by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
On the Wednesday noon Brownbag series at Trinity Cathedral, mezzo-soprano Kira McGirr will sing a tribute to British contralto Clara Butt (1872-1936) featuring Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures with pianist Shiloh Roby. Oberlin College & Conservatory Professor Charles McGuire — an expert on Butt’s life and music — will discuss her career and the profound impact she had on music-making in Great Britain and early vocal recording. It’s free.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Departures: Danish-German organist and composer Nicolaus Bruhns died on this date in 1697. Arrivals: Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev was born on March 19, 1873 in Novgorod, followed exactly one year later by German composer Max Reger in Brand, Bavaria.
Bruhns, who studied with Dietrich Buxtehude and served as organist of the Cathedral of Husum, left a small but distinguished oeuvre of solo organ music (5 pieces) and solo cantatas (12 works) when he died at the age of 31. A violinist as well, he was known for playing that instrument with his hands while his feet were busy on the pedalboard (an effect he wrote into his larger e-minor Präludium, analyzed here by Balint Karosi and violinist Edson Scheid).
CIM graduate David von Behren (now assistant organist and choirmaster at Harvard) channels Bruhns’ feat in several videos. Click here to watch him play his arrangement of the Sinfonia from J.S. Bach’s Cantata 156 in Woolsey Hall when he was a graduate student at Yale.
The history of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes is featured in a two-hour documentary film here.
Until his death in 1916, Max Reger enjoyed a distinguished career as composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and teacher. Among his students were Rudolf Serkin and George Szell.
Reger’s organ works combine classical forms with Romantic rhetoric, and his complex scores can be thick with notes.
Follow along with the score to his Variationen und Fuge über ein Originalthema, Op. 73, played by Dutch organist Willem Tanke. The performer describes the work as “A forty minute battle with immense technical difficulties and emotions.”
For another Reger performance, watch Ken Cowan navigate the Phantasie über Wie schön leucht’ uns der Morgenstern, Op. 40 on the Fisk-Rosales organ in Edythe Bates Old Recital Hall at Rice University in Houston.
