by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
• Kenneth Bean conducts Oberlin Sinfonietta in works by David Ludwig, Igor Stravinsky, and George Enescu (7:30, Warner Concert Hall)
• Tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes and violinist Alan Choo star in Apollo’s Fire’s Classical Sparks (7:30, First Methodist, Akron)
• Music Director Franz Welser-Möst (pictured) returns from medical leave to lead The Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos and Beethoven’s Third Symphony (7:30, Severance Music Center)
• The CIM Black Student Union presents a Benefit Concert for the Black Student Union’s Student Assistance Fund (7:30, Mixon Hall).
Visit our Concert Listings page for details and ticket information for these and other performances.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced that Jessie Montgomery will headline the school’s 2025 Young Composers Program. Read more here.
INTERESTING READS:
Roberta Flack’s performances softly burned with the fire of life itself. “The soul singer was ambitiously diverse in her musicianship, and enthralled at every turn – whether doing desolate folk cover versions or lighter, sophisticated pop.” Read the article by Stevie Chick in The Guardian here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Some big names to mention for February 27: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, born either on the 27th or the 25th in 1873 in Naples, Russian composer Alexander Borodin, who died during a ballroom concert in St. Petersburg in 1887, German soprano Lotte Lehmann, born in Perleberg in 1883, and Texas pianist Van Cliburn, who lost his struggle with bone cancer in Fort Worth in 2013 at the age of 78.
Cliburn helped take the chill off the Cold War in 1958 when he won the inaugural Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Cheered by Muscovites and given the first New York ticker tape parade for a classical musician when he returned to the U.S., Cliburn founded his own competition in his hometown of Fort Worth later that year.
Click here to listen to a live recording of his winning performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto. And a 58-minute film by Peter Rosen on Medici-TV documents that event for subscribers (watch a free trailer here).
