TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Only one birth and one death to memorialize on the seventeenth day of November.
American composer and arranger Hershey Kay was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1919. He studied at the Curtis Institute, where he was a classmate of Leonard Bernstein, who entrusted the scores of On the Town, Peter Pan, and Candide to Kay for orchestration (only rarely do composers take that task on themselves).
Among Kay’s other products was the reconstruction and orchestration of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Grande Tarantelle, choreographed by George Balanchine and famously performed by New York City Ballet’s Patricia McBride and Edward Villela. Watch them dance the score here.
And on November 17, 1959, Brazilian composer, pianist, and conductor Heitor Villa-Lobos died in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 72. Among his most celebrated works are the nine Bachianas Brasileiras suites. Written between 1930 and 1945 for various instrumental ensembles, they meld Baroque compositional forms and techniques with Brazilian folk and popular music.
Suite No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos is among the most-performed. Watch Mark Kosower’s Cleveland Institute of Music cello studio play the two-movement work here with soprano Natasha Simmons in a concert from February 29, 2016.
During her visit to the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society in 2017, Sharon Isbin gave a master class on Villa-Lobos’ Prelude No. 1.
And perhaps local guitarists will recall this performance in Harkness Chapel on May 18, 2017 of his Etude No. 7 by Chaconne Klaverenga, a student of Jason Vieaux at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
