NEWS BRIEFS:
In an email, Piano Cleveland has announced that its piano donation program “hit an important milestone — placing its 88th piano into the home of a Cleveland Metropolitan School District student, 12-year-old Jayce Furmin.
“The number 88 is to a pianist what 13 is to a baker,” says Piano Cleveland executive director, Marissa Moore. “The piano has 88 keys and International Piano Day falls on the 88th day of the year. It’s really fitting that the 88th instrument we’ve placed through our donation program is going into the home of a student like Jayce.”
Although Piano Cleveland has previously rehomed 87 other pianos and keyboards, Furmin is the first student from the organization’s hallmark educational program, PianoLab, to receive an instrument.
The Violin Channel reports that “Chamber Music America, the national network for small ensemble music professionals, announced the recipients of its highest awards: the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award to the Takács Quartet; the Michael Jaffee Visionary Award to Imani Winds; and its biennial Cleveland Quartet Award to the Poiesis Quartet. Read more here.
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, guest conductor Dalia Stasevska leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Silvestre Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas and Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, repeated through Sunday afternoon.
At the same hour, Abrepaso Flamenco presents Ni más / ni menos, with all-new original music by Adam Ben Ezra, blending classical, jazz, Mediterranean, and flamenco sounds at Disciples Christian Church.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
November 20 obits include the passing of Renaissance composer Pierre de la Rue in Courtrai, Belgium in 1518 and Russian composer Anton Rubenstein in Peterhof in 1894, as well as that of English musician John Shore in 1752, who had invented the tuning fork in 1711 and presented one to Handel.
On the other end of the life cycle, American multimedia composer and innovative singer Meredith Monk was born in Lima, Peru on this date in 1942. Alan Pierson, artistic director of Alarm Will Sound talks to her about her piece Anthem in a recent interview. Watch 21 remote performers play the piece here in real time thanks to a platform Alarm Will Sound developed during the pandemic.
Finally, on this date in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sank the Nantucket whaling ship Essex 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. That event inspired Herman Melville’s 1851 more-than-a-novel, Moby-Dick, and in turn, moved American composer Jake Heggie to write his opera of the same name on commission from Dallas Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera. I saw the premiere in Dallas in April, 2010 along with colleagues from the Music Critics Association of North America.
Heggie talked about the process of composing the work in a University of California TV interview in 2012. No time like the present to crack open Melville’s magnum opus, which may be one of those classics we’ve never gotten around to reading. (The author’s Billy Budd also inspired the opera of the same name by Benjamin Britten.)
