by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
7:00 pm – Apollo’s Fire: Michael Praetorius’ Christmas Vespers at Trinity Cathedral & Burning River Brass: Christmas Around the World at The Bath Church, Akron.
7:30 pm – The Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concert in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By some calendars, the first Saturnalia festival was held on this date in Rome in 497 BCE, just one of the ancient Winter Solstice-centered events that might have influenced modern Christmas celebrations way down the line, including such traditions as the Christmas card, the first example having been commissioned on this date in 1843 by Henry Cole, founder of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
Ballet legend Vaslav Nijinsky was born on this day in 1889 in Kviv, but considered himself to be Polish. Admired for his athletic leaps and his ability to dance en pointe, he joined Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909 just in time to choreograph Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune in 1912 (he wrote a sexually suggestive final scene for himself), and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. Sadly, he spent the last three decades of his life in and out of mental institutions. Watch a digital reconstruction of Nijinsky dancing the role of the Faun here.
And Arthur Fiedler, who conducted the Boston Pops for just short of five decades beginning in 1930, was born on December 17 in 1894. His vast list of recordings includes the premiere of Danish composer Jacob Gade’s Jalousie ‘Tango Tzigane,’ which sold more than a million copies, and the first complete performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Fiedler’s hobbies included a lifetime fascination with fire engines, which won him the title of “Honorary Captain” in the Boston Fire Department.
Finally, British composer, critic, and all-around colorful literary figure Philip Heseltine took his own life on this date in 1930 at the age of 36. He wrote music under the nom de plume of Peter Warlock, and we’ll remember him with some of his jollier music: the Three Carols, colorfully orchestrated by the composer and ebulliently performed by the City of London Choir and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Click on the links to hear “Tyrley trylow,” “Balulalow,” and “As I Sat Under a Sycamore Tree.”
