by Jarrett Hoffman
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On August 17, 1958, French composer Florent Schmitt died at age 87 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Two Cleveland Orchestra guest conductors have introduced his music to local audiences in recent years. For a visit to Severance Hall in 2015, Lionel Bringuier brought along one of Schmitt’s best-known works, La Tragédie de Salomé, and at Blossom in 2017, Fabien Gabel served up La Palais Hanté.
Gabel told me in an interview that the composer was once as famous as Debussy or Ravel. “Today I think we must rediscover Florent Schmitt because his music is truly genius. He was independent — his language sounds obviously French, but it’s completely different from Ravel or Debussy.”
Bringuier hears an interesting mix of influences in Schmitt’s music. In an interview with ClevelandClassical’s Mike Telin, he recalled his first encounter with La Tragédie de Salomé as a student during a musical analysis course.
“The teacher would spend part of each class playing a piece of music, and we had to figure out who the composer was. One day he played a piece that nobody knew. First we all thought that maybe it was Stravinsky. Then, because we didn’t know the full ballet of Ravel’s Daphnis, we thought it might be part of that because there are many similarities in the writing. That made sense because both Stravinsky and Ravel admired Schmitt.”
Still, as Gabel himself noted, the composer’s legacy is complicated. In an article for the New York Stage Review, Michael Feingold covers different instances of Schmitt’s Nazi sympathy, and relates it to more recent events.
And on this day in 1981, composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett died in New York City, also at age 87. He’s best known for orchestrating a slew of high-profile musicals by composers like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers.
One recent performance of Bennett’s work was a joint production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific by The Cleveland Orchestra and Baldwin Wallace Conservatory in August 2019. (In a review of the concert, ClevelandClassical’s Timothy Robson noted conductor Andy Einhorn’s role in providing “the added pleasure of hearing details of Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations.”)
For a taste of Bennett’s composerly side, and in the spirit of his roots in the Army — he volunteered in 1917, and faced the Flu Pandemic a year later while directing the 70th Infantry Band at Camp Funston, Kansas — catch the third and fourth movements of his Concerto Grosso in a performance by the West Point Band, led by Darrin Thiriot. Principal bassoon and Oberlin Conservatory graduate Briana Hoffman is among the five soloists of the Academy Woodwind Quintet.
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
At noon from WCLV, The Cleveland Orchestra lunches with Weber (Overture to Euryanthe), Debussy (“Ibéria” from Images), and Haydn (Piano Concerto in D, with Emanuel Ax as soloist).
And at 7:30 pm, the Met Opera streams a November 2013 performance of Puccini’s Tosca, starring Patricia Racette, Roberto Alagna, and George Gagnidze, conducted by Riccardo Frizza.