by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: SalonEra concludes Season 4 with the music of Margaret Bonds and Florence Price in “Gilded-Age Chicago”
•Announcements: honors for a trio of locals and recent grads
•Almanac: Stravinsky at the White House with JFK
by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: Cleveland Orchestra & Oberlin Orchestra
•Interesting reads: Rachmaninoff at 150
•Job listings: Senior Strategist (Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy) at City Hall, and Conservatory Event Publicity and Marketing Specialist at Oberlin
•Honors for a CWRU composer
•Almanac: Carlos Salzedo, André Previn, Igor Stravinsky, Ray Charles
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, Rafael Payare (pictured) leads The Cleveland Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Bernstein’s Second (“The Age of Anxiety”), which features pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist. Tickets are available here.
And at that same hour at Finney Chapel, pianist Annie Qin, one of the winners of Oberlin Conservatory’s Concerto Competition, will play Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto with the Oberlin Orchestra, led by Raphael Jiménez. The program also includes Pierre Jalbert’s Passage and the world premiere of Michael Frazier’s la flor nopal. It’s free, and you can catch the stream here.
by Daniel Hathaway
ON TODAY:
Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert at high noon today will feature the Amethyst String Quartet – Mary Beth Ions and Carol Ruzicka, violins, Laura Kuennen-Poper, viola, an Kent Collier, cello in a “spring bouquet” of Classical favorites by Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Dvořák & Mozart. The hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived for later, on-demand viewing.
NEWS BRIEFS:
On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the appointment of Zachary Woolfe, a freelancer at the paper since 2011, as its classical music critic. In an article in Editor and Publisher, his Times colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel wrote
Zack often engages with the major issues confronting the field — editing and writing pieces about the continuing obstacles female conductors face; the lack of diversity in major orchestras and on podiums; the ways classical music should change in an era of racial reckoning; and the field’s complex, fraught relationship with Asian and Asian American musicians. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
CHANGES TO TODAY’S SCHEDULE:
The livestreamed “Tuesday Noon” concert from Church of the Covenant featuring organist Jonathan Moyer in Petr Ebenhas’ complete Nedêlní Hudba (“Sunday Music”) has been postponed to January 25 due to weather.
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA NEWS:
Three pieces of news arrived from the Orchestra over the long weekend.
First, February 4 will bring the return of the In Focus series, available on the Adella streaming platform. Season Two contains six episodes, set to carry us through June. And now that the series exists alongside the Orchestra’s concert season, it’s taking a slightly different approach: it will include selected live performances from the second half of the 2021-22, set alongside interviews and features about the music and the music-making. See the schedule here.
Second, the 2022 Blossom Music Festival was announced on Sunday, and will run from July 2 through September 4 at the Orchestra’s summer home in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Subscriptions are currently on sale, and individual tickets will be available beginning April 4. Take in an overview here.
And while the annual festivities celebrating MLK had to be postponed due to COVID-19, that didn’t stop the Orchestra from announcing the recipients of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award, recognizing individuals and organizations whose impact on Cleveland reflects the spirit of King’s teachings. The three winners for 2022 are Joan Southgate, Dolores White, and the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center (pictured above, left to right). A formal presentation of the awards will take place onstage at Severance Music Center before the rescheduled MLK Celebration Concert on June 4.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Perhaps the most interesting anniversary on this date is not of a birth, a death, or a premiere, but of a dinner. The host was John F. Kennedy, the featured guest was a 79-year-old Stravinsky, and the setting was the White House, January 18, 1962. (Above, left to right: Vera de Bosset Stravinsky, JFK, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Igor Stravinsky.)
Pettiness, chumminess, politics, charm, and drunkenness were all a part of the evening: