by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Music to raise goose bumps and stand your hair on end
. G. Schirmer’s plans to publish music by Holocaust composers
. Remembering Roget Quilter, Hugo Distler, and Anthony van Hoboken
TODAY’S EVENTS:
2:00 pm – Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, Eric Charnofsky, host. A special Halloween-themed program, including music about haunted landscapes, witches, gnomes, apparitions, hallucinations, the moon, and nighttime. Composers include Arthur Bliss, György Ligeti, Robert Gibson, Ottorino Respighi, Lei Liang, Mathew Rosenblum, George Crumb, and John Corigliano. Listen on WRUW (via the internet feed) or at 91.1 FM in Cleveland.
7:00 pm – M.U.S.i.C. – Stars in the Classics Halloween Musical Salons, Victor Beyens, Maria Beyens & Maude Cloutier, violins, Jack Kehrli, viola, Brendon Phelps, cello, Brian Skoog, voice, Nicole Martin, clarinet, Alexander Kostritsa, Hechengzi Li, Chris Neiner, & Nikolay Pushkarev, piano. Camille Saint-Saens’s Dance Macabre, Antonio Bazzini’s Dance of the Goblins, Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, Steve Isserlis’ The Haunted House, William Bolcom’ Graceful Ghost Rag & Engelbert Humperdinck’s The Witches’ Aria from Hansel and Gretel. A private home in Shaker Heights. $45 general, $70 patron, reserve online.
7:30 pm – Dana Fall Choral Concert, with Voices of YSU directed by Adam Howard and Dana Chorale directed by Hae-Jong Lee. Program includes contemporary works by Sarah Quartel, Elaine Hagenberg, Harry Somers, Daniel Elder, Ola Gjeilo, René Clausen, and Frank Ticheli, concluding with John Rutter’s Gloria. Boardman United Methodist Church. Freewill offering.
HALLOWE’EN PLAYLISTS:
A variety of scary mix tapes is available, but Dark Classical, one of the better collections to listen to on Hallowe’en, will give you an hour and 45 minutes worth of thrills and chills while you’re waiting to pass out sugary treats.
Everyone has their own favorite hair-raising music, and comments on the aforementioned collection have lamented the omission of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and proposed adding Schnittke’s Requiem, and the “Dance of the Knights” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
My own recommendation for generating goose bumps is “Satan’s Dance” from Ralph Vaughan William’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, based on drawings by William Blake (above: Satan smiting Job with boils). The composer dedicated his 1930 work to conductor Sir Adrian Boult, who leads it here with the London Philharmonic at the age of 83. (Satan enters around 4:12).
NEWS BRIEFS:
G. Schirmer, the well-known music publisher, will join Exilarte, an organization based at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, announced last Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust,
The music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring. includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring. Read the New York Times story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
English art song composer Roger Quilter (born on November 1, 1877) and German composer Hugo Distler (died on this date in 1942) have been featured in earlier editions of our almanac here and here. One newcomer is American composer Kent Kennan, who died on November 1, 2003 in Austin, Texas, where he had spent the majority of his career on the faculty of UT — though he also taught briefly at Kent State and Ohio State.
Kennan’s best-known work is the widely performed and widely recorded Night Soliloquy, written in 1936 — a special year for him, given that it also marked his graduation from the master’s program at Eastman (where he studied with Howard Hanson) and his Prix de Rome.
Night Soliloquy was originally written for flute and string orchestra, a version you can hear on YouTube in an important performance of the work: by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in 1943 (the soloist goes named). It was later transcribed with piano accompaniment, and with wind ensemble — listen here from flutist Denis Bouriakov and pianist Ji-Yoon Kim, and here from flutist Betsy Hill and “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, led by Jason K. Fettig, where the clarinets of the band beautifully capture the timbre of the mysterious, pulsating opening.
The German organist, composer, and choral conductor Hugo Distler died at his own hand in Berlin on November 1, 1942. Though he suffered depression over the fate of his colleagues during the Third Reich, as Nick Strimple writes in Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, “it appears that he saw the futility of attempting to serve both God and Nazis, and came to terms with his own conscience unequivocally.”
Distler wrote a great deal of neo-Baroque music for organ and choirs. For just a sampling, listen to his motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied as sung by the Oberlin Collegium Musicum under Steven Plank on a Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert on May 4, 2011.
A work particularly suitable for this Hallowe’en/All Saints’ weekend is Distler’s Totentanz, a 14-movement choral cycle based on poetry by Angelus Silesius. Between the movements, Distler interleaved a friend’s paraphrases of poetry from the Lübecker Totentanz, “a dialogue in Middle Low German between Death and its victims.” The Netherlands Chamber Choir performs the 1934 piece here.
And November 1, 1983 saw the Death of Dutch musicologist Anthony van Hoboken, who edited Joseph Haydn’s catalog of works, hence their identification by “Hoboken” numbers that have nothing to do with New Jersey.