by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 6:30 the Canton Symphony’s Summer Serenades presents a brass Quintet at the North Canton Civic Center.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Master Singers Chorale of Northeast Ohio invites interested singers to its first weekly rehearsal on Monday, September 9 at 7 pm at First Christian Church of Stow, following a 6 pm Meet & Greet with its new artistic director Marc Weagraff. The Chorale will be preparing Schubert’s Mass in E-flat for a concert in December.
INTERESTING READS:
Writing for the New York Times, Allan Kozinn reports the death on August 12 of composer Harold Meltzer. “His music, which was performed by many prominent ensembles, mixed melodic themes and rich textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism.”
Musing about the use of music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in conjunction with Melania Trump’s appearance at the Republican National Convention, and looking forward to the Aurora Orchestra’s memorized performances of the work, The Guardian’s Tom Service writes, “The spine-tingling symphony has been used and abused for 200 years: from marking the fall of the Berlin Wall to being Hitler’s birthday song. We follow its rocky road to this year’s Proms.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
The big birthday to celebrate is that on August 22, 1862 of Claude Debussy (pictured above in 1893) in the Paris suburb of St.Germain-en-Laye. Click here to listen to a live broadcast of one of his best-known impressionist works, La Mer, with The Cleveland Orchestra from Severance Hall led by George Szell in January of 1967.
Not so well-known nor so often played is Debussy’s 1911 incidental music to a Mystery Play by Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas talks about his fascination with the work here, and leads a performance with the San Francisco Symphony here. Or listen here to a celebrated performance of the score by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony with Florence Kopleff & Catherine Akos, contraltos, Phyllis Curtin, soprano, and the New England Conservatory Chorus, Lorna Cooke de Varon, director. Skip to the very end for Debussy’s gloriously compact setting of Psalm 150.
