by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Cavani String Quartet meets up for its latest collaboration with poet Mwatabu Okantah, Professor of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University. The subject of “Collage” is spoken poetry woven in and around music, and the program will be streamed live from the Bop Stop at 7:00 pm. Free, but donations welcome.
(Speaking of poetry, read the back story of Amanda Gorman’s electrifying contribution to yesterday’s Biden/Harris Inauguration ceremony.)
Fans of gaming music can tune in to Local 4 Music Fund’s latest episode of “Tuning In,” a program of piano arrangements of Nintendo soundtracks played by Rob Kovacs. Click here at 7:00 pm to access “88 bit.” Free, but donations benefit musicians.
And here’s a heads up for Friday, when a Curtis Opera Theatre duet scenes program streams at noon, and the evening lineup includes Jason Vieaux on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, CityMusic Cleveland chamber music in-person at St. Stanislaus, the Catalyst Quartet hosted by CIM, and the Oberlin Trio, when violinist David Bowlin and pianist Haewon Song welcome new cellist, Dmitry Kouzov. Some triage will be necessary!
INTERESTING READ:
New Yorker critic Alex Ross takes a different approach to Beethoven in the composer’s 250th anniversary year. Read Keep Beethoven Weird here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1575, Queen Elizabeth I granted English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd letters patent that gave them a monopoly over publishing music and music paper. The first collection, set that year by the Hugenot printer T. Vautrollier, was Cantiones sacrae, containing 17 motets each by the two composers. Listen to Tallis’ O nata lux de lumine sung by Almire here.
And on January 21 of 1626, English lutenist and composer John Dowland died in London and was buried on February 20 in the St. Anne’s Church, Blackfriars. Much of his music is doleful, either due to his personal tendency toward melancholy or reflecting one of the prevailing fashions of his time.
An appropriate song to mark the occasion would be In darkness let me dwell, one of three of his songs published by his son in 1610. Listen to it here performed by soprano Estelí Gomez and guitarist Colin Davin.
On January 21, 1918, Italian cellist and conductor Antonio Janigro was born in Milan. Stranded in Yugoslavia during World War II, he taught at the Zagreb Conservatory and founded the chamber orchestra I Solisti di Zagreb. ChamberFest Cleveland cellist Oliver Herbert, who currently plays on a 1769 Guadagnini instrument that belonged to Janigro, and is on loan from the cellist’s family, spoke with Janigro’s son Damir, who is Director of Cerebrovascular Research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Lerner College of Medicine, in a four-part interview about his father’s life and career. Begin here, and continue here, here, and here.
Two events on this date that altered the course of American music history include the first national radio broadcast from a U.S. Opera House in 1927 (Gounod’s Faust from Chicago), and the American debut of conductor Erich Leinsdorf in New York in 1938. The first paved the way for weekly Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. The second could have kept Leinsdorf on the podium at Severance Hall had not service in the Army pulled him into uniform. Enter George Szell.
Finally, Danish pianist and comedian Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” closed on this date in 1956 at the John Golden Theater in New York after 849 performances, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest-running one-man show in the history of theater. We could all use some of Borge’s sophisticated silliness these days.