by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12 Noon, Members of Harmonia perform traditional Klezmer music on the free Brownbag Series at Trinity Cathedral.
At 6 pm, Young artists from Case Western Reserve University’s Historical Performance Practice Program present a free evening of Baroque music and dance in the Atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
At 7:30, guest conductor Rebekah Fawn Heller leads the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble in works by Orson Abram, (world premiere), Brittany J. Green, Felipe Lara, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Benjamin Muir, and Marcos Balter in Warner Concert Hall (free and live streamed).
Also tonight at 7:30, pianist Evgeny Kissin (pictured) will play J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 2, Frédéric Chopin’s Scherzo No. 4 and the Nocturnes Op. 27, No. 1 and Op. 32, No. 2, together with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata No. 2 and the Prelude and Fugues in D-flat and d in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center. Tuckets are available online.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach met the Prussian king Frederick II in Potsdam while visiting his son, Carl Phillip Emanuel, and accepted the flute-playing monarch’s challenge of improvising a three-voice Ricercar on a theme that Frederick supplied.
Back home in Leipzig, Bach the father turned that royal theme into A Musical Offering, a suite that included Ricercare for three and six voices, twelve canons — a number of them expressed as musical puzzles to be solved — and a trio sonata featuring Frederick’s instrument, the flute.
Click here to watch a performance of the entire collection at the Old Town Hall in Leipzig during the Bach anniversary year 2000 with Barthold Kuijken, transverse flute, Sigiswald Kuijken, violin, Wieland Kuijken, viola da gamba, and Robert Kohnen, harpsichord.
And Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first performed in Vienna on this date in 1824. Click here to read conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim’s guest essay, “What Beethoven’s Ninth Teaches Us,” published a year ago in the New York Times — and be sure to have a look through the many readers’ comments.
