by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
Harp, banjo, cuatro, fiddle, upright bass, guitar, and maracas are just some of the instruments played by Larry & Joe, who perform at 7:00 pm this evening. The Cleveland Museum of Art presents the duo’s blend of Venezuelan and Appalachian folk traditions at Transformer Station in Ohio City. Tickets available online.
For more details, visit our Concert Listings.
BLOSSOM SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT:
We’re especially looking forward to summer during this bitterly cold week, and The Cleveland Orchestra has now revealed the classical and pops programs coming as part of the 2025 Blossom Music Festival.
Repertoire highlights include Orff’s Carmina Burana, Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony, and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Returning faces like conductors Osmo Vänskä and Elim Chan appear as well as artists making their Blossom debut, including conductor Jonathon Heyward, violinist Veronica Eberle, and pianist Alessio Bax.
Individual tickets are now available — learn more in the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
Today’s birthdays include French pianist and composer Henri Dutilleux (1916) and Czech composer and church musician Petr Eben (1929). And American pianist and composer Marc Blitzstein died on January 22, 1964.
Dutilleux, who was head of music production at Radio France for nearly two decades, left a small body of idiosyncratic works in the vein of Ravel, Debussy, Roussel, and Messiaen. George Szell conducted his 5 Métaboles with The Cleveland Orchestra live in 1967, and CIM faculty pianist Daniel Shapiro performs his 1947-48 Piano Sonata here.
Cleveland organist Karel Paukert has frequently performed the music of Eben, his fellow Czech, including The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a 14-movement piece that originated as improvisations on themes taken from the writings of the humanist philosopher and theologian Johann Amos Comenius. Here’s a video of the finale of Eben’s Sunday Music played by Monica Czausz at Rice University.
Blitzstein gained national attention for his 1937 pro-union play, The Cradle Will Rock, which was shut down by the Works Progress Administration and hastily moved to a different theater. Leonard Bernstein revived it at Harvard in 1939 in that stripped-down format. Blitztein discusses his musical here.
If you had been watching Superbowl XVIII on this date in 1984, you’d have had the first look at the Apple Macintosh computer, the first consumer machine to feature a mouse and a graphical interface. (This message is being brought to you by one of its successors, a MacBook Pro.)
And on this date in 1573, English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne finished writing his Holy Sonnets. Benjamin Britten is among the composers who set some of that striking poetry to music. Peter Pears sings them here with the composer at the piano.
