by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Heights Chamber Orchestra will hold auditions for string players tonight from 7:30 to 9:30. Click here for excerpts for violins, violas, cellos & basses. Choose a time slot here and the location will be sent in an email.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Akron Symphony, Christopher Wilkins, music director (pictured), has announced its forthcoming season at E.J. Thomas Hall. The opening concert on November 15 will pair music by Black American composers (Perry, Ellington & Florence Price) with music by Dvořák and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The January 15 performance features Clint Needham’s Tuba Concerto along with Baroque and neo-Baroque works by J.S. Bach, Handel, Aldemaro Romero, and Stravinsky. The latest edition of Gospel Meets Symphony is scheduled for February 12.
The March 5 event will be a collaboration with guest artist Jon Sonnneberg and EarthQuakerDevices (music by Haydn, Beethoven, Sonnenberg and Walsh, with William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony), while the April 2 performance will feature flamenco dancer Alice Blumenfeld and Korean Three Drum Dancers in works by Anna Clyne, Florence Price, Kyle Newmaster and Brooke Jee-In, as well as Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. The season ends on April 30 with Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, preceded by Mabel Daniels’ Deep Forest. Details here.
Caroline Oltmanns, piano professor at Youngstown State University, has just published an E-book, Playing the Unplayable, which takes its title from her popular blog post about tackling Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s Erlkönig.
She writes, “The book is for anyone who loves the piano. It is a collection of bite size chapters about being a pianist, about practicing, concerts and performing.” That includes tips for recording, structuring your time, how to keep focused at the piano, and what to wear onstage (“a question not many performers talk about”). Click here for details.
Oberlin’s faculty notes reports: “Recently appointed Associate Professor of French Horn Jeff Scott will have a newly commissioned orchestral work, Paradise Valley Serenade, premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Jader Bignamini, Music Director, over a three-concert series November 12-14. The work musically depicts the glorious histories of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, Detroit. These cities were known for their significant African American entrepreneurialism and thriving cultural scene, including an unrivaled Jazz club district. By the 1960’s all but a few edifices were razed to make way for highway projects and ‘urban renewal.’”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Two births and an auspicious premiere appear in today’s dates to remember.
On August 16, 1909, American organist and conductor Paul Callaway was born in Atlanta, IL. Except for his period of service as a band director in the U.S., Callaway served as organist and choirmaster at Washington Cathedral for 38 years between 1939 and 1977, during which he founded the Cathedral Choral Society in 1941, and the Opera Society of Washington (now Washington National Opera) in 1956.
Click here to hear the Cathedral Choir sing Callaway’s anthem An Hymne of Heavenly Love, and here to listen to him play Eugène Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogué on the Cathedral organ, an instrument that enjoyed an expansion to 189 ranks of pipes to allow it to fill the vast space created by the eventual completion of the nave.
An amusing story about that organ: the pedalboard was situated on a pneumatic platform that could be instantaneously raised and lowered to accommodate both Callaway, who was short of stature, and his assistant, Richard Wayne Dirksen, who was tall. Years ago, I arrived on a Saturday afternoon to practice for a recital the next day to find a note indicating that a gusset had blown out and couldn’t be fixed until Saturday evening. I ended up practicing in the indoor equivalent of a Nor’easter — even the loudest registrations were obliterated by the wind noise. It was interesting, to say the least, to hear the instrument for the first time on Sunday.
Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst was born in Linz, Austria, on this date in 1960. He took up conducting after a debilitating automobile accident forced an end to his violin career, and after a series of orchestral and operatic posts, was tapped for Cleveland beginning with the 2002-2003 season.
Welser-Möst’s book, From Silence, first published in Austria in July 2020 as Als ich die Stille fand, and now available in English, chronicles the ups and downs of his career, and “remains a bestseller in the German language in 2021,” according to a Cleveland Orchestra press release. “Reviewers highlighted the book’s eclectic combination of autobiography, philosophical musings, and behind-the-scenes musical industry insight.”
And the debut we mentioned was the inaugural performance of Richard Strauss’ Olympische Hymn, first heard on this date in 1936 at the opening ceremony of the XI Olympiad in Berlin. The games that year, the first to be televised, were famously co-opted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to promote their agenda, but also proved to be a triumph for Black American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals. Listen to Strauss conducting his Hymn here, with additional documentary footage about the composer’s later years. And this video about Owens and the 1936 games suggests the complexity of reporting on historical events. (At 1:40, it also contains an amusing eyewitness recollection by U.S. distance runner Louis Zamperubi of the release of 25,000 pigeons during the opening ceremonies as experienced by spectators).
