by Stephanie Manning
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Board of Trustees of Cleveland Arts Prize has announced that the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation will be awarded the 2025 Barbara S. Robinson Prize for the Advancement of the Arts.
This award acknowledges the Foundation’s investments in Cleveland cultural institutions, including The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Public Theatre. The Discipline and Special Prize winners will be announced on August 10.
AUDITIONS:
The Heights Chamber Orchestra will be holding auditions for violin, viola, and cello players on Monday, August 18. If you are interested, download the excerpts and sign up for a time slot at this link.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this day in 2012, violin virtuoso Ruggiero Ricci died at the age of 94. A child prodigy, Ricci was born in California to Italian immigrants, and he and his six siblings were all expected to play an instrument. Although Ricci originally preferred the piano, his parents pushed violin as the better choice.
“They bribed me with fiddles,” he told The New York Times in 1976. “I’d wake up in the morning and there would be another one. Once I had five fiddles under my bed.”
After making his performance debut in San Francisco at 10 years old, he toured New York and Europe to positive reviews. Later, while serving in the U.S. Army as an “entertainment specialist,” he developed an interest in solo violin repertoire. After the war, he became the first person to record Paganini’s daunting 24 Caprices unaccompanied, in 1947. Listen to an excerpt here.
That achievement has always linked Ricci with Paganini, but his career was much more extensive. He taught at institutions including Indiana University, the Juilliard School and the University of Michigan, and he made more than 500 recordings.
In 1963, he performed the premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Listen to Hilary Hahn discuss the piece here.
“I think music doesn’t need to be pretty — it needs to say something. It needs to make you feel something,” Hahn says. “It needs to move you through those feelings into the next feelings, so that you’re all in the same experience together.”
