by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, organist Mikhail Grazdanov (pictured) plays works by J.S. Bach at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. And tonight at 7:30, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society presents the Verona Quartet with pianist Yaron Kohlberg in works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Philip Glass, Leoš Janáček, and Antonín Dvořák in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
INTERESTING READS:
6 Podcasts About Classical Music (NY Times) by Emma Dibdin
These shows demystify a genre unfairly perceived as archaic and stuffy with expert analysis, musical selections and pure fun. Click here to read.
How John Dowland Built a Music Career on Tearful Melancholy (NY Times) by Hugh Morris
Dowland, who died 400 years ago, spun out sad songs that were popular in his time and continue to influence artists today. Click here to read.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On April 28, 1954, composer Michael Daugherty was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.During his time on the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory (1986-1991), he organized the 1988 Electronic Festival Plus Festival, which featured music from more than 50 composers. Strongly influenced by American popular culture, he shook up the classical world by writing works like Metropolis Symphony, based on tales of Superman (the superhero invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in Cleveland in 1938). Here’s a performance of the second movement, “Krypton” by the Toledo Symphony, led by Alain Trudel.
And on this day in 1992, French composer Olivier Messiaen, who visited the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978, died in Paris at the age of 83. Among his most celebrated works is the Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German stalag in 1941 and first performed for his fellow prisoners-of-war. Watch a ChamberFest Cleveland performance from 2013 here, with Franklin Cohen, clarinet, Yura Lee, violin, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Orion Weiss, piano.
Like a number of Parisian composers, Messiaen was also an organist — from 1931 until his death, he served as titulaire at the Church of the Trinity, where he improvised as well as played his own compositions. Here’s a rare glimpse of the composer improvising on the Gregorian chant Puer natus.
