by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS:
Chagrin Arts announces a free, live, open-air concert by the Callisto Quartet, formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2016, winners of the 2018 Fischoff Competition, and now the graduate quartet-in-residence at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston. The performance in Solon Community Park on Friday, July 17 at 7:00 will require face masks and promote social distancing.
Erik Mann, president of the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, has written to let us know about a new video, “Beyond Ferguson, based on a melody by Michael Brown. It’s one of the few social justice pieces for classical guitar. The video was premiered for the Guitar Foundation of America convention in June and at Station Hope, a social justice event here in Cleveland.” Mann also recommended an Ideastream radio interview the Society’s education director Brian Gaudino conducted with composer Thomas Flippin and CCGS alumna Alana Colvin, now at the Berklee School.
The Music Settlement’s Bop Stop has announced that its Ohio City space is now available for rental to private parties of up to 15 attendees, as well as for rehearsals and recording. Some outdoor live, public concerts and live streams are also in the works. Read more here.
TODAY ONLINE AND ON THE RADIO:
Thursday’s online and broadcast events include Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra (featuring Respighi’s Church Windows — it’s the composer’s birthday), selections from Patience on Ohio Light Opera’s Virtual Summer Festival, a ticketed program from the Caramoor Festival about Shirley Graham Du Bois’ opera Tom-Tom (see our article about Du Bois here), an Oberlin Stage Left episode featuring the Arts and Sciences Orchestra, and a 2013 production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini from the MET Opera Archives. Details in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
We mentioned Italian composer Ottorino Respighi above, born on this date in 1879 in Bologna. A master orchestrator who insisted that song should be the “original and immortal element” in Italian music, he’s best known for his Roman tone poems. Watch a documentary, A Dream of Italy here, and listen to his infrequently-performed suite Vetrate di Chiesa (“Church Windows”) here. You can also catch a performance by The Cleveland Orchestra at noon today on WCLV 104.9 Ideastream.
African American choral conductor, composer, and actor Jester Hairston was born on this date in 1901 in Belews Creek, North Carolina. Amen: the Life and Music of Jester Hairston can be found here, and you can listen to its title song, Amen, performed by the composer and the Festival Chorus of the 1990 International Choral Festival in Missoula, Montana. Hairston was 89 at the time.
French organist and master improviser Pierre Cochereau was born on this date in 1924 near Paris. For a bit of nostalgia, and to dust off your French, watch an interview with the celebrated organist of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris where he explains how the great organ works and recalls some of the Cathedral’s great moments in history. And, in another video, preceded by the tolling of Emmanuel, the Cathedral’s largest bell, Cochereau improvises a postlude on La Marsellaise at the end of a peace mass.
Category: forgotten composers. Edward Burlingame Hill died on this date in 1960 in Francetown, New Hampshire. Here’s a rare performance of his Symphony No. 1 by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony.
And another New England composer, Randall Thompson, died on this date in 1984 in Boston. Surely his 1940 Alleluia is the most-performed of his choral works (here it’s sung by the Oberlin College Choir under Robert Fountain on its 1964 Soviet Tour), but most amateur choristers have met up with one or more of his well-crafted, accessible pieces.
Among the most popular is his suite of Seven Country Songs on poems of Robert Frost where he perfectly matches the elegant simplicity of texts to music (click here for a live performance by Edward Elwyn Jones and the Harvard University Choir), and The Peaceable Kingdom, setting texts from the prophecies of Isaiah. The Interlochen Arts Academy Chamber Singers perform them here, and as an indication of Thompson’s international reach, the Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires sings them (in English) under Carlos López Pucci here.
