by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S CONCERT AGENDA:
The Tuesday noon concert at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle will feature organist William Rehwinkel in music by Jeanne Demessieux, Jehan Alain, and himself.
Tonight’s Tuesday Musical program at 7:30 pm in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall, the annual Margaret Baxtresser Concert, features identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton (pictured), performing Copland’s Simple Gifts, Bernstein’s Candide for Four Hands, Paul Schoenfield’s Five Days in the life of a Manic Depressive, and John Adams’ Roll Over Beethoven.
Details in our Concert Listings.
IN THE NEWS:
In a Cleveland.com article published on Monday, Cleveland Orchestra President and CEO André Gremillet commented on the cancellation of its November 13 and 14 performances due to a suspected COVID case in the wind section. Read the article here.
INTERESTING READS:
Today’s Harvard Gazette features an interview with jazz legend Wayne Shorter ,and bassist, vocalist, and Harvard faculty professor Esperanza Spalding about their new opera, Iphigenia.
The work, “a project Shorter began thinking about in the 1950s, is a bold reimagining of the classical figure, daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. Spalding wrote the libretto for the show and is performing in it. The renowned architect Frank Gehry, who has studied and taught at Harvard, designed the sets. Eight years in the making, the opera made its worldwide debut Nov. 12 in Boston.” Read the interview here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1895, German-born American composer, violist, and educator Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau. His music having been condemned by the Nazis in 1936, Hindemith spent some time in Turkey during that decade, setting up a national music school, then making tours of the U.S. as a solo violist and performer on the viola d’amore.
He ended up teaching at Yale, where he formed the Yale Collegium Musicum, and also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later collected in the book A Composer’s World.
One of Hindemith’s most popular works, the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, was recorded twice by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here to the 1947 performance, and here to a studio recording made in 1964. Discuss!
On November 16, 1904, in his first American tour concert, English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor conducted his choral trilogy Hiawatha in Washington, DC. The composer, whose father was born in Sierra Leone, had already debuted the first of his three cantatas on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Song of Hiawatha in 1898 at the age of 22.
Coleridge-Taylor’s music was championed in England by Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during his American tour in 1904.
Click here to watch the documentary Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912.
And on November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music. Thirty-four years later, on November 16, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the ensemble in that hall for the premiere of William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Click here for a recent performance at Bard College led by Leon Botstein.
