by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
If you feel like making a joyful noise, Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert Series hosts a Messiah Sing-a-long at 12 Noon.
If you want to admire art and music simultaneously, visit Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (Agapanthus) at the Cleveland Museum of Art at 6:00 pm. The Chamber Music in the Galleries series presents guitarist Craig Slagh, violinists Jenny Cluggish and McKenna Glorioso, and violist Christopher Jenkins in works by Jules Massenet, Erik Satie, Antoine L’Hoyer, and Antonín Dvořák.
And if you were lucky enough to already snag your tickets, the first of two sold-out performances of The Cleveland Orchestra’s Muppet Christmas Carol in Concert (pictured) is tonight at 7:30 pm. Sarah Hicks conducts the complete score live-to-picture.
For more details, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced the honorees for its 2025 Alumni Awards. During next May’s commencement ceremony, the Distinguished Alumni Award will be presented to conductor and violinist John McLaughlin Williams (BM ’97, MM ’97), while the Alumni Achievement Award will be presented to violist and arts administrator Jennifer Arnold (BM ’03, PS ’05).
The institution also reaffirmed that renovations for Kulas Hall remain on track, with an expected grand reopening in fall 2025. Read the full press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
On this date in 1737, Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari died in Cremona, having crafted some 1,100 instruments — mostly violins, but also violas, cellos, harps, guitars and mandolins, of which some 650 survive today. That includes instruments in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, which regularly make appearances in concerts. View a fascinating list of Stradivari’s surviving instruments, their owners, and lendees here.
There’s a mystique about the stringed instruments that came out of the ateliers of the great 17th and 18th century Italian makers in Cremona. Multiple explanations have been put forward about what makes them stand head and shoulders above those of other makers (watch The Secret of the Violin here), although there are performers who debunk their superiority over later instruments.
Strads are priceless these days. Many are owned by hedge funds and put out on long-term loans to performers, or are held in museums or libraries where violinists are hired to play them regularly to keep their sound alive. That hasn’t prevented artists from leaving their instruments in taxicabs (as did cellist Yo Yo Ma and violinist Philippe Quin in New York) or in the luggage rack of a train (as did an unnamed violinist in Germany). All were happily returned within a few hours. Other instruments have simply been stolen, as in the case of Roman Totenberg’s fiddle, which disappeared from his office at the Longy School of Music in 1980 only to be recovered 35 years later.
Back home in the U.S., today marks the anniversaries of a number of American composers: the birth of Edward MacDowell in 1860, the death of Louis Moreau Gottschalk in 1869, the death of Horatio Parker in 1919, the birth of Bang-On-a-Can founder Julia Wolfe in 1958, and the death of Daniel Pinkham in 2006.
