by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S HEADLINES:
Tuesday Musical announces 70th Scholarship Competition deadlines
The Violin Channel reports more Trump-Kennedy Center cancellations
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
In Western Christian communities, January 6 marks the Feast of the Epiphany or the visit of astrologers from the East to worship the infant Jesus, bringing symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The story, told only in the Gospel according to Matthew, has spawned a rich mythology and inspired multiple works of art.
Visit the YouTube playlist of 130 titles of music for the Epiphany here, including Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen, Peter Cornelius’s Die Könige, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1951 made-for-television opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Cornelius, best known for his comic opera The Barber of Baghdad, cleverly combined a newly-composed solo vocal line with the chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How brightly shines the morning star), played by the piano. Listen here to a performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore, and here to an arrangement for solo baritone and chorus performed by Jonathan Pacey and the VOCES8 Foundation Choir directed by Barnaby Smith.
The BBC devoted a page of its classical music features in 2024 to Menotti’s opera, which had an interesting genesis and has become a Christmas tradition for many performing organizations. Read the story here.
And on this date in 1838, German composer Max Bruch was born in Köln (Cologne), the ancient city on the Rhine river where — incidentally — legend has it that the Three Kings are buried under the high altar of the cathedral.
Author of some 200 works including three violin concertos and a late-in-life octet, Bruch bucked the trend toward modernism and wrote in a traditional German romantic idiom.
Click here to listen to a performance of Bruch’s first concerto by Hilary Hahn and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada from December, 2016, and here for a performance of the Octet from the Round Top Music Festival in 2017.
