By Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Americana on Charnofsky’s Monday playlist, Blossom Band opens summer season with two concerts
. Almanac remembers Leoš Janáček & expensive 1876 centennial march commission from Wagner
HAPPENING THESE TWO DAYS:
Monday:
2:00 pm – Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, Eric Charnofsky, host. Morton Gould’s Foster Gallery (orchestra), Arthur Foote’s Three Pieces for Flute and Piano, Leoš Janáček’s The Wild Duck, The Dove & The Weeping Fountain (choir), Aaron Copland’s Vocalise (flute and piano), Kristin Kuster’s Jellyfish (saxophone and piano), John Philip Sousa’s Dwellers of the Western World (orchestra), Peter Terry’s Rise (saxophone, piano, electronics) & Morton Gould’s Santa Fe Saga (concert band). Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.
Monday & Tuesday:
8:00 pm – Blossom Festival Band, “Salute to America.” Loras John Schissel, conducting (photo above by Roger Mastroianni from 2001). Patriotic marches, Broadway favorites, an Armed Forces Salute, and more — concluding with fireworks. Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls. Tickets available online.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On July 3, 1854, Czech/Moravian composer Leoš Janáček was born in Hukvaldy. Now seems a good time to recall one of his most remarkable works, the Sinfonietta, which was performed by Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra on January 10 of 2020, just weeks before the pandemic closed live Severance Hall concerts down and effectively banished wind players from the world’s concert halls.
I wrote about that evening in a review, and Roger Mastroianni captured the moment in a photo. Look at all those extra brass players!
After the stage reset, a phalanx of nine trumpeters took their places, standing in a long row at the back of the stage for Janáček’s “Military Symphonietta,” inspired by the “pretty fanfares” the composer heard from the distant garrison band while walking through a park in his hometown of Brno. While the physical setup might have suggested an imminent onslaught of deafening brass, the opening was pure gold. Two bass trumpets and a pair of Wagner tubas helped join low and high brass in a seamless, resplendent ensemble…How can you end a piece that began so strikingly? By repeating the beginning fanfares with the Orchestra joining in, and so Janáček did.
Enjoy earlier interpretations led by George Szell (October, 1965) and Christoph von Dohnányi (September, 1988) here and here.
Composers Datebook notes that On July 4, 1876, America was celebrating its 100th birthday with a Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. “The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufacturers and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States, attracted 9 million visitors at a time when the entire population of the U.S. was only 46 million.
“The Exhibition had opened in May with a concert attended by President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. After Hail to the Chief, the orchestra premiered a specially commissioned Centennial March by the famous German opera composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was paid $5000 for the commission, an astronomically high fee in those days. Wagner did not bother to attend the Philadelphia premiere, and privately told friends back in Germany: “Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me.’
Listen to Wagner’s American Centennial March here in a performance by the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Varujan Kojian conducting.
