by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Northeast Ohio classical music calendar is blank for this Thursday, but while Cleveland audiences are busy keeping snow, ice, and subzero wind chills at bay, The Cleveland Orchestra is in Miami preparing for the first concert of their 2025 residency on Friday.
Click here to find out more about the Orchestra’s activities during the three weeks they’ll spend this season in the Sunshine State.
For details of upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Cleveland Jazz Orchestra is offering its patrons a sneak peek at the program for its concert with the Musical Theater Project on Friday at the Maltz. Click here to save a tree and download a pdf of the program for “The Gershwins are ‘Girl Crazy.’”
The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced that faculty pianist Geraldo Tessionniér will again lead its Young Artist Piano Seminar this summer from July 6-12. “In addition to Teissonnière, participants will train with new CIM faculty member Daria Rabotkina, Director of Academy Piano Studies, and guest artist Nicolas Namoradze, faculty assistant to pianists Veda Kaplinsky and Emanuel Ax at The Juilliard School and winner of the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition.”
Applications to the Young Artist Piano Seminar are open now. Admission decisions for priority applicants will be sent by March 1.
TODAY’S ALMANAC
This date in 1894 saw the first performance of Antonin Dvorák’s own arrangement of Stephen Foster’s Old Folks at Home with vocal soloists Sissierette Jones and Harry T. Burleigh at a concert of African American choral music at Madison Square Concert Hall in NYC. Listen to a later performance here.
Exactly one year later, American composer Edward MacDowell’s Indian Suite was first performed (and the composer left us on January 23, 1908 at the age of 47). Listen to an early 1950s recording by Howard Hanson and the Eastman Rochester Orchestra remastered in 1974.
The official debut of Edward “Duke” Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige Suite at Carnegie Hall followed a rehearsal performance on this date in 1943 at Rye High School, New York. Listen to the 1958 full album featuring Mahalia Jackson here.
And on this date in 2003, Franz Welser-Möst led the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Orionwith the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Music Center. Now’s a good time to listen to its second movement, “Winter Sky” from a live performance that same year by the Orchestre de Paris led by Christoph Eschenbach.
And January 23 births include American composers John Luther Adams (1953), and Mason Bates (1977), while the necrology for this date includes bass Paul Robeson (1976) and composer Samuel Barber (1981 at age 70).
