by Daniel Hathaway

On Sunday, October 3 at Youngstown’s DeYor Performing Arts Center, the Dana School of Music’s Dana Ensemble will return for its second season to perform two brilliant 20th-century pieces that straddle the worlds of chamber and theater music. The 3:00 program will feature Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (L’Histoire du Soldat) and William Walton’s Façade: An Entertainment.

In a press release, faculty cellist Kivie Cahn-Lipman writes, “This is a pair of incredibly fun pieces, both of them early experiments in classical music with spoken-word theatrical elements. The Walton is a rarity, and the Stravinsky has come to be considered one of the great works of the early 20th century. It’s a program not to be missed.”

The Walton piece is the result of a 1921 collaboration between the 19-year-old composer and the eccentric British poet Edith Sitwell, who had been writing nonsense verse since 1918. [Read more…]