by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: organist Jonathan Moyer at the Covenant, and Apollo’s Fire’s European tour sendoff concert
•Applications & honors: CIM Young Composers Program, KSU’s Roy Minoff Composition Competition, CityMusic’s Diversity Fellowship open to violinists, and wind ensemble honors for three groups
•Almanac: composer Chen Yi, violinist Augustin Hadelich, and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason
HAPPENING TODAY:
A freewill offering will get you into the Church of the Covenant at 12 pm to hear organist Jonathan Moyer on the Tuesday Noon Organ Plus series (program to be announced).
And Apollo’s Fire will give its European tour sendoff concert at 7:30 at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium. The program, titled “Exile: Music of the Jewish & African Diasporas,” celebrates the connections of Sephardic, Ashkenazy, Palestinian, and African traditions. Jeannette Sorrell (pictured) directs, and the featured soloists include Rachel Weston (mezzo-soprano), Jacob Perry and Haitham Haidar (tenors), Jeffrey Strauss (baritone), and Daphna Mor, (recorder, ney, vocals). Tickets are available here.
APPLICATIONS & HONORS:
Applications are due on April 15 for the CIM Young Composers Program, aimed at students ages 14-19 and running from June 18-24. More information here.
And composers of all ages have until June 1 to apply for the Kent State Glauser School of Music’s 2023 Roy Minoff Composition Competition. One composer will be chosen to write a new work to be premiered by Glauser School of Music faculty in the fall of 2024. Learn more here.
Meanwhile, applications are still being considered for CityMusic Cleveland’s Spring 2023 Diversity Fellowship, which is open to violinists. Click here to learn more.
And the American Prize in Band/Wind Ensemble Performance has announced its semifinalists, which include the Youngstown State University Wind Ensemble and the Capital University Symphonic Winds in the college/university division, and the Kent State Youth Winds in the high school division. See the full list here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Conductors, composers, and performers alike are well-represented on April 4 in music history. Among those born on this date are French-American conductor Pierre Monteux (1875), American composer and pianist Mary Howe (1882), French composer Eugene Bozza (1905), American composer Elmer Bernstein (1922), and a trio of living musicians, our focus today — all of them with Cleveland Orchestra connections.
Chinese-American composer Chen Yi turns 70 today. Among her many honors, in 2006 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work Si Ji (Four Seasons), which as it happens was premiered by The Cleveland Orchestra the previous year in Lucerne. Since recordings of that piece are not readily available, listen to another work with a local connection: her chamber work Happy Rain on a Spring Night, which was performed by the Oberlin Sinfonietta in 2014, when she was a finalist for a position in the Conservatory’s composition department. Listen to a recording by Third Angle New Music Ensemble here.
Moving over to today’s performers, German-American violinist Augustin Hadelich turns 39. The first-prize winner at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Hadelich made his Severance Music Center debut in 2019 with Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2. Listen to Hadelich speak about the piece before that performance here, and listen to him play the first movement here in a recording with conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the WDR Sinfonieorchester.
And British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason turns 24. Winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician award, Kanneh-Mason went on to make his Cleveland Orchestra debut in 2021 with the Elgar Concerto, which he performs live here with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as part of the 2019 BBC Proms. Speaking of which, Kanneh-Mason delivered another memorable Proms performance when the Chineke! Orchestra — Europe’s first professional orchestra with a majority-Black and ethnically diverse membership — made its Proms debut in 2017. The cellist, who was an original member of the orchestra, joins Chineke! for Dvořák’s Op. 94 Rondo in g here.