by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: Ohio Light Opera, CIPC for Young Artists, Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project
•Announcements: a grant for Les Délices, season subscriptions for Canton Symphony, concert schedule for Heights Chamber Orchestra
•Almanac: Dalcroze, Ashkenazy, Hartke
HAPPENING TODAY:
Ohio Light Opera presents the opening matinee of Emmerich Kálmán’s Arizona Lady at 2:00 pm at Freedlander Theatre in Wooster (tickets here). CIPC for Young Artists puts on a “Contestants in the Community” event at the University of Akron’s Guzzetta Hall at 7:30 pm (free). And at 8:00 at Convivium 33 Gallery, the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project presents improviser Seth Andrew Davis (pictured) with percussionist Alexander Adams, as well as music from harpist Stephan Haluska. More information here.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Les Délices has won a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the fourth season of the SalonEra series. Read the press release here.
The Canton Symphony has announced that 2023-24 season subscriptions are now on sale. More information here.
And Heights Chamber Orchestra has released its concert schedule for next season. Details on their Facebook page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Swiss composer, musician, and pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was born on this date in 1865 in Vienna. He’s best known for developing the Dalcroze method of music education, also known as eurhythmics, in which rhythm — as well as structure and expression — is taught through physical movement. In this video, Oberlin associate professor of conducting Gregory Ristow, who is also a teacher of eurhythmics, discusses and demonstrates a Dalcroze game involving walking and clapping.
Pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy was born on this date in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) — he turns 86 today. A celebrated performer onstage and the co-winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1962, Ashkenazy also has a wide recording repertoire to his name, including the complete Beethoven concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra, with Ashkenazy conducting from the keyboard. Here, in a live recording from 1974, he plays the Fifth Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Bernard Haitink.
Sharing a birthday with Ashkenazy is American composer Stephen Hartke, who blows out 71 candles today. A native of Orange, New Jersey, Hartke taught for 26 years at the USC’s Thornton School of Music before departing to take up the post of composition department chair at Oberlin Conservatory in 2015. Among his honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Charles Ives Awards, and a Grammy — awarded for his work Meanwhile – Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays.
“It is one of several works of mine that has grown from a long-standing fascination I have had for various forms of Asian court and theater music, and from a fantasy in which I imagine myself the master of my own fictional non-Western musical tradition,” Hartke writes in his program notes. Click here to listen to a recording by the ensemble for which it was commissioned: eighth blackbird.
Others anniversaries on July 6 include three departures: German-born conductor Otto Klemperer (died in 1973), Spanish composer and pianist Joaquín Rodrigo (1999), and Italian composer, conductor, trumpeter, and pianist Ennio Morricone (2020).