by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
Plenty of concert options await at this week’s middle mark.
Tonight at 7:30 pm, pianist Kirill Gerstein (pictured) presents a recital with works by Francisco Coll, Robert Schumann, Ravel, and Liszt at Severance Music Center.
In terms of holiday concerts, Apollo’s Fire continues performances of “WASSAIL! An Irish-Appalachian Christmas” in Bath at 7:00 pm; the Cleveland Museum of Art hosts M.U.S.i.C. Stars in the Classics and dancers from the Cleveland Ballet at 6:00; and the Dana School of Music presents Carols & Cocoa and the Dana Holiday Concert at 7:00.
Rounding out today’s events are the Shaker Heights High School Chamber Orchestra at Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert (12:00 pm); the voice performance majors of BW Liederabend (7:00 pm); and an evening of duos with violinist Stephen Tavani and violist William Bender for a Cleveland State University Faculty Recital (7:00 pm).
For more details on these events and more, visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
On this date in 1976, England and the classical music world lost one of its greatest composers when Benjamin Britten died in Aldeburgh, Sussex, at the home he shared with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and in the village where he and Pears had established the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 1948.
Britten’s operas are at the center of his compositional output, but he wrote in nearly every genre. He sat for an interview with the CBC in 1968 where he talked about his career as a composer.
Considering the season, who can mention Britten without thinking of his wonderful A Ceremony of Carols for treble choir and harp, written at sea between the U.S. and England in 1942? The eleven Middle English poems Britten selected inspired him to write some unforgettable music. Listen here to a performance by the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and here to a 2017 Brownbag Concert performance by the soprano and altos of the choir of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland.
Another inspired setting of Medieval poetry is his 1930 A Hymn to the Virgin for chorus and semi-chorus, sung here by Quire Cleveland.
Recent Cleveland performances of Britten’s chamber music include his String Quartet No. 2, performed at ChamberFest Cleveland in 2013, and his Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, recorded on the Severance Hall stage in the summer of 2020 by physically-distanced Cleveland Orchestra musicians.
Britten’s renown as a composer is reflected in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Listen here to a performance by the Baltic Sea Youth Philharmonic.
And on this date in 1993, iconoclastic American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa died of cancer at the age of 52 in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging career is too complex to sum up in a few sentences, but Zappa equally impressed amphitheaters-full of rock fans and symphony orchestra conductors like Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, and Pierre Boulez with his compositional prowess and guitar playing.
Listen to a performance of Zappa’s Perfect Stranger by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Matthias Pintscher, and to a France Culture retrospective, Zappa et la musique du XXe siècle.
