by Daniel Hathaway

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY SEASON UPDATE:

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society writes that they will present twelve free, pre-recorded programs online this fall and winter in two different series, and hope to resume live concerts with five performances between March and May.

“Safe With Sound,” a series produced by the Society and hosted by series Artistic Director Eric Charnofsky (above), will include music and conversations with artists featured on the CCMS series. The first episode, spotlighting the Imani Winds, is already available. Upcoming programs will feature James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong, the Takacs Quartet, and the Bennewitz Quartet (who will be performing an exclusive, full-length concert).

The first two episodes of “Front Row from Lincoln Center,” produced by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Wu Han and David Finckel, artistic directors, will air on October 23 and November 6. More information here.

NEW VIDEO FROM CHAMBERFEST CLEVELAND:

ChamberFest Cleveland has shared a new video of the Brahms Horn Trio from Season 8, prior to its public release. Watch the June 22, 2019 performance by violinist Diana Cohen, hornist William Caballero, and pianist Roman Rabinovitch here, and plan to tune in to WCLV on November 11, when rebroadcasts of performances resume. “For the full schedule of dates, artists, repertoire and programs notes, please reply RADIO! to info@chamberfestcleveland.com.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German violinist, clarino trumpet player and composer Johann Christoph Pezel departed this life on October 13, 1694, having served as Stadtpfeifer and Stadtmusicus (a member of the municipal wind band) in Leipzig and Bautzen. His music is frequently played these days by modern brass ensembles, but ensembles were more complex in Pezel’s time. As an example, listen to his Sonata Ciacona a 6 in a performance by ACRONYM here (there’s a score to follow).

In 1912 on this date, Moravian-American composer Hugo Weisgall was born in Ivancice, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of eight, studying at Peabody and Curtis, and completing a doctorate in German literature at Johns Hopkins — which made him a valuable aide-de-camp to General George S. Patton during World War II.

In addition to his interest in Jewish cantorial music, Weisgall is known for his operas (especially Six Characters in Search of an Author) and extended song cycles, including Soldier Songs. The latter preserves a Wilfred Owen poem Weisgall set after investigating the mistreatment of Germans by Czechs in the hospital at Terezin. Listen here to Six Characters as performed by Chicago’s Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. There don’t seem to be any recordings of Soldier Songs — enterprising baritones, take note!

We highlighted English-born violist and composer Rebecca Clarke in the Diary on her birthdate on August 27, when we recommended a CIM video of her Viola Sonata. She died on this date in 1979 in New York City. Watch here another CIM performance, this time of her 1921 Piano Trio by the Hazel Trio (JuEun Lee, violin Richard Li, cello, and Jonathan Mak, piano) from May, 2019.

by Jarrett Hoffman

DEBATING THE “GOAT,” AND CONNECTIONS TO CLASSICAL MUSIC:

The morning after Akron native LeBron James won his fourth NBA championship, this one with the Los Angeles Lakers, a cascade of articles have already been written on the topic of whether he might now, just maybe, be the GOAT — the “Greatest Of All Time” among basketball players. James vs. Jordan: it’s an exhausting question that nevertheless generates plenty of opinions, and to be sure, plenty of clicks.

It’s also a question that’s based on the adversarial nature of sports — one person or team versus another. That’s not what classical music is about. To be sure, there is plenty of competition when it comes to forging a career, but most of all, discussions in the field are based on aesthetics.

Rivalries are compelling, and easy for casual fans to become wrapped up in. But even some basketball icons and journalists feel that those debates can dumb down the conversation around a sport, crowding out discussions of intricate tactics and, yes, also aesthetic beauty.

Still, it’s interesting to wonder how and if such debates could fit into classical music. We have big competitions that help launch careers, but what would it look like to have a “showdown” among the top, established names in composition or performance? Grammys are one thing, but let’s think more creatively.

Cleveland Chamber Choir offered one unique possibility with its “March Madrigal Madness” program in 2018, though the stakes would feel higher if the competing composers were still living, able to watch the results unfold. Another option: could a few orchestras pit their recordings of a single piece against each other, and have listeners vote online? (It would have to be friendly — at least on the surface.)

