by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2:30 this afternoon, ChamberFest Cleveland hosts “Meet Composer Errollyn Wallen!, a family-friendly event that begins with a performance of Remember, Marimba by percussionist Tanner Tanyeri, followed at 3:00 by a conversation with Errollyn Wallen CBE & Sandra Morgan OBE (interim mayor of East Cleveland).
From 4 to 5:30, a hands-on percussion activity will be led by Gabriel Globus-Hoenich. The day ends at 6 pm with a concert of Wallen’s music, — including selections from the Errollyn Wallen Songbook. The event at East Cleveland Public Library is free.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Neighborhood Connections has approved $325,792 in grants to support 83 projects in Cleveland and East Cleveland. Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC), the local public funder for arts and culture, will co-fund 24 of these resident-led arts and culture projects through a partnership with Neighborhood Connections. Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two well-known composers were born on this date: Charles Gounod (in Paris, 1818) and Igor Stravinsky (in Oranienbaum, Russia, 1882). And two lesser-known American composers have anniversaries: Don Gillis was born in Cameron, Missouri in 1912, and Peter Mennin died in New York in 1983.
Gounod wrote a number of operas, of which his Faust is most frequently performed, but his operatic church music, like Rossini’s, also has a global following. Watch a video here of The Symphonials’ performing the “Kyrie” from Gounod’s Messe solennelle en l’honneur de sainte Cécile in 2018 at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stravinsky made his debut as guest conductor with The Cleveland Orchestra in February of 1925, conducting his Fireworks, Chant du Rossignol and Firebird Suite. Conductor Nikolai Sokoloff found him “something of a showman and not entirely endearing,” adding, “He was, in short, a pain in the neck.” (Donald Rosenberg, The Cleveland Orchestra Story, p. 87).
Stravinsky was more complimentary about his experience: “I have never seen an orchestra in which there was finer discipline and a greater responsiveness than right here in your Cleveland Orchestra.” Here’s a live performance of Le chant du rossignol by Pierre Boulez and The Cleveland Orchestra from November, 1970.
Don Gillis’s music is pure Americana, and there’s a lot of it that he wrote on the side while serving as Arturo Toscanini’s producer for the NBC Orchestra. Click here to listen to a historical recording of a live broadcast of “Perpetual Emotion — Spiritual” from his Symphony No. 5½, “A Symphony for Fun.” The fun continues here with “Scherzofrenia – Conclusion.”
Born in Erie, PA in 1923, Peter Mennin served as president of both the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the Juilliard School in New York. He found the time to write nine symphonies among other compositions. If there’s a best-known work of his, it’s probably the Concertato for orchestra “Moby Dick,” commissioned in 1952 by the Erie Philharmonic, and one of the only programmatic pieces he wrote. Listen here to a performance by the Albany Symphony led by David Alan Miller.
