by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 pm, No Exit New Music presents Cleveland Renaissance: Art of the Cleveland School at Praxis Fiber Workshop, and at 7:30 pm, guest conductor Elim Chan (pictured) begins her two weekends with The Cleveland Orchestra leading Igor Stravinsky’s Suite from Pulcinella, Joseph Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with Michael Sachs, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Both concerts are repeated through Sunday.
For details of these and other performances, please visit our Concert Listings page.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On March 12, 1837, French organist and composer Alexandre Guilmant was born in Meudon. Titulaire of La Trinité for 30 years (Messiaen held the post even longer beginning in 1931), Guilmant founded Paris’s Schola Cantorum, taught Marcel Dupré at the Paris Conservatory, and left a large legacy of works for the organ — his sole compositional interest.
Guilmant played his Fugue in D at the opening concert for the E.F. Walcker & Sons organ in Latvia’s Riga Dom (Cathedral) in 1884 for an audience of 3,000. During the Soviet occupation of Riga, the Dom was secularized. But Moscow picked up the bill for the renovation of its famous instrument in 1984 when the entire organ was flown to the workshop of Flentrop Orgelbouw in Zaandam, the Netherlands.
Enjoy Olivier Latry’s performance of the Finale of Guilmant’s Sonata No. 1. And for fans of American organist Christopher Houlihan, here’s his performance of Guilmant’s March, Op. 15 based on the “Lift up your heads” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Houlihan plays a large Allen digital instrument. Loaded question: can you tell the difference between pipes and electronics?
On March 12, 1890, Russian ballet master Vaslav Nijinsky, famous — or notorious — for creating the role of the Faun in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, was born in Kvev. Although his performance seems to have been filmed, Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev suppressed its release. But Nijinsky’s close counterpart Rudolph Nureyev contributed a tribute in 1980 in partnership with the Joffrey Ballet.
March 12, 1985 saw the death of Eugene Ormandy (born Jeno Blau in Hungary), who launched his American career with what is now the Minnesota Orchestra, then chalked up a record-winning 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Both heralded and criticized for developing “The Philadelphia Sound,” to some ears everything he conducted sounded the same. Watch a film of Ormandy conducting Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony in 1979.
