by Daniel Hathaway
VOTE FOR YOUR LOCAL ORCHESTRA
For the fourth year in a row, Gramophone magazine will be naming an Orchestra of the Year by public vote. The Cleveland Orchestra is among the ten worldwide ensembles to be nominated for 2021, based on the quality of their recordings. The other nine are the Academy of Ancient Music (UK), Accademia Bizantina (Italy), Bamberger Symphoniker (Germany), Berliner Philharmoniker (Germany), Philharmonia Orchestra (UK), Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (Canada), Minnesota Orchestra (USA), Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Singapore), and Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich (Switzerland).
Gramophone has created Apple Music playlists in lossless audio for each ensemble, as well as a dynamic playlist that will be updated throughout the summer. Listen HERE.
Voting opened at noon on July 1 and remains live until 8 am (BST) on Monday, September 13. Votes can be cast on Gramophone’s website ,. The Orchestra of the Year will be revealed on October 5 at the 2021 Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Considering the withering heat and humidity of the past few days, doesn’t an afternoon in a cool, dark movie theater sound enticing? Or perhaps just a couple of hours on the couch in the A/C enjoying the music of one of the world’s premier film composers — Ennio Morricone, who died on July 6, 2020 at the age of 91.
Although Morricone never left Rome and never learned to speak English, he created some 400 film scores and a hundred classical compositions. Click here to listen to 39 excerpts from his oeuvre.
Among the other aspects of his intriguing life, Morricone was a skillful chess player who once held grand master Boris Spassky to a draw in a simultaneous competition involving 27 players, of which he was the last man standing.
Morricone’s instrument was the trumpet, and we can honor him as well as the memory of Ryan Anthony, who studied at CIM, taught at Oberlin, played with the Canadian Brass, and who performed “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission with members of the Dallas Symphony at a Cancer Blows benefit on March 4, 2015, before Anthony’s untimely death just a year ago. Listen here.