by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Pianist Lang Lang joins Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra for Camille Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto, and the Orchestra adds another French classic: Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique (7:30 at Severance Music Center).
At the same hour, Timothy Weiss leads the Oberlin Sinfonietta in music by Stephen Hartke, and in world premieres of works by Wesley Horner (with faculty baritone Timothy LeFebvre), Graham Lazorchak, and Jesse Jones (Warner Concert Hall).
For details of these and other performances, visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Today we celebrate American composer, choir director, and musicologist William Levi Dawson who died on this date in 1990 at the age of 90.
Dawson’s musical story begins at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Having run away from home early in his youth, he began studying music there full-time as a pre-college student, participating in the choir, band, and orchestra, and covering his tuition by working as a music librarian and manual laborer.
After going to college in Chicago and serving as trombonist with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, he began teaching in Kansas City public schools, then returned to Tuskegee for what would become a 25-year tenure on the faculty. During that time, he led the school’s choir, famously developing its reputation to the point that it was invited to perform at the opening of Radio City Music Hall, and to sing for two sitting presidents.
Not just a choral conductor, Dawson is known as the “Dean of African American Choral Composers,” particularly due to his arrangements of and variations on spirituals. Among the most well-known of those works is Ezekiel Saw the Wheel. Listen to a recording by the Tuskegee Institute Choir under Dawson here.
In the instrumental world, his most famous work is the Negro Folk Symphony, which was premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934 at Carnegie Hall. The work received a good deal of positive press before descending, despite the composer’s best efforts, into a long period of obscurity — one that may be finally ending. In 2020, it was recorded by Arthur Fagen and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Listen to the second movement, titled “Hope In the Night,” here.
Dawson’s story ends where it began. After passing away in Montgomery, he was buried in the Tuskegee University cemetery.
