HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, The Cleveland Opera will stage Georges Bizet’s Doctor Miracle, an hour-long, one-act comedy,with sets and costumes, sung in English, and accompanied by chamber instrumentalists. Stewart Room of the Randall Campus Center, Malone University, Canton.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On November 24, 1868, American composer and pianist Scott Joplin (pictured) was born near Marshall, Texas. Most famous for single-handedly inventing ragtime — a syncopated American genre revived by William Bolcom and William Albright, who introduced the young musicologist Joshua Rifin to Joplin’s music in 1968, and further popularized it in the movie The Sting — Joplin wrote two operas as well.
The materials for A Guest of Honor have been lost, probably seized by a rooming house owner in lieu of rent during a tour in 1904, but Treemonisha enjoyed a full production by Houston Grand Opera in May, 1975. Watch a video (with subtitles in Portuguese!) here.
Back to ragtime: Joplin made seven pianola rolls in 1916 including his most famous piece, the Maple Leaf Rag. In 1970, Rifkin’s Nonesuch recording of Joplin piano rags was the label’s first to sell a million copies.
Also born on November 24 (in 1934), Russian composer Alfred Schnittke adopted what he called his polystylistic technique in works like his remarkable Concerto Grosso No. 1, performed live in Moscow in 2004 by Gidon Kremer, Tatiana Grindenko and Kremerata Baltica.
On November 24, 1940, American jazz composer Wendell Logan was born in Thompson, Georgia. He joined the Oberlin Conservatory Faculty and founded the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble in 1973, later developing a jazz curriculum for the school, which adopted admission standards for jazz students in 1991. Logan spoke at the dedication of the Kohl Jazz Studies Building in 2010 (he died later that year).
And listen to a February, 1991 recording of Logan’s Roots, Branches, Shapes and Shades (of Green), commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, composed for pianist Neal Creque, and first performed under the direction of Edwin London in February, 1991.
Finally, multi-genre double bass phenomenon and composer Edgar Meyer was born on this date in 1960. ChamferFest Cleveland violinist David Bowlin and bassist Nathan Farrington performed the third movement of his Concerto Duo at The Wine Spot in June, 2014. Watch here.
