by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: organist Keith Reas (pictured), Musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Bennewitz Quartet
•Announcements: a call for visual artists as part of a collaboration between Heights Arts and No Exit New Music, and a webinar about the Ohio Arts Economic Relief Grant program
•Almanac: Peter Maxwell Davies and musical funhouse mirrors
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12:00 pm, organist Keith Reas plays music from Nicolaus Bruhns, the Susanne van Soldt manuscript, Tarquinio Merulo, Heinrich Scheidemann, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Dietrich Buxtehude, and J.S. Bach (program details here) on the Church of the Covenant’s Tuesday Noon Organ Plus series. The recital will also be livestreamed. A freewill offering will be taken up.
At 7, Musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra will head to Severance Music Center’s Reinberger Chamber Hall for a concert to benefit UNICEF’s response to the earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria. Click here for more information and here to purchase tickets.
And at 7:30 at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society will present the Bennewitz Quartet. Their program is bookended by C-Major string quartets — beginning with Haydn’s Op. 54, No. 2, and ending with Dvořák’s Op. 61 — with Hans Krása’s Theme and Variations for String Quartet and Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet in between. Tickets are available here.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Heights Arts is collaborating with No Exit New Music and other organizations on a “city-wide exploration of Surrealism” this fall and into 2024. The project begins with “Collaborage,” a multidisciplinary exhibition opening in August. More pressing is the deadline of March 31 for visual artists to apply in order to participate. Learn more here.
A webinar about the Ohio Arts Economic Relief Grant program is available to watch on the Ohio Department of Development’s YouTube Channel. Applications open at 10:00 am on March 16. More details here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Peter Maxwell Davies, one of the great English composers of the 20th century, died on this date in 2016 at the age of 81 in Sanday, Orkney, Scotland. Davies traversed a multitude of styles over the course of his career, sometimes within a single work — a great example being his 1969 St Thomas Wake for orchestra and small band. Based on 16th-17th century English composer John Bull’s St Thomas Wake Pavan, the piece distorts that material almost as if with a series of funhouse mirrors.
As Davies himself writes in the program notes,
This pre-existing material is “projected” through a progressive series of mathematical curves, which affect it much as, in visual terms, would distorting mirrors of systematically varying degrees of convexity and concavity.
Or, as the unknowing listener says, hearing the piece for the first time coming from another person’s computer,
Are you listening to two pieces at the same time?
Listen here to a recording by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra — where Davies served as associate conductor/composer — led by the composer himself.