by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Tonight: Cleveland Orchestra holiday concert
•Local News: MLK Celebration Concert scheduled, Western Reserve Chorale seeks singers, and CIM recognizes a pair of alumni (pictured)
•Further afield: R.I.P. composer Angelo Badalamenti, and New School adjunct strike comes to an end
•Almanac: first performances of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, Bloch’s Violin Concerto (in Cleveland), and Revueltas’ Sensemayá
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Cleveland Orchestra continues the run of its holiday program tonight at 7:30 at Severance Music Center. Brett Mitchell conducts, and the ensemble is joined by soprano Mikaela Bennett, the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and members of the Blossom Music Festival Chorus. Click here to read a preview article and here for tickets.
LOCAL NEWS:
Speaking of Severance, The Cleveland Orchestra will host its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Concert on Sunday, January 15 at 7:00 pm, and free tickets will be made available here on January 7 at 10:00 am. (All tickets are typically distributed within hours, and there is a limit of four tickets per household.) Audio of the concert will be broadcast live on WCLV, WKSU, and Ideastream.
Assistant conductor Daniel Reith will lead the Orchestra and the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Chorus, directed by William Henry Caldwell. The program includes music by Florence Price, William L. Dawson, Aaron Copland, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Thomas Dorsey, Philip Herbert, Richard Smallwood, Louise Shropshire, and J. Rosamond Johnson, as well as traditionals arranged by Moses Hogan and Stacey V. Gibbs.
The 2023 Community Day — also free, also at Severance — will take place January 16 beginning at 12:30 pm. That event will feature performances by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus and Youth Orchestra, as well as a concert from the Crescendo! Program — a partnership between The Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland School of the Arts, Tri-C Creative Arts Academy, and select K-8 schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
Western Reserve Chorale invites singers to join the ensemble, which rehearses Tuesday evenings from 7:15-9:30 pm at Church of the Gesu in University Heights beginning on January 3. Tuesday rehearsals will be streamed over Zoom for those who cannot attend live, and recordings will be made available for practice use at home. Given that the ensemble’s next performance will be presented alongside Choral Arts Cleveland, singers are also invited to rehearse with that group on Sunday evenings from 7-9 at Disciples Church in Cleveland Heights. Send an email to WRC@westernreservechorale.org for more information.
And the Cleveland Institute of Music has announced the winners of its Distinguished Alumni Award (given to Scott Price, a pianist and educator focused on children with special needs) and its Alumni Achievement Award (given to Diana Cohen, concertmaster of the Calgary Philharmonic and co-founder of ChamberFest Cleveland and ChamberFest West). Price and Cohen will receive their awards during CIM’s Honors Convocation on Friday, May 19 at 10:00 am. Both will be keynote speakers at that event, and both will perform that evening at CIM’s Luminaries Benefit Concert.
FURTHER AFIELD:
Composer Angelo Badalamenti, best known for his collaborations with filmmaker David Lynch, died on December 11 at the age of 85. His theme for the television series Twin Peaks won the 1990 Grammy Award for best instrumental pop performance, while his several lauded film scores include music for Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, a particular favorite of mine — both beautiful and unsettling with its bleeding synth. In the composer’s obituary for The Washington Post, Tim Greiving puts it well when he describes the “dreamlike melancholy” and “dread” that Badalamenti conjured in his music. Read that article here.
And as The Violin Channel reports, “the longest adjunct strike in U.S. history” concluded this past weekend, with part-time faculty at New York City’s The New School — which includes the Mannes School of Music — achieving wage increases, expanded health insurance, and greater job security. Read the article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
This date in music history includes anniversaries for a handful of important works.
Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony was premiered on December 15, 1893 by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. (“A capacity crowd queued outside the Hall in the pouring rain to get a first listen,” according to an article from the venue.) Click here to listen to a recording by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra.
On that note, Ernest Bloch’s Violin Concerto was first performed on this date in 1938 by Dimitri Mitropoulos and — yes, The Cleveland Orchestra, with Joseph Szigeti as soloist. Listen here to a live recording from a year after the premiere, featuring Szigeti himself with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg.
And three thousand miles away, on that very same day in 1938, Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemayá was receiving its first performance, with the composer leading a pick-up orchestra at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Click here to listen to a recording by that city’s oldest symphony orchestra: the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM.