by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at Noon at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle, organists Michael Peters & Owen Metz, play Advent chorale settings, French Noëls, and Christmas Carols. Click here for the live stream.
And tonight at 7, the Singers’ Club of Cleveland marks The Longest Night of the Year with a meditative concert at Majestic Hall.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
IN MEMORIAM ZAKIR HUSSAIN:
The BBC reports that Zakir Hussain, “the legendary tabla virtuoso and global ambassador of Indian classical music who has died aged 73, leaves behind a timeless rhythmic legacy that will inspire generations.
“A child prodigy, he collaborated with Indian classical icons like Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, and Shivkumar Sharma and global musicians like John McLaughlin and George Harrison.” Read the obituary here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two events that have importantly impacted music history pop up on today’s calendar. On this date in 497 B.C.E. the first Saturnalia — a festival celebrating Saturn — was held in Imperial Rome. When the early Christian church began adding its own holy days to events in pagan calendars in an attempt to co-opt their dates, Saturnalia turned into Christmas and calendar machinations eventually fixed its date as December 25.
And on this date in 1538, when Pope Paul III excommunicated England’s King Henry VIII and his subjects from the Roman church, the Church of England was born — although some historians believe that Christianity had been well established in the British Isles long before Papal missionaries arrived. This excommunication hastened the Protestant Reformation in England and launched a new chapter for British music. Two Youtube videos illustrate the striking difference between pre- and post- Reformation music in Magnificats by Robert Fayrfax and Robert Parsons.
More recently, December 17, 1890 witnessed the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. The libretto for the 2-act work was adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and the piece shared the program with a second commissioned work, the composer’s opera Iolanta. Tchaikovsky wrote parts of the score in Rouen, France, and suspended his work for three weeks to inaugurate New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Click here to view a much-praised concert version of Nutcracker performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Yannick Nezet-Seguin, recorded in December 2010 in De Doelen te Rotterdam.
A number of famous works like The Nutcracker have spawned parodies, of which we’ll mention only two: Spike Jones presents for the Kiddies: The Nutcracker Suite (With Apologies to Tchaikovsky), which came out in 1945, and most recently, The Graham Cracker, a modern dance parody dedicated to choreographer Martha Graham.
