by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, pianist Garrick Ohlsson will play the first of three performances of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s Concerto No. 23 with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra. The concerts on Thursday and Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 3 in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center will also include Tyler Taylor’s Permissions, and Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, “Rhenish.”
Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto will also be performed by Antonio Pompa-Baldi in a 7:30 concert this evening by the Cleveland Institute of Music Virtuosi in Kulas Hall, along with the composer’s Divertimento in D, K. 136 and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Todd Phillips leads the ensemble.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Guardian writes that the 9th century manuscript for an Easter rite discovered “hiding in plain sight” in a private collection near Philadelphia may now claim to contain the oldest extant example of Western musical notation. Read the story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1864 American music patroness and composer Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born in Chicago. 
Her generous advocacy for chamber music led to the founding of the Berkshire Music Festival in 1918, the precursor of Tanglewood, and she was responsible for the commissioning of a long list of important works for the Library of Congress, including quartets by Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, Schoenberg and Webern, a flute sonata by Poulenc, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Click here to watch Demarre McGill perform the Poulenc sonata with pianist Michael McHale.
English composer Philip Heseltine, who used the nom de plume Peter Warlock — a nice touch for Halloween weekend since he had a lively interest in the occult — was born on October 30, 1894 in London. A close friend of Delius since their boyhood at Eton, Heseltine was such a character that he appeared as himself in novels by such authors as D.H. Lawrence. “Classical Nerd” host Thomas Little devoted an episode to Warlock’s life.
Heseltine wrote musical criticism sporadically and composed a long list of songs and choral pieces significant for their eccentricity. Rumor had it that he attended an amateur choral society’s performance of his Three Carols in December, 1930, went home depressed, put the cat out, and gassed himself at the kitchen stove. The Baldwin Wallace Men’s Chorus programmed those pieces in 2015 without such a tragic after effect.
Listen to his popular carol Benedicamus Domino sung in 2013 by Quire Cleveland, and another carol, Bethlehem Down, performed by King’s College Choir. The latter resulted when poet Bruce Blunt and Heseltine decided to enter a newspaper contest for a new carol. They won, and had “an immortal carouse on the proceeds.”
On this date in 1934, Dutch flutist, musicologist, and virtuoso recorder player Franz Bruggen was born in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to him play his reconstruction of a Bach recorder concerto with the Orchestra of the 18th Century at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. For an explanation of the piece, scroll down to read the comment by Skip Sempé.
And on October 30, 1953, Hungarian-born operetta composer Emmerich Kálmán died in Paris. Click here to watch a virtual Kálmán Festival “from the Merry Widow Vaults,” produced by Ohio Light Opera, who have championed his works at The College of Wooster during their summer seasons.
