by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two of Cleveland’s distinguished pianists will be featured in events today. At noon, Antonio Pompa-Baldi will play in the Atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and tonight at 7:30, faculty pianist Sergei Babyan will solo in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with guest conductor Sarah Hicks and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in Mandel Hall at Severance Music Center. Also on the program, Boulanger’s D’un matin du printemps & Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite (1919).
Also today at noon, organist Noah Duckwall will play works by Francisco Correa de Arauxo, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Matthias Weckmann, J.S.Bach & Dieterich Buxtehude at the Church of the Covenant. Click here for the live stream.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Cleveland Orchestra violinist Jessica Lee is leaving the ensemble to take up a position as full time chair of the violin department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Read a press release here.
“Rhiannon Giddens, the genre-defying singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who trained as an operatic soprano at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, will deliver the keynote address for Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Commencement ceremony honoring the Class of 2024 on Monday, May 27. She will also be awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree.” Read a press release here.
The Canton Symphony has announced the opening of part-time positions on its administrative staff for marketing & development assistant and personnel manager. Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Among its many quirks, the ClevelandClassical.com Diary is a rich source of cultural trivia. Did you know that American silent film icon Charlie Chaplin was actually born in England on this date in 1889, composed most of the music for his own films, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975? (“Sir Charles!”)
Or that American composer Henry (Enrico) Mancini was a native Clevelander, born on this date in 1924 in Little Italy, whose first instrument was the piccolo? Or that he auditioned (successfully) for Juilliard in 1942 with a Beethoven sonata and an improvisation on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day?” Or that he made a cameo appearance in the first season of Frasier as a call-in patient to Dr. Frasier Crane’s radio show, followed by the playing of Moon River?
Celebrate Chaplin’s genius with this full version of the 1936 silent film Modern Times.
Tunes from Mancini’s scores to such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther are surely still circulating in our ears. The latter is played here by a combo with the composer at the piano, and Swiss organist Guy Bovet was moved to make the theme into a cheeky polyphonic piece in his Fuga sopra un sogetto.
And Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks was born in Aizpute on this date in 1946. Cleveland Orchestra solo English horn Robert Walters performed Vasks’ concerto for that expressive instrument with Andrey Boreyko and the Orchestra in February of 2011. Click here to watch a brief preview with Walters, and here for a performance of 28-minute concerto by Takahiro Watanabe with the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt. And Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla, who has appeared twice on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series, plays Vasks’ The Sonata of Loneliness here.
And as we noted in our review of last Thursday’s Cleveland Orchestra concert that featured cellist Sol Gabetta in the Elgar concerto, “Responding to a seismic ovation, Gabetta both played and vocalized exquisitely in an encore — Latvian composer Peteris Vasks’ Grāmata čellam.“
