by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, organist Emily Amos plays a recital of French music by Charles Tournemire, Louis Vierne, and Paul Dukas on the chancel organ at the Church of the Covenant. Hear it in person or click here for the live stream..
And tonight at 7 pm, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute of Ohio presents an inaugural Thanksgiving Concert, Sound of Warsaw, featuring pianists Jiana Peng and Konrad Binienda. Grzegorz Nowak leads the Chopin Institute Orchestra at the Dodero Center for Performing Arts at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills.
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
CAC GRANTS:
On November 20, Cuyahoga Arts & Culture announced the approval of grants totaling $10,750,847 in support of 300 Cuyahoga County nonprofit organizations in 2025 through CAC’s General Operating Support, Project Support and Cultural Heritage grant programs. “Since 2006, CAC has invested more than $257 million in 500 organizations.”
The announcement added that “The 2025 grant amounts are not impacted by the increased cigarette tax approved by voters in November 2024. CAC will begin collecting the new tax monthly starting in March 2025 and anticipates higher revenues to impact grantmaking starting in 2026.”
INTERESTING READ:
In a critic’s notebook entry, the New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe asks, “Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise? The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.” Read the article — with a wide range of reader comments — here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Born on this date in 1915 (he died in 2010), American pianist Earl Wild began composing and transcribing romantic music as a teenager in Pittsburgh. His career included a number of unique achievements: he was the only pianist to have been invited to play at the White House for six consecutive presidents from Herbert Hoover to Lyndon Johnson, the first pianist to play a recital on U.S. television in 1939, and in 1997, the first pianist to stream a performance on the Internet.
In a New York Times obituary, Alan Kozinn wrote:
“Mr. Wild, with his shock of white hair and his high-energy performance style, could seem a flamboyant presence on the concert stage. But although he reveled in bravura works — splashy Liszt operatic transcriptions, for example, and concertos by Rachmaninoff — his performances consistently combined a deeply considered interpretive approach and an ironclad technique. Even into his 90s, his performances projected both power and musicality.
“In a 1981 profile of Mr. Wild in The New York Times, the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Mr. Wild had been “in the forefront of the Romantic revival,” and cited his championship of Liszt at a time when Liszt was out of favor among many pianists as one of Mr. Wild’s most crucial contributions to modern pianism.”
Click here to watch a video of Wild’s 2002 recital in Shumei Hall in Pasadena, and here to watch him perform four of his Rachmaninoff transcriptions in Atlanta in 1983
And click here to watch Kirill Gerstein play Wild’s Virtuoso Étude after Gershwin’s “Embraceable You”
