by Stephanie Manning
LOOKING AHEAD:
Leading up to Halloween, things are relatively calmer, but there are still plenty of options. It’s a big week for new music, with The Cleveland Orchestra welcoming composer/conductor Tan Dun (pictured) on Thursday and Saturday, and the Cleveland Repertory Orchestra performing an all-modern program on Saturday.
It’s also a good week for jazz, with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra teaming up with Sean Jones on Friday and the BW Jazz Ensemble playing on Thursday.
For more information on these concerts and more, visit our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Some Cleveland arts organizations were praised in a recent report from SMU DataArts, which looked at how arts agencies helped their local communities during the pandemic.
Together, Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and Assembly for the Arts were spotlighted for their artist postcard campaign and their dedicated community engagement for racial equity. Read the report here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman:
Because of his connections to the area — thirteen years as concertmaster of The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell — we’ll focus today on Josef Gingold, the Russian-born violinist who became one of America’s foremost pedagogues of his instrument, and who was born on this date in 1909.
Gingold also held tenures in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini, and as concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. As for his time with The Cleveland Orchestra, he later noted the important influence Szell had had on him “as a musician and, without my realizing it at the time, as a teacher.” He taught at Case Western Reserve University and The Music Settlement before spending over thirty years on the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
The list of his famous students is long, so I’ll name just a few: Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, and Jamie Laredo. But as Alex Ross wrote in Gingold’s obituary for The New York Times, “he was noted less for the manufacture of virtuosos than for the broader values of musicianship he instilled in master classes and the close guidance he gave to chamber and orchestral musicians…He is remembered as a vibrant man who played a paternal role in his students’ lives.”
As for his own lineage, he was a student of Eugène Ysaÿe (whose Third Sonata he premiered), and was considered one of the final links to an earlier era of violin playing.
Here’s a recording of Gingold playing Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words, and here’s a tribute video titled “A Musical Life” followed by his 75th Birthday Concert (the latter coming at the 27:33 mark). One great quote from Gingold early in the video, best heard in his own scruffy voice and Russian accent: “The greater love of the violin is everything in the world to me. That’s what I cherish more than anything.”
