by Jarrett Hoffman
HAPPENING TODAY:
12:15 pm – Wednesday Noon Organ Concert by Robert Myers. “Little beginnings,” music by Sweelinck, Pachelbel, and J.S. Bach. Beckerath organ. Trinity Lutheran Church, W. 30th & Lorain, Cleveland. Freewill offering.
6:00 pm – Piano Cleveland Live @ 50. Performers include the Preliminary Jury of the 2024 Cleveland International Piano Competition. Boss Dog Brewing, 2197 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights. Free.
7:30 pm – Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, conducting. Sergei Prokoviev’s Symphonies No. 2 & 5 & Anton Webern’s Symphony. Concert Preview lecture by Eric Charnofsky. Severance Music Center, 11001 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. Tickets available online.
NEWS BRIEFS:
In a Facebook post, David Conte (pictured above) has updated information we reposted on Tuesday from The Violin Channel about his role in an opera premiere. He writes:
“La Ville Morte, an opera by Nadia Boulanger and Raoul Pugno, is being premiered by Catapult Opera this week in Athens and in New York in April. My role as a supervisor was minimal for a new orchestration by my brilliant former students and now colleagues Joseph Stillwell and Stefan Cwik, who labored mightily for over a year. Thanks to Catapult’s Artistic Director Neal Goren for entrusting us with this project.”
And last week, violinist Hilary Hahn was named the winner of the 2024 Avery Fisher Prize, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. “The announcement was made by Deborah Borda, chair of the Avery Fisher Artist Program, from the stage of David Geffen Hall, following Hahn’s performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto no.1 with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Jakub Hrůša.” Read from The Strad here, and read a New York Times review of that evening here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Several important composers were born on this date in music history.
A good place to begin is with Donald Erb. Winner of the 1992 Rome Prize, among many honors, Erb was also at the center of a web of local connections: he was born in Youngstown on this date in 1927, graduated from Lakewood High School, went on to study at Kent State and CIM, and taught at both Bowling Green and CIM, where he led the school’s composition department for many years.
Continuing locally, his 1993 Evensong was commissioned by Christoph von Dohnanyi for the 75th anniversary of The Cleveland Orchestra. Click here to listen to a performance by the CIM Orchestra under guest conductor Steven Smith.
Next up is Polish composer and violinist Grażyna Bacewicz, who died on this date in 1969. Both of her main musical interests were on display when she was concertmaster of the Polish Radio Orchestra, where she not only was featured as soloist but also had the opportunity to hear her own works performed — from a pretty good seat, to boot.
Composition became her primary focus after injuries suffered from a car accident — and after a series of awards and commissions pushed her further in that direction. One of her many works to receive major honors was the Concerto for String Orchestra, which you can listen to here in a performance from 2020 by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, led by Ruth Reinhardt.
Back to local connections: Zenobia Powell Perry, who died on this date in 2004, had a long career in education, including on the faculty and as composer-in-residence at Central State University in Wilberforce, where she taught for over 25 years. Like Bacewicz, she put her energy more fully into composition fairly late in life, in her forties — only a few years before beginning to teach at CSU. Perry was also active in the civil rights movement, becoming a member of the NAACP in 1962.
We began today’s almanac with Erb’s work in honor of The Cleveland Orchestra, and we’ll end with Perry’s work based on a piece of Wilberforce history: the opera Tawawa House, named after a hotel that was part of the Underground Railroad. It was premiered at CSU in 1987 before being revived in 2014 in Modesto, California. Watch a documentary here, and a 2019 performance here by The Sankofa Theater Company in Modesto.