by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at 6 pm – the Cleveland Museum of Art hosts Chamber Music in the Atrium featuring student musicians from the Cleveland Institute of Music.
And tonight at 7:30, the CIM’s Insiders Series presents violinists Olga Dubossarskaya Kaler & Ilya Kaler, violist Lynne Ramsey, cellist Daniel Kaler, cello, and pianist Ilya Itin, in music by Debussy, Brahms, and Ysaÿe in Mixon Hall.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Mike Telin
Today we remember three composers who took their leave of this world on April 8.
In 1848 Italian bel canto composer Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti died of neurosyphilis at the age of 50. A prolific composer best-known for his operatic works, he also wrote church music, a number of string quartets, and some orchestral pieces. Altogether, he composed some 75 operas, 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces.
Who doesn’t like a Donizetti aria? One crowd pleaser is “Ah! Mes amis … Pour mon âme” (the one with nine high Cs) from La Fille du Régiment. Click here to witness a rare encore performance at the Metropolitan Opera by tenor Javier Camarena that brings the total count of high Cs to eighteen). Read the New York Times review here.
Another Donizetti aria sure to inspire the crowd is the “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoor. Natalie Dessay gives a stunning performance here.
It was the Spanish Flu that took composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ life in 1920 at the age of 35 in New York City. His most famous work is his 1915 piano piece, White Peacock, which he then orchestrated in 1919. Other compositions include his Piano Sonata, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (based on a poetic fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra.
In addition to many programmatic pieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and voice, it is his unpublished Sho-jo (1917) — a one-act pantomimic drama based on Japanese themes — that makes him one of the first American composers to draw direct inspiration from Japanese music. Pianist Michael Lewin plays The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan here.
Last but not least, we pay our respects to American organist and composer Arthur William Foote, who died in Boston in 1937 at age 84. Foote was a member of the select group of composers known as the Boston Six which included George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker.
Foote was appointed organist of the First Church in Boston (Unitarian) in 1878, a position he held for 32 years. During his tenure he was an editor of Hymns of the Church Universal, published in 1890. He was also a founder of the American Guild of Organists.
Most of his catalogue is chamber music — A Night Piece for flute and string quartet immediately comes to mind (here’s a performance by Joshua Smith and the Cavani Quartet at CIM in 2008). But his Second String Quartet from 1893 is a gem. Listen to a performance by the Da Vinci Quartet here.
