By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, CIM alumna Elisabeth Kufferath (pictured) will play mostly contemporary music both on violin and viola on the LCCC Signature Series in Elyria.
At the same hour, CityMusic Cleveland clarinetist Daniel Gilbert will “Celebrate Black Elegance” with soprano Elizabeth Hanje, tenor Trevis Guillory & bass-baritone Benhur Mosazghi at East Mount Zion Baptist Church (repeated on Friday at 8:30 La Sagrada Familia, Saturday at 7:30 at the Shrine of St. Stanislaus & Sunday at 4:30 at St. Sebastian in Akron).
Also tonight at 7:30, the Canton Symphony’s Divergent Sounds series will present JT’s Electrik BLACKOUT at The Auricle.
For details, visit our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
San Francisco Classical Voice remembers publisher Stephen Rubin, who founded the Rubin Institute for Musical Criticism, which now funds a number of print and online classical music publications including ClevelandClassical.com. Read that article here, and his New York Times obituary here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1922, Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition premiered in Paris, commissioned and conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. He recorded the work in late October of 1930 with the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall (listen here), and there are numerous other orchestral adaptations and rearrangements of the Russian composer’s popular piano suite. Click here to watch John Scott play his solo arrangement on the 1895 organ in Albion Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, U.K.
A smaller work was first heard on this date in 1967 at the Library of Congress when the Juilliard String Quartet debuted George Gershwin’s lovely Lullaby (1919-20). Give that and other 20th-century American string quartets a listen on the CD American String Quartets 1900-1950.
Twenty years later, English cellist Jacqueline du Pré left us at the age of 42 in London. Married to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, she was permanently associated with the Elgar concerto. Her life, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis, has been the subject of the partly fictionalized Broadway play, Duet for One (1981) and the film about the cellist and her flutist sister, Hilary and Jackie (1998, available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime).
