by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The 24th edition of the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival begins today with the Semi-Final Rounds of the James Stroud Youth Competition at 10 am and 1:30 pm in Mixon Hall of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Fifteen competitors, ages 13 to 18 will vie for a place in the Final Round on Sunday evening.
And tonight at 7:30 in Mixon Hall, the first CICGF faculty concert will feature guitarist Jason Vieaux and violinist Mari Sato. Read a preview of the Festival here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
And then there were seven (summer music festivals) scheduled for June, not just the six we previewed last week. We just learned about the Cleveland Lutefest, which will run from June 23-29 at CWRU and feature 7:30 pm Harkness Chapel performances by Paul O’Dette (Sunday), Nigel North (Monday), Robert Barto & flutist Mara Winter (Tuesday), Xavier Díaz-Latorre (Wednesday), Bor Zuljan & Mara Winter (Thursday), and Catherine Liddell (Friday at 1 pm). A participant recital is scheduled for Friday at 7:30). More festival details and ticket information here.
INTERESTING READ:
For a year, New York Times critic Joshua Barone and photographer James Estrin followed five Curtis Institute of Music students “as they made friends, pushed their artistry and stared down an uncertain future.” Read At This School, the Students Live Entirely for Music here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
June 6 marks the birthdays of English composer, organist, and musical scholar Sir John Stainer (1840 in London), Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903 in Tiflis), and American composer Vincent Persichetti (1915 in Philadelphia).
Perhaps least well-known of this troika is Stainer, until you take a closer look at the origin of Christmas carols you hear or perhaps sing yourself every December. Among the 70 carols published in Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old in 1871, a collection that played an important role in the revival of that musical form, his arrangements of What Child Is This, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, The First Nowell, and Good King Wenceslas became standard. (See “Happening Today” for Jonathan W. Moyer’s noonday performance of Petr Eben’s variations on the latter.) Another eminent Victorian, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, contributed arrangements to the second edition the following year. View or print the entire collection here, which may give choir directors some fresh ideas for next December.
An important bridge between music of the Victorian era and the 20th century, Stainer served as organist of St. Michael’s College, Tenbury, Oxford’s Magdalen College, and London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as professor of music at Oxford, where he was among the first scholars to rediscover the music of Guillaume Dufay, and for whose Magdalen Madrigal Society he wrote modern part-songs. As a choirmaster, he worked to reform the old system where lay clerks (paid adult singers) weren’t expected to attend rehearsals (!)
Although Armenia came under Soviet rule in 1920, and Khachaturian was educated at the Moscow Conservatory, he retained his Armenian cultural identity throughout his career. Among his most popular works is the ballet Gayane, from which a much-performed suite has been extracted. Click here to watch a performance by the Sofia Philharmonic conducted by Beatrice Venezi in Bulgaria Hall on March 7, 2019. And here to listen to the composer lead his Symphonie No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1962.
And Philadelphia native Vincent Persichetti, whose home town and its “local orchestra” were very important to him, talks about his life and career in a charming 28-minute documentary created in 1983 by Penn State University with funding from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and aired on Pennsylvania’s Public Broadcasting System. His wife joins him midway through.
Having experimented early in his career with nearly every trending 20th century style, Persichetti eventually achieved a synthesis, and at his passing in 1987 left us with a large catalog of works including seven operas (there would have been nine, but he withdrew two of them), nine symphonies, 25 Parables for various instruments, and a number of works for wind band.
His vocal and choral works demonstrate a sensitivity to poetry of the 20th century. Click here to watch a performance of his Spring Cantata for women’s voices and piano, and here for his Winter Cantata for flute, marimba, and women’s voices. And his setting of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is performed here by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra with trumpeter Chris Gekker.
