by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 at Kent State University, No Exit new music ensemble will launch its 17th season with American Descent, featuring works by Garth Knox, Geoffrey Burleson, June Young and Will Kim, as well as the world premiere of American Descent, “a passionate rumination on our present time in America” by Andrew Rindfleisch (pictured). Concert repeats Saturday at 7:30 at Praxis Fiber Workshop.
An extended ensemble — Transient Canvas (Amy Advocat, clarinet/bass clarinet and Matt Sharrock, percussion), John Faieta, trombone, Geoffrey Burleson, piano, Ann Yu,violin and David Russell, cello will join No Exit for the Rindfleisch.
Also tonight at 7:30, Franz Welser–Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra, Chorus and solo quartet in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Mandel Hall at Severance Music Center. The Orchestra will pair it with Jean Sibelius’s Tapiola. Concert repeats on Friday and Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3.
For more information, please visit our Concert Listings.
CANCELLATION:
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced the cancellation of Italian pianist Beatrice Rana’s October 29 recital at Severance Music Center due to “personal circumstances beyond her control.” The event will not be rescheduled, and the box office will contact ticket holders about refunds.
INTERESTING READ:
Writing in Early Music America, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Oberlin grad, founder of the Baroque String band ACRONYM and cello professor at Lawrence University, asks “Can AI decipher a manuscript better than you?’’ Read about his experiment with ChatGP and a 17th-century motet by Giovanni Valentini here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Russian choral director and composer Alexander Andreyevich Archangelsky was born on (or near) this date in 1846. A niche figure in the greater stream of Russian music, he mainly wrote Russian Orthodox Church music, including an All Night Vigil and masses, and led a choir that made successful tours of Russia and Europe, eventually transitioning from all-male voices to male and female singers.
Listen here to his chilling anthem about the day of judgement, and here to his setting of the Song of Simeon or Nunc Dimittis. Note the octave doublings of the bass line (octavism), which are such a unique feature of Russian choral music.
And American composer and diarist Ned Rorem was born on this date in 1923 in Richmond, Indiana. A prolific composer of art songs, he penned a few operas as well — listen here to a performance of his musical version of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Baldwin Wallace produced the work in 2010.
Rorem’s tell-all diaries have tended to overshadow his compositions. The New Yorker published The Ultimate Diary, a wicked parody of his writings in 1975, and The Paris Review wrote about them in 1999. Rorem sat for an interview with New Music USA’s Frank J. Oteri in 2006. Watch “Ned Rorem at Home” here.
