by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, the Cleveland Celtic Ensemble will perform on the Brownbag Series at Trinity Cathedral.
At 6 pm, Piano Cleveland Live will present Zhu Wang and Cleveland Playhouse artists Madalyn Baker and Nathan Nelson in a medley of favorites from the American musical theater canon at Hofbräuhaus Cleveland.
Then at 7:30, Raul Midón, the blind singer-songwriter and guitarist will play a blend of “smooth folk, alt-pop, and jazz” in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
For details of these and other events, please visit our Concert Listings page.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Apollo’s Fire has announced its season plans for 2025-2026. Read the details here.
ENCORE Music & Ideas Festival has released its tenth anniversary season, which will take place from June 2-22 in Gates Mills. “This year’s theme, By Leaps and Bounds, will launch us into our next decade with a celebration of dazzling classical music inspired by movement and dance.” Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Among its many quirks, the ClevelandClassical.com Diary is a rich source of cultural trivia. Did you know that American silent film icon Charlie Chaplin was actually born in England on this date in 1889, composed most of the music for his own films, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975? (“Sir Charles!”)
Or that American composer Henry (Enrico) Mancini was a native Clevelander, born on this date in 1924 in Little Italy, whose first instrument was the piccolo? Or that he auditioned (successfully) for Juilliard in 1942 with a Beethoven sonata and an improvisation on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day?” Or that he made a cameo appearance in the first season of Frasier as a call-in patient to Dr. Frasier Crane’s radio show, followed by the playing of Moon River?
Tuck those useful factoids away while browsing “The Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology, compiled by the Chaplin Office, which retraces many of the milestones in Chaplin’s music-composing career, from City Lights (1931), the first film he released with a score of his own creation, to the 1976 re-release of A Woman of Paris with a new score composed by Chaplin at the age of 86, not to mention extracts from Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Limelight, The Kid and more.”
Tunes from Mancini’s scores to such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther are surely still circulating in our ears. The latter is played here by a combo with the composer at the piano, and Swiss organist Guy Bovet was moved to make the theme into a cheeky polyphonic piece in his Fuga sopra un sogetto.
Final tribute of the day: the birth of Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks in Aizpute on this date in 1946. Cleveland Orchestra solo English horn Robert Walters performed his concerto for that expressive instrument with Andrey Boreyko and the Orchestra in February of 2011, and talked about it in a preview. And Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla, who has appeared more than once on the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society series, plays Vasks’ The Sonata of Loneliness here.
