by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 pm, the Cleveland Chapter of the American Guild of Organists presents its annual members’ recital and installs its new officers. The free event includes music by J.S. Bach, Florence Price, Charles Tournemire, and William T. Allen played by seven chapter members on the new Schantz organ in Our Lady of Peace Roman Catholic Church. It’s free, and the public is welcome.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On September 17, 1803, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, student of Mozart and Salieri who was entrusted by Mozart’s widow with the unenviable task of completing his teacher’s Requiem, died in Vienna. That’s how we remember Süssmayr today, but in his own era, he was a well-regarded composer who wrote church music and opera, as well as a concerto for Mozart’s favorite clarinetist, Anton Stadler, left unfinished but later completed by Michael Freyhan. Give Süssmayr’s piece a listen here in a performance by Dieter Klökker and the English Chamber Orchestra.
American composer, pedagogue, and pianist Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born on this date in 1884 in Elmira, New York, and died of influenza in New York City during the 1918 pandemic. He became a leading American exponent of impressionism as exemplified in his orchestral works White Peacock, (a 1915 piano work he orchestrated in 1919), The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, (1912, revised in 1916), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). Like Gustav Holst, he wrote music in his spare time while teaching at a private school. Listen to a 2012 performance of Kubla Khan with the Texas Festival Orchestra at the Round Top Music Festival, led by Micahel Stern.
On September 17, 1931, RCA Victor made history by introducing the first 33-⅓ rpm long playing record in a demonstration at the Savoy Hotel in New York, years later to be upstaged by Columbia Records, who released an improved version in 1948.
And on this date in 1998, American composer and organist William Albright died unexpectedly at the age of 53 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he had taught at the University of Michigan since 1970. Influenced by his studies with Oliver Messiaen in Paris, Albright contributed to the 20th century canon of organ music with solo works as well as with his introduction to The King of Instruments, played here by Painesville-born organist Tom Trenney and narrated by Oberlin alumnus Michael Barone at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2013.
Albright was also an enthusiastic performer of ragtime, having recorded many pieces by Scott Joplin and others. Here’s one of his own concert rags for the organ, Sweet Sixteenths, played by Frank Hoffmann at the Heiliggeistkirche in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2018.
