by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
There’s nothing on the local concert calendar this Wednesday, but should you find yourself in Finland, you can enjoy a concert by The Cleveland Orchestra at the Musiikkitalo Helsinki (pictured). Franz Welser-Möst conducts Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and Víkingur Ólafsson solos in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
If you’re interested in organs, the Helsinki hall recently installed the largest modern concert hall instrument in the world. Read about the Rieger organ here.
CONCERT UPDATES:
The Cleveland Orchestra has rescheduled the “Evening With John Legend” concert that was canceled shortly after it began earlier this month. The new date is Sunday, September 22, at 7 pm, at Blossom Music Center, but without the Orchestra. Current ticket holders still have their seats reserved for the new date. Lawn tickets are still available for purchase on the event webpage.
Tuesday Musical writes that more than 700 tickets have already been sold for its October 22 Michael Feinstein tribute to Tony Bennett concert featuring the Carnegie Hall Big Band. Click here to purchase tickets for the event at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University announces auditions for the Youth Orchestra’s 2024-2025 season. Read the press release here.
INTERESTING READ;
Today’s print edition of the New York Times features a story about the resumption of fortepianist Robert Levin’s 13-album project to record all of Mozart’s keyboard works that call for cadenzas using his own improvisations. Begun three decades ago in cooperation with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy for Ancient Music, the project first stalled out due to lack of funds and later because of the COVID pandemic, but has now been re-launched. Read the story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1749, German dramatist and social philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt. And on this date in 1949, the Aspen Music Festival was founded in Colorado by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and Elizabeth Paepcke as a two-week bicentennial celebration of Goethe’s birth. “The event, which included both intellectual forums and musical performances, was such a success that it led to the formation of both the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School” (Aspen Festival website.)
August 28 is also notable for bringing conductors Karl Böhm and Istvan Kertesz into the world in 1894 in Graz, Austria and 1929 in Budapest, Hungary respectively.
Kertesz was The Cleveland Orchestra players’ unanimous choice to succeed George Szell. In an informal poll taken in August of 1971, they voted 77 for Kertesz against 2 for Lorin Maazel, who received the position. An orchestra representative quoted in The New York Times said “I think their reaction will be one of disappointment. But I think the orchestra will rally around. There is too much integrity and too much personal pride in the tradition for which the orchestra is known.” Kertesz tragically drowned during a concert tour in Israel in 1973 while swimming in the Mediterranean.
Speaking of tragic denouements, August 28, 1767 will also be remembered for the death of German composer and harpsichordist Johannn Schobert and his entire family from mushroom poisoning in Nüremberg. (Rumor has it that the doctor who declared the mushrooms edible was among the diners.)
Czech composer Bohuslav Jan Martinů departed on a similarly tragic note — he died of gastric cancer on this date in 1959 in Liestal, Switzerland.
But back to beginnings. Other births on August 28 include Hungarian musicologist and critic Paul Henry Lang (Budapest, 1901), American bass Paul Plishka (Old Forge, PA, 1941), and British pianist Imogen Cooper (London, 1949), who played Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra in March of 2022.
