by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Chinese-born American composer Tan Dun leads The Cleveland Orchestra tonight at 7:30 at Severance Music Center in original works — his Water Concerto & Concerto for Orchestra — plus Igor Stravinsky’s Fireworks, and Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Marc Damoulakis (pictured), the Orchestra’s principal percussion, will be featured in the Water Concerto, and the program will be repeated on Saturday at 8. Damoulakis previews the piece in a Cleveland Orchestra video here.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
“The Baltimore Sun has dissolved its entire features section, reassigning some of its most celebrated writers to news departments and leaving the paper without any culture coverage for the first time since 1888,” the paper’s guild announced Tuesday on Yahoo News.
“The guild said it is ‘devastated’ for the city’s chefs, artists, musicians and business owners ‘who are no longer considered worthy of coverage by their hometown newspaper — and for readers, who will lose information they can use to decide how to spend their money and time.”
The guild closed by saying its stance is simple: ‘If the Baltimore Sun isn’t covering culture, it isn’t covering Baltimore.’”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
It’s time for the annual celebration of Hallowe’en, and probably also time to put the apostrophe back in its name, which is a contraction of “All Hallows Eve,” or the day before the Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. So today, “ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night” will be out and about.
To celebrate, a variety of scary mix tapes is available, but Dark Classical, one of the better collections to listen to on Hallowe’en, will give you an hour and 45 minutes worth of thrills and chills while you’re waiting to hand out sugary treats.
Everyone has their own favorite hair-raising music, and comments on the aforementioned collection have lamented the omission of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and proposed adding Schnittke’s Requiem, and the “Dance of the Knights” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
My own recommendation for generating goose bumps is “Satan’s Dance” from Ralph Vaughan William’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, based on drawings by William Blake (above, Satan smiting Job with boils). The composer dedicated his 1930 work to conductor Sir Adrian Boult, who leads it here with the London Philharmonic at the age of 83. (Satan enters around 4:12).
