by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Events tonight from Urban Troubadour and The Cleveland Orchestra
•News briefs: the 2022 Re:Sound lineup and schedule, auditions for the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and a change of conductor for The Cleveland Orchestra’s concerts April 14-16
•In memoriam: American composer Dorothy Rudd Moore (pictured)
HAPPENING TODAY:
In Urban Troubadour’s “Chamber Orchestra Gala” tonight at the Akron Civic Theater, you can take in small plates and drinks at 6:30, music by Britten, Ravel, and Abels at 7:30, and live jazz and desserts at 8:30. All that said, tickets seem to be booked up according to their website.
And at 7:30 pm, guest conductor Alan Gilbert visits The Cleveland Orchestra for a program of music by Boulanger, Chin, Debussy, and Chopin — more specifically that composer’s Second Piano Concerto, featuring Emanuel Ax as soloist. Tickets are available here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The new and experimental music festival Re:Sound has announced its 2022 schedule. Five concerts and one workshop event will take place from June 9-12 at the Bop Stop, The Music Settlement’s Ohio City campus, Kaiser Gallery, and CODA.
The lineup includes the Warp Trio, the nine-piece Robin Blake Sound Experiment, pianist Eunbi Kim, trumpeter Émelie Fortin, harpist Danielle Kuntz, the voice-saxophone duo DechoVoche, the sound collage project Elephant Ornament, vocalist SLOWSPIN, saxophonist-composer Nick Zoulek, and the chamber ensemble PinkNoise. Click here to read about the artists, and here if you’d like to offer one of them your couch.
Auditions for the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus are open now for May 22, 25, and 28. Register here.
There’s been a personnel change for The Cleveland Orchestra’s concerts April 14-16. Due to visa delays, conductor Francois-Xavier Roth will be replaced by Kahchun Wong, who will be making his Cleveland Orchestra debut. The program will still feature Christian Tetzlaff in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, paired with Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.
IN MEMORIAM:
American composer, educator, and Society of Black Composers co-founder Dorothy Rudd Moore, a native of New Castle, Delaware, passed away on March 30 at age 81.
Moore was a graduate of Howard University, where she studied composition with Mark Fax. Other mentors included Chou Wen-Chung in New York City, and Nadia Boulanger after Moore went to Fontainebleau, France through the Lucy Moten Fellowship. That award was followed by grants from the American Music Center, Meet The Composer, and the New York State Council on the Arts, for which she later served as a panelist — as she also would twice for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moore received commissions from the National Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, and Opera Ebony — the latter for her opera Frederick Douglass, commissioned by Opera Ebony, with a libretto also written by the composer.
Reviewing the 1985 premiere for The New York Times, Tim Page highlights the moment “when Douglass contemplates the bitter irony of a pre-emancipation Fourth of July.” For that aria, Moore set excerpts from a speech that Douglass delivered in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852, the most famous line of which reads: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
Watch a performance of the aria by baritone José Pietri-Coimbre and pianist Richard Liebowitz from 2019. You can also read about the speech here from the Library of Congress, and read the full speech here from BlackPast.