by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Venues are on hiatus this summer Monday. For details of upcoming concerts, visit our Concert Listings page.
IN MEMORIAM: LaVert Stuart, 78
Lavert Levin Stuart (pictured), music teacher, and choir director, he was a church musician for almost 60 years and served as minister of music at a number of congregations in Northeast Ohio.” Read an obituary here.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Neighborhood Connections Announces $382,114 in Funding for 121 Projects, 27 co-funded by Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Mike Telin
July 15 presents a number of noteworthy events beginning with the death of Carl Czerny in 1857 at age 66 in Vienna. For those who only know the celebrated teacher as the person who wrote the many technical studies we all had to endure as piano students, one must remember that he was also a prolific composer with over one thousand works — sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, and choral pieces — to his credit. Click here to listen to his Variations on a Theme by Rode, Op. 33 (“La ricordanza”) played by pianist Alexis Weissenberg.
July 15, 1933 saw the birth of English guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream in London. With a career that spanned over a half-century, Bream is credited with transforming the classical guitar — in the eyes of the public — into an instrument worthy of being performed in the world’s great concert halls. The list of composers who dedicated pieces to Bream include Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett, Leo Brouwer, Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Benjamin Britten. Bream plays Britten’s Nocturnal here.
One year later, English composer Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington, Lancashire. His 1986 Earth Dances have been compared to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Christoph von Dohnányi recorded the work in 1996 with The Cleveland Orchestra for Decca (listen here), but there’s also a video of a performance by Cologne’s Gürzenich Orchestra led by Marcus Stenz.
1946 saw the birth of American singer Linda Ronstadt in Tucson, Arizona. She began her prolific career as a member of The Stone Poneys — Click here to listen to their 1967 hit Different Drum. Never content to be boxed into a genre, Ronsdadt would later star in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, first with the New York Shakespeare Company, and later on Broadway and in the 1983 film version — listen to Poor Wandering One here. Ronstadt also toured with The Nelson Riddle Orchestra. She sings Falling in Love Again here.
We conclude today’s list with two local connections. The first is that of Swiss American composer Ernst Bloch, who died on this date in 1959 in Portland, Oregon. Bloch served as founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1920-1925 before moving on to the San Francisco Conservatory. Among Bloch’s music based on Jewish themes is his tone poem about King Solomon, Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque. Listen here to a live Blossom Festival performance in 1980 by cellist Janós Starker with The Cleveland Orchestra, led by Eduardo Mata.
And on July 15, 1988, pianist Robert Shannon gave the premiere of John Harbison’s Sonata No. 1 In Memoriam Roger Sessions at the Dorothy Taubman Piano Institute in Amherst, MA. The sonata was written for Shannon, a long-time faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory, and for Ursula Oppens and Alan Feinberg, on a consortium commission from the National Endowment for the Arts. Click here to listen to Shannon’s recording.
