by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society will conclude its season with a performance by the Isidore String Quartet with pianist Jeremy Denk. After the Quartet plays works by Joseph Haydn and Hungarian composer György Ligeti, Denk will join the group for Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet in f minor.
INTERESTING READ:
Previously Unknown Vaughan Williams Piece Found in London
Titled Before the Mirror, the newly-discovered piece was found in the archives of London’s Morley College. Read the Violin Channel article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1954, the iconoclastic American composer Charles Ives died in New York.
Son of a Civil War bandmaster, Ives began playing organ and composing at an early age in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, studied composition at Yale with Horatio Parker, and wrote music in his spare time while working as an executive in the insurance industry. Ives’ music, most of it produced before 1918 when he suddenly stopped writing, shows numerous and widespread influences.
Leonard Bernstein devoted Volume 2 of his famous New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts to a survey of the composer’s life and works. Watch the February 23, 1967 broadcast of Charles Ives — American Pioneer here.
