by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On May 4, 1665, Italian harpsichord builder Bartolomeo Cristofori was born in Padua. During his career, he would invent the first practical pianoforte, launching a family of instruments whose strings were struck with hammers rather than plucked, earning them their “soft-loud” name. His first model, crafted in 1720 in Florence, is still on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — and during the closure of the collection, can be viewed online here.
Oberlin Conservatory professors David Breitman and Peter Takács devised their course Time Travel for Pianists to introduce their students to the history of the piano, using historic and modern instruments from Oberlin’s rich collection. Watch a 2012 video where they explain what they had in mind and students offer their insights into what they learned from older instruments that inform their performances on modern Steinways.
KENT STATE SHOOTINGS — 50th ANNIVERSARY:
Click here to watch the official Kent State University commemoration of the shootings by the National Guard of four students that took place fifty years ago today. And go here to read an opinion piece about the anniversary by Cleveland State University professor Richard M. Perloff.
ONLINE & ON THE AIRWAVES TODAY:
See details in our Concert Listings for today’s scheduled events: fp Creative launches its Long Distance series with a virtual release of collabs, Lunchtime with the Cleveland Orchestra, an archive performance by the CIM Chamber Orchestra of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, and the MET Opera’s HD Archive webcast of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
BW VIRTUAL HANSEL & GRETEL THIS WEEK:
This Friday, May 8, the 2020 Vocal Performance Program class at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory will present their 30-minute adaptation of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Click here to read a Clevelandclassical.com article about the project.
Click here to visit the Opera Interactive website where you can listen to the story of Hansel and Gretel, learn the opera’s children’s chorus, watch a dress rehearsal (available now), and enjoy the performance (available May 8). Children of all ages are invited to submit artwork inspired by scenes from the opera. (The deadline is May 5 at 5:00 pm). Click here to learn more.
INTERESTING READS:
New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini writes today about the Berlin Philharmonic’s first live concert since the lockdown, presented last Friday in the Philharmonie. Conductor Kirill Petrenko and small groups of performers (limited by German restrictions to 15 onstage at a time) observed strict distancing and made use of Erwin Stein’s arrangement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, originally created in 1921 for Arnold Schoenberg’s private concert series in Vienna. Read his Critic’s Notebook entry here.
And following up on earlier articles when the Times asked a variety of artists and critics to choose five minute excerpts that would make their friends fall in love with classical music and the piano, this time the proposed subject was opera. Read and listen to their submissions here. (The comments section where readers could enter their own choices is now closed, but there are many other contributions that are fun to read.)
