by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Occidental Gypsy’s tribute to Django Reinhardt (7 pm at Transformer Station).
JoAnn Falletta (photo collage by Mark Dellas) and Jake Taniguchi conduct the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in works by Joe Hisaishi, Zoltán Kodály and Antonín Dvořák (7:30 at Severance Music Center).
And Tri-C Performing Arts presents the Count Basie Orchestra (7:30 at Metropolitan Campus Auditorium).
See our Concert Listings for more information about these and other events.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Bascom Little Fund, a charitable trust created to promote the work of Northeast Ohio composers through live concerts, recordings, publications of contemporary music composed in Northeast Ohio, is now accepting proposals for the new grant cycle via its online application. Deadline is May 1.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
One debut and three final acts to commemorate today: French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was born on this date in 1925 in Montbrison, while Renaissance composers Heinrich Isaac and Antonio de Cabezon, and German composer Ludwig van Beethoven took their final bows in 1517, 1566, and 1827 in Florence, Madrid, and Vienna, respectively.
Cabezon, who was blind from early childhood, rose to become the first major Iberian composer for keyboard instruments and a member of the Spanish royal household. Listen here to his Diferencias sobre la Gallarda Milanesa played by Arturo Barba Sevillano on the historic organ at Villar de Cañas, Cuenca, in 2013.
One of the most prolific and well-traveled of Renaissance composers, Isaac enjoyed the patronage of the Medicis, whose coat of arms is associated with his Palle palle, played here by Voices of Music.
If you’ve been missing wind music (allegedly the super-spreaders of the COVID-19 era), here’s another Isaac tune, A la battaglia, performed by the Italian Consort.
Beethoven’s music has been in everyone’s ears more than usual since the 250th anniversary of his birth, but maybe not this piece. His Elegischer Gesang for string quartet and four voices dates from 1814 and was dedicated to a friend whose wife had died three years earlier at the age of 24. It’s a lovely way to celebrate the departure of Beethoven as well. Listen to it here performed by the San Francisco Choral Artists.
Lest we become too sentimental, it’s worth remembering that the earthy composer was told on his deathbed that a gift of a dozen bottles of wine had arrived from his publisher. According to his American biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Beethoven’s last recorded words were “Pity, pity — too late!”
And Pierre Boulez enjoyed a special relationship with The Cleveland Orchestra, palpably represented by his performance with them of the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, but also preserved in musicians’ tributes on the occasion of his 90th birthday. And more recently, in Principal Trumpet Michael Sachs’ remembrances in the 10th episode of the Orchestra’s On a Personal Note podcasts.
