By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 pm, Tri-C will present A Tribute to Ruth Brown, including a screening of George T. Nierenberg’s 1988 documentary, That Rhythm, Those Blues, followed by a live performance of music by vocalist Shenel Johns, Dominick Farinacci, and the East Central Jazz Educators All-Star Big Band.
And at 7:30, Jeannette Sorrell will lead Apollo’s Fire in the first of four performances of “Fire and Joy: from Bach and Vivaldi” featuring Debra Nagy, oboe, Alan Choo, violin, & Nicole Divall, viola d’amore (pictured — read a preview here) in works by J.S. Bach and Vivaldi at First Methodist in Akron.
For details of these and other events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Cleveland Orchestra principal trumpet Michael Sachs, who resigned from his teaching post at the Cleveland Institute of Music in October after heading the brass department for 35 years, has been appointed to the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia beginning with the 2024-2025 academic year. Read a press release here.
On Wednesday, November 15, Cuyahoga Arts & Culture approved grants totaling $10,750,487 to support 300 Cuyahoga County nonprofit organizations of all sizes in 2024 through CAC’s General Operating Support, Project Support and Cultural Heritage grant programs. Since 2007, CAC has invested more than $246 million in 485 organizations.
In the press release, executive director Jill M. Paulsen defended CAC’s policies and practices against criticism that the organization “has strayed from its mission and needs to do more to show it is listening to the arts community and acting transparently,” adding that “it’s important that everyone in the conversation acknowledge some facts about CAC’s operations and the current economic realities.” Read the release here, and view the list of approved grants here.”
We’ve learned with sadness of the passing of Mary Ann Griebling at the age of 87. Read an obituary sent to us by her family here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1895, German-born American composer, violist, and educator Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau. His music having been condemned by the Nazis in 1936, Hindemith spent some time in Turkey during that decade, setting up a national music school, then making tours of the U.S. as a solo violist and performer on the viola d’amore, the exotic instrument with sympathetic strings being played this week by Nicole Divall on Apollo’s Fire concerts. Below: Hindemith with such an instrument.
He ended up teaching at Yale, where he formed the Yale Collegium Musicum, and also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later collected in the book A Composer’s World.
One of Hindemith’s most popular works, the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, was recorded twice by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here to the 1947 performance, and here to a studio recording made in 1964. Discuss!
On November 16, 1904, in his first American tour concert, English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted his choral trilogy Hiawatha in Washington, DC. The composer, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, had already debuted the first of his three cantatas on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Song of Hiawatha in 1898 at the age of 22.
Coleridge-Taylor’s music was championed in England by Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during his American tour in 1904.
Click here to watch the documentary Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912.
And on November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music. Thirty-four years later, on November 16, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the ensemble in that hall for the premiere of William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Click here for a recent performance at Bard College led by Leon Botstein.
