by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
2:00 pm – Ohio Light Opera. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. Freedlander Theatre, College of Wooster.
7:00 pm – Kent Blossom Music Festival. Santiago Cañón-Valencia, cello (pictured), and Jee-Won Oh, piano. Ludwig Recital Hall, Kent State University.
7:30 pm – City Stages. Yeison Landero, accordion, at Transformer Station.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was born on this date in 1879 in Bologna. A master orchestrator who insisted that song should be the “original and immortal element” in Italian music, he’s best known for his Roman tone poems. Watch a documentary, A Dream of Italy here, and listen to his infrequently-performed suite Vetrate di Chiesa (“Church Windows”) here.
African American choral conductor, composer, and actor Jester Hairston was born on this date in 1901 in Belews Creek, North Carolina. Amen: the Life and Music of Jester Hairston can be viewed here, and you can listen to its title song, Amen, performed by the composer and the Festival Chorus of the 1990 International Choral Festival in Missoula, Montana. Hairston was 89 at the time.
French organist and master improviser Pierre Cochereau was born on this date in 1924 near Paris. For a bit of nostalgia (and to dust off your French), watch an interview with the celebrated organist of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris before the disastrous fire that threatened the entire structure but miraculously spared the great organ. He explains how the great organ works and recalls some of the Cathedral’s great moments in history. And, in another video, preceded by the tolling of Emmanuel, the Cathedral’s largest bell, Cochereau improvises a postlude on La Marsellaise at the end of a peace mass.
Category: forgotten composers. Edward Burlingame Hill died on this date in 1960 in Francetown, New Hampshire. Here’s a rare performance of his Symphony No. 1 by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony.
And another New England composer, Randall Thompson, died on this date in 1984 in Boston. Surely his 1940 Alleluia is the most-performed of his choral works (here it’s sung by the Oberlin College Choir under Robert Fountain on its 1964 Soviet Tour), but most amateur choristers have met up with one or more of his well-crafted, accessible pieces.
Among the most popular is Frostiana, his suite of Seven Country Songs on poems of Robert Frost where he perfectly matches the elegant simplicity of texts to music (click here for a live performance by Edward Elwyn Jones and the Harvard University Choir), and The Peaceable Kingdom, setting texts from the prophecies of Isaiah. The Interlochen Arts Academy Chamber Singers perform them here, and as an indication of Thompson’s international reach, the Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires sings them (in English) under Carlos López Pucci here.
