By Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. OLO stages Pinafore, CIPC hosts Gevorgyan recital, Kent Blossom Festival presents first faculty concert
. Youngstown Symphony season, Opera Western Reserve grant for Carmen
. Almanac remembers famous Douglass anti-slavery speech that inspired an opera
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2 pm, Ohio Light Opera continues its run of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Lass That Loved a Sailor in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.
At 7:30, Eva Gevorgyan returns to Cleveland to kick off the 2023 Cleveland International Piano Competition and Institute for Young Artists with a program of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
And Kent Blossom Music Festival Faculty Concerts begin at 7:30 pm with a performance by WindSync — Garrett Hudson, flute, Emily Tsai, oboe, Graeme Steele Johnson, clarinet, Kara LaMoure, bassoon and Anni Hochhalter, horn — in Ludwig Recital Hall on the Kent State campus.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Youngstown Symphony has announced its 2023-2024 season. Read the press release here.
Opera Western Reserve has received a $10,000 grant from the Frank & Pearl E. Gelbman Charitable Foundation to support its November 17 production of Carmen, the first grant of a three-year commitment in support of OWR.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
At a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on this date in 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his speech What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? — considered by many to be the greatest piece of anti-slavery oratory in American history.
Composer Dorothy Rudd Moore turned to that prominent abolitionist as inspiration for her opera Frederick Douglass. One powerful moment that critic Tim Page noted in his review of the 1985 premiere is a musical setting of excerpts of that famous speech — “when Douglass contemplates the bitter irony of a pre-emancipation Fourth of July,” Page writes.
Watch a performance of the aria by baritone José Pietri-Coimbre and pianist Richard Liebowitz from 2019. You can also read about the speech here from the Library of Congress, read the full speech here from BlackPast, or listen to five descendants of Douglass reading and responding to excerpts of it here.
