by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight’s 7 pm performance of Handel’s Messiah by Apollo’s Fire at St. Raphael in Bay Village is the only one of its four local presentations for which tickets were still available at press time.
The Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concerts continue at Severance Music Center tonight at 7:30, and at the same hour, CityMusic Cleveland continues its December Orchestra concerts at Fairmount Presbyterian in Cleveland Heights.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Cleveland.com reports that “Baldwin Wallace University has named Jennifer Hemphill as professor of music theater and music theater director. The university described the hire as the first step in assembling a new leadership team to replace program director Victoria Bussert.”
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced its 45th anniversary concert honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 19. While the concert is free, tickets become available on a first-come, first-served basis on Jan. 4.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
December 12 is a rare, uneventful date in music history. Drawing on loosened associations, two celebrations occur to us which may be worth a thought.
First, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was born on this date in Ådalsbruk. His fame rests mainly on his 1893 expressionist image, The Scream, which exists in several versions, has been stolen twice, and “communicates the anxiety and terror of a man being dragged into a new and terrifying modern era, defined by conflict and mechanical industry.”
If that resonates with your own feelings, click here to learn more by reading the British Museum’s Ten Things you may not know about The Scream.
And December 12 is National Ding-a-Ling Day, “which encourages us to reconnect by telephone with people we once talked to often. “It may be an old classmate, co-worker, or neighbor from years ago. Or perhaps a call will go out to the child who used to mow the grass during the summer. How about that couple who carpooled for soccer? What was their name? Many people slip out of our lives who would love to hear the ding-a-ling of a call from you. Why don’t you join the Ding-a-ling club and call someone this year?”
That leads us (via those loosened associations) to Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera The Telephone (or L’Amour à trois), which premiered in 1947 and was presented by Oberlin Opera in a special made-for-the-pandemic production directed by Jason Aaron Goldberg in November of 2020. Jarrett Hoffman reviewed it for ClevelandClassical.com.
