by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY
Tonight at 6 pm, Piano Cleveland Live presents Spencer Myer, Chu-Fang Huang, Daria Rabotkina, and Dongni Xie, the members of the preliminary jury for The Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists, in recital at Sapphire Creek Winery & Gardens.
And at 7:30, ENCORE Chamber Music Institute presents Trio Seoul (pictured, Jinjoo Cho, violin, Brannon Cho, cello, and Kyu Yeon Kim, piano) in music by Joseph Haydn, Juri Seo, Franz Liszt, and Maurice Ravel at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
INTERESTING READ:
Can the American Oboe Sing Again?
“Building the instrument is hard enough. Turning a profit is a killer. But Jim Phelan is bent on reviving one of the great names in classical music. Read the NY Times story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
This edition of the Almanac complements today’s Interesting Read topic of …interesting reeds.
Several sources claim that the clarinet was invented by the German woodwind maker Johann Christoph Denner on this date in 1690 in Nürnberg. Well…Denner seems to have added a register key to the chalmeau, a single-reed instrument whose origins can be traced back to ancient times. In any case, clarinets entered the orchestra during the Classical period and such virtuosi as Anton Stadler mastered them an inspired two wonderful solo works by Mozart. A good excuse to revisit Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet performed by Franklin Cohen and his ChamberFest Cleveland colleagues here.
Speaking of Mozart, January 14, 1800 was the birthdate of the Austrian musicographer Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, who compiled the first comprehensive catalogue of the composer’s works, hence the “K” numbers that identify them.
Many composers kept their own lists of compositions, often assigning them Opus (“Work”) numbers if they thought them worthy of a position in their personal canon. We have four sets of catalogue numbers for Beethoven: his own Opus list (Nos. 1-135), then a 1955 list by Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm of “Works without Opus Numbers” (WoOo numbers 1-125), and a further list of works compiled by Willy Hess in the 1950s identified by Hess numbers.
The final catalogue, compiled by Giovanni Biamonti in 1968, attempts a chronological listing of all of Beethoven’s works, Opus, WoO, and Hess numbers included. Otto Deutsch did a similar favor for Schubert, assigning his works “D” numbers.
Good trivia question: How many works did each of these composers leave to posterity? Mozart: at least 626 plus fragments. Beethoven: 849 according to Biamonti. Schubert: 993. Bach: more than 1,126. Numbers are approximate — some include lost works.
And looking forward to the celebrations this month, it was on January 14, 1979 that President Jimmy Carter proposed observing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday.
