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To•Day

DIARY: Monday, February 16, 2026

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

Today is Presidents Day, a federal holiday that began as a celebration of the birthday of George Washington, to which Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was later added by Congress. TIME magazine sums up the history of presidential birthday celebrations here.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: The Music Settlement will offer a wide variety of summer classes and camps this year. Registration is now open. Read more here.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

Helmuth Rilling, Who Recorded Huge Swaths of Bach, Dies at 92 (NY Times)

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1938, American composer John Corigliano was born in New York City, the son of John Sr., who served for 23 years as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Although he came late to composition, Corigliano was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, the Grawemeyer Award, and an Oscar. [Read More…]

Pre•Views & Features

American Brass Quintet visits Oberlin Artist Recital Series

by Stephanie Manning

With more than 65 years as an ensemble under their belt and a commitment to commissioning new works, the American Brass Quintet has a lot of repertoire to choose from. “We’ve got such an extraordinary wealth of music,” bass trombonist John Rojak said. For at least the past 15 years, “every piece that has been coming in is one we want to keep playing.”

Several of those works appear on the group’s current program, which they are set to bring to the Oberlin Artist Recital Series on February 20. Trumpeters Brandon Ridenour and Tiago Linck, hornist Eric Reed, trombonist Hillary Simms, and Rojak will take to the Finney Chapel stage to present works by Anthony Barfield, Philip Lasser, Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Lacerda, and David Biedenbender. Tickets are available online.

Although the majority of the evening’s works are less than a decade old, the concert first finds its footing in the 16th century, with John Dowland’s Earl of Essex Galliard & Can She Excuse My Wrongs. Rojak described how Brandon Ridenour combined the two pieces into his own, “really cool” edition. [Read on…]

No Exit Presents: pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined

by Mike Telin

This week, No Exit presents pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined at Heights Arts at 7:00 pm on Friday, February 13. The concert is free.

For this multimedia event, Lin will be joined by electronic artist Drake Andersen performing a new score to the 1984 restoration of Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. This new score was created collaboratively by the ten composers of ICEBERG New Music.

This interview is reposted with the permission of the ensemble and author. 

No Exit’s Laura King spoke with the pianist and began by asking what excites her about this project.

[Read on…]

Johanna Wallroth sings Barber’s Knoxville with the Cleveland Orchestra

by Mike Telin

Photo credit: Amélie Chapalain

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. —James Agee, in the preface to A Death in the Family

While searching for a text for the solo piece with orchestra that would become Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Samuel Barber said that Agee’s prose-poem particularly struck him because it reminded him so much of evenings when he was a child at home.

“I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both 5,” Barber told James Fasset during a 1949 interview. ‘You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.”

Swedish soprano Johanna Wallroth said during a Zoom call that “Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is one of my absolute favorite pieces, and I’m very excited about making my Cleveland Orchestra and U.S. debut with it.”

On Thursday, February 12 at 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, conductor Barbara Hannigan will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in an all-American program that features Barber’s haunting work along with George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape, Charles Ruggles’ Sun-Treader, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture (arranged by Robert Russell Bennett). The program will be repeated on Saturday at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online.

[Read on…]

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