by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Staying indoors at noon? Tune in to WCLV 104.9 Ideastream for Bruckner, Ravel, and Johann Strauss, Jr. on Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra. Venturing outdoors at mid-day? Stop (or walk around) in University Circle to enjoy a carillon concert by George Leggiero from the McGaffin Tower on Euclid Avenue. This evening, your choice of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, with Kathleen Battle and Luciano Pavarotti from the MET Opera’s HD archives, or a virtual Oberlin Summer Organ Institute concert by Jonathan Moyer and Christa Rakich on four organs in three concert halls. Details here.
VIDEOS OF NOTE:
Social media has been crackling with superlatives about 79-year-old Argentine pianist Martha Argerich’s performance this week of Chopin’s B-Minor Sonata in an empty hall in Hamburg for “Die liebe Erde allüberall” (‘Everywhere the beloved Earth’), an project by the Hamburg Symphony that aims to rethink the relationship between classical music and the Internet. Watch the performance here.
In the latest episode of One on One, Musical America interviews Trey Devey, president of the Interlochen Center for the Arts, about the five interlocking divisions of the Northern Michigan center, and how each is dealing with the pandemic. “Interlochen’s flagship, the Summer Arts Camp, founded in 1928, opens online June 28. The boarding school — Interlochen Arts Academy — will welcome students in August in person, under a very specific re-entry plan.” Watch here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Only one birthday to mark today: that of the late composer Jacob Druckman, born on June 26, 1928 in Philadelphia. At Juilliard, The Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Brooklyn College, Bard College, and Yale University, he mentored a number of composers, including Daniel Asia, Conrad Cummings, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Kevin Puts, and Augusta Read Thomas.
Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra performed Windows, his 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for large orchestra, in October of 1974. Listen to a live performance at Severance Hall here. Druckman described the work in his composer’s notes:
The ‘Windows’ of the title are windows inward. They are points of light which appear as the thick orchestral textures part, allowing us to hear, fleetingly, moments out of time – memories, not of any music that ever existed before, but memories of memories, shadows of ghosts. The imagery is as though, having looked at an unpeopled wall of windows, one looks away and sees the afterimage of a face.
And Edwin London and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony recorded Druckman’s The Sound of Time in September, 1992. Soprano Marlene Rosen, Professor of Voice at Oberlin, is the soloist in the composer’s setting of texts from Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies (and other Disasters). Listen here.
