by Mike Telin
TODAY ON THE WEB:
Happy Thursday.
At 12:00 pm it’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV 104.9 Ideastream & on the web. Music Director Franz Welser-Möst leads performances of Sibelius’ Tapiola, Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari as well as Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.
At 7:00 pm, the Local 4 Music Fund: Tuning in series continues with the Beta Collective — Brad Wagner, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet, Chris Cole, alto sax, tenor sax, vocoder, Paul Ferguson, trombone, Theron Brown, keyboards, melodica, Aidan Plank, bass, Anthony Taddeo, drums, percussion, and Dan Bruce, guitar. The free event is live streamed from the Bop Stop. Click here at start time.
A half-hour later at 7:30 pm, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble Les Délices debuts Women of Genius (photo). The program features Music and poetry of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marie de Louvencourt, Mme. Duval, Julie Pinel, Marie-Françoise Certain & Marguerite Louise Couperin.
You can enjoy a pre-concert conversation with art historian and National Gallery of Art curator Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. The topic: female visual artists of the Baroque period and their powerful interpretations of the Judith story, including a focus on paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.
Read our preview here and our review here. The program will be available on demand through March 29. Click here for tickets and connection details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Today we celebrate the birth of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1844 in Tikhvin. Who doesn’t remember the first time they heard Scheherazade?
Other noteworthy births include ragtime composer Frank Losey in 1822 in Rochester, New York, and composer Clara Edwards in 1887 in Blue Earth County, Minnesota.
There was a time when the American music industry focused its attention on the sale of printed music rather than on the sales of recordings. On March 18, 1911, Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band was copyrighted and quickly sold over one-million copies of sheet music.
And on this day in 1927, legendary composer of musical theater John Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri.
A classically trained musician, Kander studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and later at Columbia University, where his teachers included Douglas Moore, Jack Beeson, and Otto Luening.
Early in his career he served as rehearsal pianist and then dance arranger for the original productions of Gypsy and Irma la Douce. He composed his first Broadway score, A Family Affair, with lyricists and book writers (and brothers) James and William Goldman.
Kander began his nearly four-decade-long career with lyricist Fred Ebb with the 1965 musical Flora, The Red Menace, starring the young Liza Minnelli. The song-writing duo (photo: Kander on the left) went on to write such classic musicals as Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spiderwoman, along with many other shows.
Since the passing of Fred Ebb in 2004, Kander has continued to write musicals with other lyricists. He composed an eloquent art song, The Ballad of Sullivan Ballou, for soprano Renée Fleming.
Some of this information came in an email from music critic Donald Rosenberg, who has a special interest in American musical theater and has written about Kander. “He’s really nice,” Rosenberg wrote. “I interviewed him in Oberlin a bunch of years back when the college did a production of Flora, The Red Menace.”
Summarizing his music, Rosenberg noted that Kander “exemplifies a Broadway composer steeped in classical traditions while also being fully versed in popular musical forms (jazz, Latin, folk) that have long been woven into musical theater. He can be effortlessly hip, as in the vamps that run through many of his scores (think All That Jazz) or lyrical (the waltzing “You” from The Visit is particularly haunting).”
During his prolific career, Kander has amassed numerous awards including three Tonys, two Emmys, and two Grammys. In 1991 he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1991 and along with his long-time collaborator Fred Ebb, was the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors award for Lifetime Achievement.
Click here to watch a video interview with Kander produced by the Dramatists Guild Foundation as part of the organization’s Legacy Project.
Happy 94th, Mr. Kander!