by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two lunchtime and three evening concerts round out the mid-week.
At 12:00 noon, the “Feel Good Music” group Gruve Tonic entertains Trinity Cathedral as part of their Brownbag Concert Series, while organist Robert Myers plays reformation music at Trinity Lutheran Church’s Music Near the Market.
And tonight, 7:30 pm concerts abound at three local educational institutions. At CIM, the four female vocalists of the Quince Ensemble (pictured) present a variety of contemporary repertoire; at Oberlin, Maurice Cohn leads the Oberlin Orchestra in a program featuring Schoenberg’s Cello Concerto; and Tri-C’s Metropolitan Campus hosts the Amina Figarova Sextet as they join forces with the Matsiko World Orphan Choir, an ensemble of at-risk Liberian children.
For more details on these and more, visit our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
English-born violist and composer Rebecca Clarke died on this date in 1979 in New Dutch composer-organist Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck died on this date in music history (1621), as did German composer and lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss (1750).
The more cheery anniversaries belong to Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (born on October 16, 1679), American bassist and conductor Henry Jay Lewis (likewise in 1932), and one figure who is still with us: American conductor Marin Alsop (born in 1956, making her 67 today).
Another type of birth: Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire was premiered on this date in 1912, as were two works by Aaron Copland (Billy the Kid in 1938 and Rodeo in 1942), Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 4 (in 1992), and Tan Dun’s Paper Concerto (in 2003).
We’ll focus on Tower and Alsop, a fitting pairing, given that both of them are trailblazing women and leading figures in classical music today — and even more fitting in the context of Tower’s six-part series of fanfares dedicated to “women who take risks and are adventurous,” as the composer writes in her program note.
The first of those works was dedicated to Alsop, and the sixth was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony in 2016 under her baton. Plus, she recorded the first five of them on the 1999 album Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman with the Colorado Symphony. Listen to No. 4 here.
