entire collection here, which may give choir directors some fresh ideas for next December.
An important bridge between music of the Victorian era and the 20th century, Stainer served as organist of St. Michael’s College, Tenbury, Oxford’s Magdalen College, and London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as professor of music at Oxford, where he was among the first scholars to rediscover the music of Guillaume Dufay, and for whose Magdalen Madrigal Society he wrote modern part-songs. As a choirmaster, he worked to reform the old system where lay clerks (paid adult singers) weren’t expected to attend rehearsals (!)
Although Armenia came under Soviet rule in 1920, and Khachaturian was educated at the Moscow Conservatory, he retained his Armenian cultural identity throughout his career. Among his most popular works is the ballet Gayane, from which a much-performed suite has been extracted. Click here to watch a performance by the Sofia Philharmonic conducted by Beatrice Venezi in Bulgaria Hall on March 7, 2019. And here to listen to the composer lead his Symphonie No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1962.
And Philadelphia native Vincent Persichetti, whose home town and its “local orchestra” were very important to him, talks about his life and career in a charming 28-minute documentary created in 1983 by Penn State University with funding from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and aired on Pennsylvania’s Public Broadcasting System. His wife joins him midway through.
Having experimented early in his career with nearly every trending 20th century style, Persichetti eventually achieved a synthesis, and at his passing in 1987 left us with a large catalog of works including seven operas (there would have been nine, but he withdrew two of them), nine symphonies, 25 Parables for various instruments, and a number of works for wind band. His vocal and choral works demonstrate a sensitivity to poetry of the 20th century. Click here to watch a performance of his Spring Cantata for women’s voices and piano, and here for his Winter Cantata for flute, marimba, and women’s voices. And his take on T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is performed here by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra with trumpeter Chris Gekker.
