by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, Don Verkuijlen leads the Singers Club of Cleveland in“Holiday Twists” at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
At 7:30, Brett Mitchell leads The Cleveland Orchestra & Chorus in the second of its fourteen Holiday Concerts at Severance Music Center (pictured) featuring vocalist Capathia Jenkins. Our review of the opening performance will appear later this morning on Cleveland.com (the Plain Dealer).
Also tonight at 7:30, Apollo’s Fire brings “Wassail! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas” to Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these performances.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
On this date in 1788, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach passed away in Hamburg at age 74. That second surviving son of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach is known for retaining the influence of his father’s music while charting a path of his own in the early Classical period.
Here’s one throwback of a listening recommendation: the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble released a record of three C.P.E. Bach sonatas in 1982. Fortunately it’s been digitized and is available on YouTube: click these links to hear the Sonata in g (oboe and continuo), Trio Sonata in d (flute, violin, and continuo), and Sonata in D (viola da gamba and continuo), played by such names as James Caldwell, Catharina Meints, Lisa Goode Crawford, Robert Willoughby, and Marilyn McDonald.
For a neat contrast, today is also the birthday of composer/conductor/clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, born in 1959 in Chicago. He’s known for his diverse musical interests, including post-minimalism, jazz, pop, Balinese traditional music, and cross-cultural collaborations. Those latter two arenas informed his 2017 visit to Northeast Ohio, when he brought Gamelan Galak Tika (the Balinese gamelan ensemble he founded and directs) to the Cleveland Museum of Art for a celebration of composer Lou Harrison.
I had the chance to interview Ziporyn before that concert, and one topic we discussed was the contrast between Harrison’s music and his own. As Ziporyn said,
In Lou’s mature music, there’s a serenity and a sense of being comfortable with who he is and with what he regards as beautiful, noble, and coherent… I think my compositions…are more about embracing the contradictions that come with making music in a busy world…Particularly when there’s a cross-cultural linkage, I’ve always wanted to deal with the ways that can be complex and thorny.
Along those lines, check out Ziporyn’s 1990 Kekembangan for saxophone quartet and Balinese gamelan, heard here in a performance from October 2019 as part of the Bowling Green New Music Festival.
