by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 noon, organist Owen Metz will play Franz Liszt’s monumental Fantasie and Fugue on the Choral Ad nos, ad salutarum Undam on the Tuesday noon Organ Series at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
This date in history includes two birth anniversaries — French pianist and composer Robert Casadesus (1899) and Indian sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar (1920).
Robert Casadesus is often remembered for his interpretations of Mozart, and for his partnerships with George Szell. Someone even more famous with whom he collaborated — or more accurately, with whom he performed in a friendly setting? Albert Einstein, who was his neighbor in Princeton, NJ, during World War II.
Einstein had a deep love for violin music, particularly Mozart’s sonatas. According to a blog entry by his great grandson Paul Einstein, among Albert’s favorites was the Sonata No. 21 in e. Too bad we can’t find a Casadesus recording of that one, but here’s something else beautiful and melodic that perhaps the pianist would have shared with the physicist: the Adagio of the E-flat-major Sonata, K. 481, which he recorded here with violinist Zino Francescatti.
Ravi Shankar is most famous for igniting a passion in the West for classical Indian music. “If I’ve accomplished anything in these past 30 years,” he told The New York Times in 1985, “it’s that I have been able to open the door to our music in the West. I enjoy seeing other Indian musicians — old and young — coming to Europe and America and having some success. I’m happy to have contributed to that.”
He also acknowledged the cultural challenges that came along with that, noting that in the next generation, interest in India was being fueled in part by Western films and television shows. “What we have to do now is to convey to them an awareness of the richness and diversity of our culture.”
A similar contrast of emotions can be seen in his rise to pop culture celebrity. According to his December 2012 obituary written by Allan Kozinn in The New York Times, “At first Mr. Shankar reveled in the attention…and he performed for huge audiences at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969….[But he] came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake, saying he deplored the use of his music, with its roots in an ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug use.” He was also displeased about his music being treated as a fad, “something that is very common in Western countries,” he said.
Here are two different ways (out of many) to revisit or delve into Shankar’s music. First, his 1990 album Passages, co-composed with Philip Glass — a compelling mixture of Hindustani classical music and minimalism. Second, moving more in the traditional direction, a live performance in London with one of his favorite collaborators, Alla Rakha on tabla.
