by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, composer John Adams conducts The Cleveland Orchestra with organist James McVinnie and saxophonist Timothy McAllister in Gabriella Smith’s Breathing Forests, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and his own City Noir.
At the same hour at The Auricle in Canton, the Canton Symphony’s Divergent Sounds Series hosts Alla Bora, the band specializing in near-extinct Italian folk music, and in Warner Concert Hall, conductor Timothy Weiss, violinist Hannah Hurwitz, baritone Timothy LeFebvre, and the Oberlin Sinfonietta launch Oberlin Conservatory’s “Oclipse” series, anticipating next Monday’s solar event.
INTERESTING READ:
Van Magazine, the European weekly online journal simultaneously published in English and German, is taking Easter Week off, but offers reprints of some of its popular articles, including Benjamin Poore’s February 22 piece, “Inhabiting the Curve: How assistant conductors keep orchestras running.”
“The mythography of great conductors means that they outgrow the role of the assistant like a snake sloughing off its skin; they are already bursting with an ever-expanding musical imagination. In such accounts, being an assistant is never something vital, enriching, and valued in its own right. One might be mistaken for thinking, to adapt a phrase attributed to John Steinbeck, that assistant conductors are merely temporarily embarrassed music directors. Beneath the mythmaking are more instructive stories.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Conductors, composers, and performers alike are well-represented on April 4 in music history. Among those born on this date are French-American conductor Pierre Monteux (1875), American composer and pianist Mary Howe (1882), French composer Eugene Bozza (1905), American composer Elmer Bernstein (1922), and a trio of living musicians, our focus today — all of them with Cleveland Orchestra connections.
Chinese-American composer Chen Yi turns 71 today. Among her many honors, in 2006 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work Si Ji (Four Seasons), which as it happens was premiered by The Cleveland Orchestra the previous year in Lucerne. Since recordings of that piece are not readily available, here’s another work with a local connection: her Happy Rain on a Spring Night was performed by the Oberlin Sinfonietta in 2014, when she was a finalist for a position in the Conservatory’s composition department. Listen to a recording by Third Angle New Music Ensemble here.
Moving over to today’s performers, German-American violinist Augustin Hadelich turns 40. The first-prize winner at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Hadelich made his Severance Music Center debut in 2019 with Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2. Listen to Hadelich speak about the piece before that performance here, and listen to him play the first movement here in a recording with conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the WDR Sinfonieorchester.
And British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason turns 25. Winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician award, Kanneh-Mason went on to make his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 2021 with the Elgar Concerto, which he performs live here with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as part of the 2019 BBC Proms. Speaking of which, Kanneh-Mason delivered another memorable Proms performance when the Chineke! Orchestra — Europe’s first professional orchestra with a majority-Black and ethnically diverse membership — made its Proms debut in 2017. The cellist, who was an original member of the orchestra, joins Chineke! for Dvořák’s Op. 94 Rondo in g here.
