by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight the Baldwin Wallace Symphony Orchestra, led by Douglas Droste, features soprano Kate Tiemens in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a nostalgic setting of words by James Agee (7:30 in Gamble Auditorium)
Also tonight, British composer/conductor Thomas Adès (pictured) joins mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and The Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the U.S. premiere of the co-commission America: A Prophecy, plus Jean Sibelius’s The Oceanides, Kaija Saariaho’s Oltra Mar, and Charles Ives’ Orchestral Set No. 2 (7:30 at Severance Music Center, repeated at 8 pm Saturday). Read a preview interview with Sasha Cooke here.
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these and other forthcoming concerts.
LOCAL HEADLINES:
CIM’s concert calendar expands with the launch of a new conductor-less chamber orchestra. Read the Cleveland Institute of Music press release here.
The Cleveland Orchestra to display costumes from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther and perform live film score. Read the Cleveland Orchestra News story here.
INTERESTING READS:
Trump’s Revenge Now Includes His Takeover of the Kennedy Center. “What will a thin-skinned showman do with an institution central to Washington’s cultural life? One expectation is more country music.” Read the White House Memo in the New York Times here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Austrian pianist and composer Carl Czerny who was born on February 20, 1791, became one of Beethoven’s star pupils and was said to be able to play any of his master’s works from memory if merely requested by opus number. Czerny is remembered today chiefly for his piano etudes, but his more than 1,000 compositions include such interesting works as the Piano Concerto in C for Four Hands, Op. 153, and the Symphony No. 5 in E-flat.
Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger left the scene on February 20, 1961 in White Plains, NY, at the age of 78. Grainger joined a group of musicians in a lifelong quest to rescue British and Scandinavian music from central European influences, largely through the use of folk music, though he also dabbled in mechanical music-making (including recording piano rolls of his compositions and arrangements.)
Among Grainger’s most popular arrangements are wind band versions of Lincolnshire Posy (listen here to a performance by the West Point Band) and Irish Tune from County Derry (aka “Danny Boy,” performed here by the University of Michigan Symphonic Band). As a high schooler, I looked forward to hearing Irish Tune at the end of each of the University of Kansas summer music camp concerts, and still get the chills in the last verse when the horns suddenly soar out their counter melody.
And on February 20, 1996, Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu died in Tokyo. His nature-based compositions are popular and frequently performed. Click on the links to listen to Water-ways and Rain Spell performed by the CIM New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch, director.
