by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
They moved my station!
Beginning today, Monday, March 28, WCLV, Ideastream Public Media’s classical music service, will migrate from 104.9 FM to 90.3 FM. This frequency change will extend classical music access to approximately 1 million additional listeners. National Public Radio news will now come from WKSU, which will begin broadcasting at 89.7 and 104.9 on March 28. Click here to read more about the changes, which are designed to expand coverage for the region.
Eric Charnofsky is spending his two-hour Monday slot on WRUW radio in the company of Karl Goldmark, James Primosch, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Jacob Druckman. Join him for the internet feed at 2 pm.
Tonight at 7:30 pm, and for the first time in a long while, Oberlin’s jazz faculty will share the stage with their students in the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble in a side-by-side from Finney Chapel. The program featuring music by Ray Brown, Marian McPartland, Ivan Lins, and Jay Ashby will be livestreamed.
And Les Délices’ next SalonEra program, which debuts tonight at 7:30, features harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff and Filipino baritone Enrico Lagasca in early music from Asia. Watch a trailer here.
INTERESTING READ:
“The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff are being removed from playbills,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on television on Friday.
“Never mind that Eugene Onegin opened at the Met that evening, as the New York Philharmonic was playing Shostakovich across the street. And later this week the Philharmonic performs three concerts of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, with Rimsky-Korsakov and yet more Rachmaninoff the week after. As with so many cancel-culture narratives, this one is about fostering a sense of grievance, not about the facts.”
Read Zachary Woolfe’s Critic’s Notebook entry in the New York Times here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Speaking of Russian composers, on this date in 1881, Modest Moussorgsky died in 1881 at the age of 42 following a drinking binge, and pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff died in 1943 in California, shortly after becoming a U.S. Citizen.
It’s a toss up whether Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain or Pictures at an Exhibition is more popular. Check out the original piano version of Pictures played by Evgeny Kissin at the Chorégies d’Orange in France in 2002, or by Sviatoslav Richter in 1956, live in Prague.
Certainly the most popular orchestration of Pictures is the one made by Maurice Ravel in 1922, although there are many others. Cleveland Orchestra Music Study Group lecturer Dr. Rose T. Breckenridge talks about the Ravel version here.
Rachmaninoff made personal appearances in Cleveland during his American tours from 1923 to 1942, performing his concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. The composer-pianist’s fame inspired Mike Telin to make a trip to the Cleveland Orchestra archives to learn what kind of P.R the Orchestra used to promote his visits, and to imagine what Rachmaninoff might have done with today’s social media resources. Click here to read “Keeping in touch with your fans then and now: what would Rachmaninoff post on Facebook?”
And to revisit a special Rachmaninoff moment in Cleveland, go here to replay Spanish pianist Martin García García’s final round performance of the Third Concerto, which sealed the deal for his gold medal at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2021. Jahja Ling conducts The Cleveland Orchestra.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com March 28, 2022.
