by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at Noon, the Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concerts feature Cleveland Chamber Choir members. Dominic Aragon, baritone, Abigail Hakel-Garcia, soprano and violin, Adrian Murillo, theorbo, Kira McGirr, mezzo-soprano (pictured), and Gregory Ristow, harpsichord, in “Madness & Melancholy — including selections from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, mad songs, and Italian and French laments.
And tonight at 7:30 in Gartner Auditorium, the Cleveland Museum of Art will host the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, Bobby Ferrazza, director, in original works by members of the band and fresh arrangements of Rollins’ compositions, along with jazz standards.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
TODAY’S HEADLINE:
New York’s Met Opera announces ‘necessary’ layoffs and pay cuts
The Guardian reports that “The company is laying off 22 of its 284 administrative staffers, reducing pay for 35 of its top executives (including general director Peter Gelb and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin), and dropping one production from next season’s schedule.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1575, Queen Elizabeth I granted English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd letters patent that gave them a monopoly over publishing music and music paper. The first collection, brought out that year by the Huguenot printer T. Vautrollier, was Cantiones sacrae, containing 17 motets each by the two composers. Listen to Tallis’ O nata lux de lumine sung by Almire here.
And on January 21 of 1626, English lutenist and composer John Dowland died in London and was buried on February 20 in the St. Anne’s Church, Blackfriars. Much of his music is doleful, either due to his personal tendency toward melancholy (“semper Dowland, semper dolens”) or reflecting one of the prevailing fashions of his time.
An appropriate song to mark the occasion would be In darkness let me dwell, one of three of his songs published by his son in 1610. Listen to it here performed by soprano Estelí Gomez and guitarist Colin Davin.
Two events on this date that altered the course of American music history include the first national radio broadcast from a U.S. Opera House in 1927 (Gounod’s Faust from Chicago), and the American debut of conductor Erich Leinsdorf in New York in 1938. The first paved the way for weekly Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. The second could have kept Leinsdorf on the podium at Severance Hall had not service in the Army pulled him into uniform. Enter George Szell.
Finally, Danish pianist and comedian Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” closed on this date in 1956 at the John Golden Theater in New York after 849 performances, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest-running one-man show in the history of theater. We could all use some of Borge’s sophisticated silliness these days.
