by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 in Finney Chapel, Raphael Jiménez conducts the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra in Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour, Quinn Mason’s Serenade (premiere), and Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 3.
See our Concert Listings for more information about these and other events
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Italian-American composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born on this date in Florence in 1895, as was American pianist Garrick Ohlsson in Bronxville, NY in 1948. Meanwhile, German composer Johannes Brahms died of liver cancer at age 63 in Vienna on this date in 1897, while German-born American composer Kurt Weill suffered a heart attack at 50 and passed away not long after, on April 3, 1950 in New York City. Finally, British tenor Peter Pears died in Aldeburgh in 1986 at the age of 75.
Picking out a couple of those names, celebrate Ohlsson by reading about his recent, last-minute appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra in a review by Kevin McLaughlin for Cleveland.com. (“With Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra musicians as partners, the pianist strode onstage to render as refined and unfussy a performance of a Mozart Piano Concerto as one might hope to hear.”)
And go down a YouTube rabbit hole in honor of Weill by bopping around from one version to another of his famous ballad “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera, one of his many collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.
Lotte Lenya sings it in the original German (she also sang in the original production), saxophonist Sidney Bechet transforms the tune into a virtuosic display for jazz band, Bobby Darin smooths it out all nice and cool, and in a version for wind quintet, the Amsterdam Quintet spins it into a lyrical, almost pastoral scene — not exactly a portrayal of a serial killer, but something quite pleasing to the ear nonetheless.
