by Daniel Hathaway
CONCERTS TODAY AND TOMORROW:
On Saturday, the BGSU Men’s Chorus continues its tour in the area with a 4pm program at First Congregational Church in Tallmadge and TrueNorth Chorale and Chamber Orchestra perform in Bay Village at 7.
Two Oberlin events on Saturday evening at 7:30 pm include a Faculty/Guest Recital by NEXUS Chamber Music with English hornist Robert Walters, and an organ recital by former professor William Porter with Michael Lynn, flute and recorder.
Porter’s recital is the harbinger of two events on Sunday marking the 40th anniversary of the 17th-century style North German meantone organ by John Brombaugh and Associates in Fairchild Chapel (pictured). Alumni play a tag team recital at 2:30 pm, and a 7:30 pm Vespers Concert will feature the Collegium Musicum, directed by Steven Plank, faculty organists Jonathan Moyer and Christa Rakich, Porter and guests.
Halloween inspires programs by the Euclid Symphony and the Kent State Orchestra, both on Sunday at 3, and other performances include composer, arranger, and organist Dan Miller (2 pm in Parma Heights), the Jerusalem Quartet on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series (3 pm at the Maltz PAC), the CIM New Music Ensemble with Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (4 pm in Mixon Hall), saxophonist Gabriel Piqué and pianist Casey Dierlam Tse on the Music From The Western Reserve series (5 pm at Christ Church, Hudson), and an Oberlin Jazz Society jam session with Caleb Smith (7:30 pm at the Birenbaum).
Details in our Concert Listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
It’s time for the annual celebration of Hallowe’en, and probably also time to put that apostrophe back in its name, which is a contraction of “All Hallows Eve,” the day before the Christian feast of All Saints’ Day. So on Sunday there will be “ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night” out and about.
A variety of scary mix tapes is available, but Dark Classical, one of the better collections to listen to on Hallowe’en, will give you an hour and 45 minutes worth of thrills and chills while you’re waiting to pass out sugary treats.
Everyone has their own favorite hair-raising music, and comments on the aforementioned collection have lamented the omission of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and proposed adding Schnittke’s Requiem, and the “Dance of the Knights” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
My own recommendation for generating goose bumps is “Satan’s Dance” from Ralph Vaughan William’s Job: A Masque for Dancing, based on drawings by William Blake (left, Satan smiting Job with boils). The composer dedicated his 1930 work to conductor Sir Adrian Boult, who leads it here with the London Philharmonic at the age of 83. (Satan enters around 4:12).
A bit scary in its own way, George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children was first performed on October 30, 1970 at the Library of Congress by the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, which included mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, pianist Gilbert Kalish, and boy soprano Michael Dash. The piece was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, named for the American music patroness and composer who was, by coincidence, born on October 30, 1864 in Chicago.
Click here to watch a more recent performance by faculty and fellows at the 2016 Bang on a Can Summer Marathon at MASS MoCA’s Summer Festival.
English composer Philip Heseltine, who used the nom de plume Peter Warlock — a nice touch for Halloween weekend 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.
Heseltine sporadically wrote musical criticism, and composed a long list of songs and choral pieces significant for their eccentricity. Rumor had it that he attended an amateur choral society’s performance of his Three Carols in December, 1930, went home depressed, put out the cat, and gassed himself at the kitchen stove.
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.”
