by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
Round 2 of the Cooper International Competition begins today, with the field now narrowed to six violinists. From 3:00 to 6:15 pm and again from 8:00 to 10:45 pm, each will perform a 45-minute recital in Oberlin’s Warner Concert Hall. See our Concert Listings for contestants and their start times.
All rounds will also be streamed live at oberlin.edu and via The Violin Channel. You can learn more about this year’s competition here, in Mike Telin’s interview with competition director and jury chair Sibbi Bernhardsson.
For details of upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Pianist Gerardo Teissonnière has been announced as one of nine winners of the 2025 Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio. These awards, conferred since 1971, celebrate exceptional Ohio artists, organizations, educators and beyond. Teissonnière, a Cleveland Institute of Music alum and faculty member, will be honored at the awards ceremony on May 28.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
On January 8, 1957, American composer David Lang was born in Los Angeles. He describes himself in his biography as “Passionate, prolific, and complicated, David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention; he is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.” One of the founders of Bang on a Can and the author of little match girl passion, which was just performed by Cleveland Chamber Choir and reviewed here by Peter Feher, Lang also conceived Lifespan, an installation that involved members of The Crossing blowing on a suspended 4 billion-year-old rock at the Cleveland Museum of Art in January, 2017. Watch here.
And on January 8, 1998, British composer Sir Michael Tippett died in London at the age of 93. Regarded along with Benjamin Britten as one of the preeminent British composers of the 20th century, and like Britten, a pacifist, Tippett is remembered today for his operas and for the oratorio A Child of Our Time, which he began composing in 1939. The subject was inspired by the murder of a teenaged Jewish refugee in Paris that set off the events of Kristallnacht in November, 1938. Basing its structure on Handel’s Messiah, the oratorio used African American spirituals as commentary in the same way that J.S. Bach used Lutheran chorales in the Passions.
Simon Rattle talked about the work with Andrew Sachs in this interview. Watch a complete 2011 performance by the Concertkoor Haarlem and the Promenade Orkkest here.
The chorales are frequently performed by themselves, as they were by Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Chorus and Orchestra on the Last Night of the Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall in September, 2011. Slatkin chose to program them in place of the usual end-of-Proms revelry due to the 9/11 attacks that happened only days before. Watch here.
