by Daniel Hathaway
Messiaen at La Trinité, 1940
HAPPENING TODAY:
At noon, organist Evan de Jong plays works by J.S. Bach and Johann Adam Reincken at the Church of the Covenant.
Tonight at 7 pm, Apollo’s Fire takes Jeannette Sorrell’s interpretation of. George Frideric Handel’s Messiah to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron.
And tonight at 7:30, John Kennedy, who conducted Oberlin’s concert performances of Rhiannon Giddens’ and Michael Ables’ opera Omar last weekend, extends his stay to lead the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra in works by Gabriella Smith, John Cage, and Louise Farrenc in Finney Chapel.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
NEW RELEASES:
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that its recording of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, is now available worldwide for digital streaming and download in spatial audio on all major platforms, marking the fourth recording to be released by the Orchestra in 2024. Read a press release here.
The Cavani Quartet announces the launch of The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques and Team Building, by Annie Fullard and Dorianne Cotter-Lockard. Click here to visit a website dedicated to the book launch.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
French composer and organist Olivier Messiaen (pictured above) was born on December 10, 1908 in Avignon.
Probably Messiaen’s most-performed work, the Quatour pour la fin du temps, was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. ChamberFest Cleveland has featured it on at least two occasions. Click here for a performance in Mixon Hall at CIM by Cohen with Yura Lee, violin, Gabriel Cabezas, cello, and Orion Weiss, piano in June, 2013. Franklin Cohen talked about the piece in a promotional video before a later performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center.
Messiaen was also a keen ornithologist who incorporated bird song into such works as his Oiseaux exotiques, which won pianist Angeline Chang, conductor John McLaughlin Williams, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony a Grammy Award in 2007.
And as an organist, Messiaen played weekly masses at La Trinité in Paris for more than six decades. Hear him in some of his celebrated improvisations in this video.
Ready for a touch of the bizarre? Here’s a performance of “Dieu parmi nous” from the organ suite La Nativité du Seigneur played on bayan (accordion) by Ukrainian artist Artem Nyzhnyk, and an arrangement for accordion and theremin of the “Louange à l’Éternité du Jésus” from the Quatour performed by Lydia Kavina and Roman Yusipey. Given Messiaen’s embrace of another electronic instrument, the ondes martinot, he probably would have approved.
