HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30, Country GongBang, South Korea’s first and only bluegrass band performs a distinctive blend of contemporary bluegrass and K-pop sentiments in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
INTERESTING READ:
The Guardian reports that a previously unknown printed song and a collection of keyboard music by Henry Purcell have recently surfaced in local authority archives in Worcestershire and Norfolk… “‘As soon as day began to peep” was written for a character called Monsieur le Prate, a French fop, in a 1691 play titled Love for Money, which lampooned a girls’ boarding school. Its author was Thomas D’Urfey, a frequent collaborator of Purcell.
“…in this song, the fop is ‘not quite in control of his emotions’ in trying to woo a woman: ‘He comically compares himself to a cat howling and scratching at the door of his beloved, with Purcell representing the miaows in music.”
“…at the play’s performance in London, audience members booed it as a malicious attack on the girls’ boarding school in Chelsea, where D’Urfey had stayed in 1690: Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas was performed at the same school in around 1687, so it is interesting to see Purcell also involved in a play that satirised the venue of his opera and the girls who sang in it.”
NB: Dido and Aeneas will be staged by Apollo’s Fire in local venues from October 9-12.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German composer Heinrich Schütz was born in Kostritz on this date in 1585. Renowned for his evocative settings of texts, Schütz’s vocal music comes in all shapes and sizes, from two-part motets that reflected the decimation of choirs during the Thirty Years War, to splendid polychoral works he wrote after study trips to Venice. It’s a pity that his only opera, Daphne, has been lost.
Listen here to Concerto Palatino perform his astonishingly expressive motet Anime mea liquefacta est from the Symphoniae Sacrae, and here to his funeral cantata, Ein Musikalische Exequien, a 3-movement Protestant requiem commissioned long before it was needed by a patron who wanted to enjoy it while he was still alive. Lionel Bringuier leads the Belgian choir Vox Luminis, who sang most recently in Cleveland at St. John’s Cathedral in October, 2018.
French organist and composer Louis Vierne was born on this date in Poitiers. Legally blind, Vierne served as organist of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris from 1900-1937, collapsing at the console during a recital.
There’s a celebrated recording of Vierne’s Mass for choir and two organs recorded in Notre-Dame and featuring the composer’s later successor Pierre Cochereau. Listen here. (NB: most of the accompanying photos are actually of Notre-Dame in Montréal!)
On this date in 1930, Japanese composer Torū Takemitsu was born in Tokyo. Two of his nature-inspired compositions are available in performances by the CIM New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch, director. Click on the links to watch Water-ways (from a November, 2015 concert), and Rain Spell (from February, 2018).
And Australian composer Carl Vine was born on October 8, 1954 in Perth. His Piano Sonata No. 1 was among the works that Cleveland International Piano Competition laureate Spencer Myer played in the 2005 contest. Watch those performances here and here.
