by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at Noon, Youngstown State’s Dana School of Music’s Music at Noon Series presents the Ficocelli Trio — Erick Ramos, violin, Heewon Jeon, cello, and Allison Hillier, piano — in Haydn’s Piano Trio in G, “Gypsy,” and Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 4 in e, “Dumky” at the McDonough Museum of Art.
Tonight at 8 at Severance, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) featuring tenor Limmie Puilliam (pictured) and baritone Iurii Samoilov, and Arthur Honegger’s symphony liturgique.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German composer Max Bruch died on this date in Berlin-Friedenau in 1920. Inspired by Brahms and mostly known as a choral composer during his lifetime, Bruch is now celebrated for a few instrumental works that have remained popular.
The first of his three violin concertos is one of those, performed here by Rachel Barton Pine and CityMusic Cleveland at St. Stanislaus in October, 2012. Another is his Kol Nidrei, played here in the same venue by CityMusic cellist Amit Peled in October, 2019. And ChamberFest Cleveland featured selections from his Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano on a June concert in 2019 (with Franklin Cohen, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Evren Ozel).
And on this date in 1943, Canadian American composer R. Nathaniel Dett died of a heart attack in Battle Creek, Michigan while on tour with a USO orchestra. Born in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls), Dett moved across the border with his family at the age of 11, was the first Black student to graduate from the Oberlin Conservatory’s 5-year degree program, and studied composition during the summers at Harvard with Arthur Foote.
Dett reflected the opinions of Antonín Dvořák when he wrote, in 1918
We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people … But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long.
Dett’s Don’t Be Weary, Traveler, which won Harvard’s Francis Boot Award, was sung by Quire Cleveland at Historic St. Peter Church in April, 2014. And click here to listen to Canada’s Nathaniel Dett Chorale perform his popular spiritual, Listen to the Lambs.
Dett’s most ambitious work is his 1937 oratorio, The Ordering of Moses, premiered at Cincinnati’s May Festival in 1937. Listen here to a performance by Jeanette Walters, soprano, Carol Brice, contralto, John Miles, tenor, and John Work, baritone, with the Talladega College Choir, Frank Harrison, director, and The Mobile Symphony Orchestra, William Levi Dawson, conductor.
