HAPPENING TODAY:
At 5 pm, the Miró Quartet (Daniel Ching & William Fedkenheuer, violins, John Largess, viola, and Joshua Gindele, cello) embarks on a Complete Beethoven Quartet Cycle celebrating the 30th anniversary of the quartet’s founding at Oberlin Conservatory. The first of two concerts today in Kulas Recital Hall will open with Quartet Nos. 1-3, followed by Nos. 4-6 at 7:30. The remaining nine quartets will be performed over the weekend.
At 7:30 at Severance Music Center, pianist Daniil Trifonov will join Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra for Johannes Brahms’ Second Concerto, and the Orchestra will fill out the evening with Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7.
And Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas will be staged simultaneously tonight by two organizations: at 7:30 by Apollo’s Fire on period instruments at Morley Music Hall in Painesville, and at 8 pm by Baldwin Wallace, in a reimagined telling set within the dystopian framework of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at The Helen in Playhouse Square.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Cleveland.com reports that Cleveland State University’s abrupt transfer of WCSB FM/89.3 to Ideastream Public Media has sparked a protest. “Students and community members demanded the return of the station’s student-run content instead of a 24/7 jazz format.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two French composers have birthday anniversaries on this date.
Camille Saint-Saëns was born in 1835 in Paris and went on to a long career as organist at St-Merri and La Madeleine in Paris, teacher of Fauré and Ravel, and composer of a vast catalogue of works. As a keyboardist, he gave one of his last piano recitals in 1921 at the age of 86 — then went on holiday to his favorite vacation spot, Algiers, where he died a month later.
Celebrate the composer with a very private work he forbade to be played publicly during his lifetime: Carnival of the Animals, which parodies the music of Offenbach, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Rossini, and is usually accompanied by the delicious nonsense poetry of Ogden Nash. Here’s a performance by the Zagreb Music Academy Chamber Orchestra, and Nash’s opening lines go:
Camille Saint-Saëns
Was wracked with pains,
When people addressed him,
As Saint Sanes.
He held the human race to blame,
Because it could not pronounce his name.
So, he turned with metronome and fife,
To glorify other kinds of life.
Be quiet please — for here begins
His salute to feathers, fur, and fins.
Another famous work is his Danse macabre, a Halloween favorite, recorded here on a Brunswick 78 record by Nikolai Sokoloff and The Cleveland Orchestra in 1926.
Reynaldo Hahn, another French composer (though he was born in Venezuela, where he spent only the first three years of his life), was born on this day in 1875. He’s celebrated for his vocal music, and one of his most popular songs is À Chloris, sung by Joyce DiDonato on “Call to Unite,” the 24-hour global pandemic initiative. DiDonato impressively serves as her own collaborative pianist.
