by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S AGENDA:
The Tuesday Noon Advent Series continues at the Church of the Covenant with a program of “Marian Music” performed by harpist Anna O’Connell and organist Jonathan Moyer. The program introduces the new Flentrop chapel organ.
The Cavani Quartet brings its “Beyond Beethoven” project to Mandel Concert Hall at Severance tonight at 7:30, sharing the stage with 90 students and teachers and unveiling new works by Josh Henderson and Kamari Dodson-Poindexter as well as playing LvB’s Opus 59, No. 3 Quartet. Educator Dr. Ronald Crutcher, himself a cellist, emcees the gala event.
And at 7:30 pm, Oberlin clarinet professor Richard Hawkins (pictured) and the Verona Quartet discuss Brahms’ B-minor Clarinet Quartet before performing the work. You can watch the performance online around 8:10.
Casting a wider net, the Harvard University Choir will present its 112th annual Christmas Carol Service tonight at 8 in Memorial Church in Cambridge. Predating by eight years the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols devised by Eric Milner-White for King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve, 1918, Harvard’s version includes only three readings and a lot more music, this year with an emphasis on American works. Download the program and join the live stream here. The organist’s name will ring bells for Clevelanders — it’s David von Behren, a CIM graduate and student of Todd Wilson, who served as organ scholar at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Tuesday Musical will hold its 66th annual Scholarship Competition in-person on Saturday, March 19 in the University of Akron’s Guzzetta Hall. More than $32,000 is available to award to Ohio music majors. Details here. Applications will be accepted online from January 1-31.
WEIRD BUT FUN?:
Does Jeffrey Arlo Brown at Van Magazine have too much time on his hands? He’s put himself in the position of a first-time listener to Schubert’s songs and has ranked all of them — more than 600 — from worst (“Yikes!”) to best (“The Transcendent”). Enter that rabbit hole here. If that was amusing, he’s done the same here for Domenico Scarlatti’s 500+ keyboard sonatas. Brown writes, “I’ll make no claim to have heard each work in monkish concentration, and I make no guarantees for the correctness of my observations. But, at least partially thanks to the social wasteland caused by the coronavirus, I really did hear the entirety of every single one. Now you don’t have to.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Let’s remember some first performance anniversaries today: Puccini’s Il Trittico (comprising Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on this date in 1918, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in Berlin in 1925 after a whopping 137 rehearsals, and Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11 in Rome by the Pro Arte Quartet in 1936.
Click here to enjoy a 2011 Royal Opera House production of Puccini’s madcap comedy, Gianni Schicchi, with Antonio Pappano in the pit and the family from hell onstage.
The quality’s not terrific, but click here to hear what may be the only surviving recording of Wozzeck led by Eric Kleiber, who conducted its premiere. It dates from Covent Garden in 1953.
And it’s interesting to hear a much-appropriated piece in its original form and context. Click here to listen to the Barber Quartet performed by the Curtis Quartet in 1938. The slow movement has become the famous Adagio for Strings, but some think it’s more intense played by a quartet. Do you agree?
