by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 in Warner Concert Hall, the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Timothy Weiss, will be joined by Jennifer Koh, violin (pictured, by Roger Mastroianni), Alexandra Armantrading, soprano, Rodrick Dixon, tenor, Timothy LeFebvre, baritone, and the Oberlin Percussion Group, for a program that includes Emma O’Halloran’s meditation for metal pipes, Olly Wilson’s Of Visions and Truth, Jesse Jones’ Ennead, and Courtney Bryan’s Syzygy. (To be repeated on Friday in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art).
For details of other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Today’s birthdays include French pianist Petr Eben and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916), Czech composer and church musician (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzstein died on January 22, 1964.
Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.
The late Cleveland organist Karel Paukert frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)
And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.
