by Daniel Hathaway:
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 is the last local opportunity to hear Apollo’s Fire’s Countryside Concert ¡HISPANIA! with music by Diego Ortiz, Gaspar Sanz, and Santiago de Murcia, plus René Schiffer’s Concerto for Two Violas da Gamba. Jeannette Sorrell conducts from the harpsichord at Avon Lake UCC, 32801 Electric Blvd., Avon Lake. Tickets available online.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Violin Channel reports that, following the final rounds in Fort Worth over the weekend, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition awarded its First Prize of $100,000 to 29-year-old pianist Aristo Sham from Hong Kong/China.
Second Prize was won by 30-year-old Vitaly Starikov from Israel/Russia, who received a cash award of $50,000. Third prize was claimed by 26-year-old Evren Ozel from the United States, who will receive $25,000.
Videos of all rounds of the Cliburn Competition are now available on YouTube.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Danish composer Carl Nielsen was born on this date in 1865 in Norre-Lyndelse. The BBC “Workshop” Series chronicled his life and career in the 1970s in Espansiva: a Portrait, leading one viewer to write, “The BBC used to do this kind of thing very well back in the day, and since there weren’t many channels to choose from, many people had to learn new things despite themselves.”
Watch that documentary here, and enjoy a memorized and choreographed performance of his woodwind quintet by the Copenhagen-based Carion Quintet (who played on the Latvian Concert Association series in Cleveland a few years back). And here’s a video of his Flute Concerto from a CIM Master’s Degree recital in November, 2018. Moisés López-Ruiz is the soloist, and Yohan Kwon conducts the CIM Orchestra.
And on June 9, 1912, composer Ingolf Dahl was born in Hamburg. One of the German musicians who escaped to the United States in the late 1930s to join the expat community in Southern California, Dahl kept one foot in the classical world and the other in the entertainment industry, maintaining a career that included teaching classical lessons to Benny Goodman and arranging for Tommy Dorsey. Michael Tilson Thomas was among his students at UCLA, and he served as director of the Ojai Festival.
WCLV featured his 1949 Concerto for Saxophone and Wind Ensemble in its Cleveland Orchestra on the Radio series in a concert led by Franz Welser-Möst in May of 2005 with Joseph Lulloff as soloist. And here’s a performance of the concerto, Dahl’s best-known work, by Katherine Weintraub and the Eastman Wind Ensemble from November, 2014.
