by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
We’re halfway through the week, with two concerts to celebrate. At 12:00 noon, hear organist Shane Brandes perform at Trinity Lutheran Church for Music Near the Market.
Or, at 6:00, hear students from the CIM Guitar Studio perform at the Cleveland Museum of Art (pictured). This free concert takes place in Gallery 212, Baroque Painting and Sculpture.
For more information, visit our Concert Listings.
ANOTHER NEW DISCOVERY:
First Mozart, now Chopin — it’s been a big year for unearthing music by long-dead composers. That’s right — a previously unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin has emerged from the collection at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. The brief, though complete, manuscript is said to be from when the composer is in his early 20s. Read more about it and hear a performance from the pianist Lang Lang here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
On this date in 1864, American music patroness and composer Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born in Chicago. Her generous advocacy for chamber music led to the founding of the Berkshire Music Festival in 1918, the precursor of Tanglewood, and she was responsible for the commissioning of a long list of important works for the Library of Congress, including quartets by Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, Schoenberg and Webern, a flute sonata by Poulenc, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Click here to watch Demarre McGill perform the Poulenc sonata with pianist Michael McHale.
English composer Philip Heseltine, who used the nom de plume Peter Warlock — a nice touch for Halloween since he had a lively interest in the occult — was born on October 30, 1894 in London. A close friend of Delius since their boyhood at Eton, Heseltine was such a character that he appeared as himself in novels by such authors as D.H. Lawrence. “Classical Nerd” host Thomas Little devoted an episode to Warlock’s life.
Listen to his popular carol Benedicamus Domino sung in 2013 by Quire Cleveland, and another carol, Bethlehem Down, performed by King’s College Choir. The latter resulted when poet Bruce Blunt and Heseltine decided to enter a newspaper contest for a new carol. They won, and had “an immortal carouse on the proceeds.”
On this date in 1934, Dutch flutist, musicologist, and virtuoso recorder player Franz Bruggen was born in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to him play his reconstruction of a Bach recorder concerto with the Orchestra of the 18th Century at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. For an explanation of the piece, scroll down to read the comment by Skip Sempé.
And on October 30, 1953, Hungarian-born operetta composer Emmerich Kálmán died in Paris. Click here to watch a virtual Kálmán Festival “from the Merry Widow Vaults,” produced by Ohio Light Opera, who have championed his works in Wooster during their summer seasons.