As the coronavirus crisis continues to challenge the music industry, maybe an effort like that to reach out to casual fans isn’t a bad idea — something fun and harmless, with an ounce of drama, yet still with a substantive and even beautiful artistic result.

TODAY ON THE WEB:

I’ll highlight two live streams and one re-broadcast on tonight’s local schedule. In the first category, hear the CIM Orchestra at 7, and the Diamond Brass Quintet at 7:30 (presented by Rocky River Chamber Music Society). Then at 8:00, in recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Early Music America joins Les Délices in replaying the ensemble’s recent “Recovering Roots” program. More info in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German composer and lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss, English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti were born on this date in 1687, 1872, and 1935, respectively.

We covered Vaughan Williams in our Diary on August 26, the anniversary of his passing, though it’s neat to celebrate him again today with his A Sea Symphony, which was also premiered on his 38th birthday. (Here’s a performance from the BBC Proms in 2013.)

As for Weiss, one recent performance of his music in Northeast Ohio came in the 2019 Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, when Petra Poláčková opened her recital with the Tombeau Sur La Mort de M. Comte de Logy. You can hear her play it on YouTube in a presentation by Cleveland’s own Guitars International.

There are so many possible recordings with which to remember Pavarotti — himself a GOAT contender among tenors — but how about his memorable final performance: Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. (One note: it was later revealed to have been pre-recorded, though it’s unclear whether that was due to illness on the part of Pavarotti, or the cold temperature.)

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

The second streamed event in Music From the Western Reserve’s season features Cleveland Orchestra Principal Horn Nathaniel Silberschlag and fourteen of his friends. Read a preview of the Sunday broadcast here.

Also during these two days: No Exit sponsors a concert by Boston’s Transient Canvas, Oberlin Stage Left continues its pre-recorded large ensemble performances, the Kent State Orchestra goes digital for its first outing, and Heights Arts moves its “‘Not Too Close’ Encounters 20th Anniversary Birthday Concert” into the great outdoors. Consult our Concert Listings for times and connection details.

INTERESTING NEWS, READS, AND VIDEO INTERVIEWS:

The New York Times will run an article by David Allen about The Cleveland Orchestra’s new recording initiatives in its Sunday print edition (online readers may already have perused it here).

The only musician named in the most recent round of McArthur Fellowships is three-time Grammy-winning jazz singer Cecile McLorin Salvant, already the recipient of a Doris Artist Duke Award. Read the Musical America article here.

Another Musical America recommendation is a One on One video conversation with Detroit Symphony President and CEO Anne Parsons. She talks about “how the DSO has been adapting to the pandemic, from streaming its archives in the spring, to live outdoor concerts in the summer, to the current concerts on the stage of an empty Orchestra Hall, conducted by new Music Director Jader Bignamini.” Watch on demand here.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Italian opera composer Giuseppi Verdi was born either on October 9 or 10 of 1813 in Parma. Remember both the composer and the prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp in Theresienstadt, who were compelled by their captors to perform Verdi’s Requiem sixteen times in 1944 before being sent to Auschwitz. CityMusic Cleveland sponsored a special Yom ha-Sho’ah performance at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on May 2, 2019 led by James Gaffigan.

Russian-Southern Ural composer Lera Auerbach was born on October 10, 1973 in Chelyabinsk. Auerbach played a solo recital on CIM’s Mixon Masters Series in September, 2013, and Kellen Degnan and April Sun played her 24 Preludes for violoncello and piano in Mixon Hall at CIM in November, 2017 (watch here). And just before the pandemic hit, the Jasper String Quartet played her Frozen Dreams on the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival in March, 2020.

We remembered the death of Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett in the October 2 Diary. He was born on October 11, 1882 in Drummondville, Ontario.

Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner died in Vienna on October 11, 1896 at the age of 72. Watch a video of George Szell leading Bruckner’s 3rd Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in June, 1963 (Bruckner starts at 49:30), and watch a Cleveland Orchestra promotional video for the 5-DVD boxed set of recordings of Nos. 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 recorded live at Severance Hall, the Wiener Musikverein, and St. Florian’s Abbey between 2006 and 2012 with Franz Welser-Möst at the helm.

And for something lighter, mark the birth of the late Italian film composer Ennio Morricone on October 11, 1928 (or it might have been October 10) with this April, 2019 Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert performance of “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission. Stephanie Cohn is the soloist.

by Daniel Hathaway

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PREMIERES IN FOCUS OCT. 15 :

The initial concert on The Cleveland Orchestra: IN FOCUS video streaming series will be available to subscribers, donors, and membership holders on the Orchestra’s new Adella platform on Thursday, October 15 at 7:00 pm and later on demand. (Adella is named after the Orchestra’s founder, Adella Prentiss Hughes.)

The fall series replaces in-person performances. In the first episode, an all-string orchestra program, Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will lead the third set of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, the premiere of George Walker’s Antifonys, and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir of Venice. This and subsequent performances have been recorded in Severance Hall without audience, and with physical distancing protocols in place for the musicians. Click here for further information. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni.)

ADDED TO TODAY’S CALENDAR:

Oberlin grad and 2014 Chartres Competition prizewinner Dexter Kennedy is first up on this fall’s organ series from Christ Church in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to be live streamed tonight. Kennedy writes in a Facebook post, “It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly 7 months since my last recital, but I’m looking forward to performing again this Friday, albeit in this socially distant way. Finally getting to some of the pieces learned during quarantine out for a spin!” The series continues with recitals by Todd Wilson on October 23, and Scott Hanoian on November 13. See the Concert Listings for details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Two French composers have birthday anniversaries on this date.

Camille Saint-Saëns was born in 1835 in Paris and went on to a long career as organist at St-Merri and La Madeleine in Paris, teacher of Fauré and Ravel, and composer of a vast catalogue of works. As a keyboardist, he gave one of his last piano recitals in 1921 at the age of 86 — then went on holiday to his favorite vacation spot, Algiers, where he died a month later.

Celebrate the composer with a very private work he forbade to be played publicly during his lifetime: Carnival of the Animals, which parodies the music of Offenbach, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Rossini, and is usually accompanied by the delicious nonsense poetry of Ogden Nash. Here’s a performance by the Zagreb Music Academy Chamber Orchestra, and Nash’s opening lines go:

Camille Saint-Saëns
Was wracked with pains,
When people addressed him,
As Saint Sanes.
He held the human race to blame,
Because it could not pronounce his name.
So, he turned with metronome and fife,
To glorify other kinds of life.
Be quiet please —    for here begins
His salute to feathers, fur, and fins.

Another famous work is his Danse macabre, a Halloween favorite, recorded here on a Brunswick 78 record by Nikolai Sokoloff and The Cleveland Orchestra in 1926.

Reynaldo Hahn, another French composer (though he was born in Venezuela, where he spent only the first three years of his life), was born on this day in 1875. He’s celebrated for his vocal music, and one of his most popular songs is À Chloris, sung here by Matthew Maisano on his Cleveland Institute of Music master’s recital in 2016, and more recently by Joyce DiDonato on last May’s “Call to Unite” 24-hour global pandemic initiative. DiDonato impressively serves as her own collaborative pianist.

by Daniel Hathaway

PLAGUES REMEMBERED:

This week in “Resilience,” Apollo’s Fire is revisiting in words and music London’s Great Plague of 1665 and the cholera and dysentery outbreaks during America’s Civil War. In the same vein, British-born conductor Nicholas McGegan — music director emeritus of the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and popular guest conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra —  spent part of the pandemic lockdown developing an illustrated lecture about the 1665 pestilence. It streams at 2:00 pm on October 14. Read an article in San Francisco Classical Voice here.

THIS WEEK FROM MUSICAL AMERICA:

Nashville Symphony principal oboe Titus Underwood is featured in the latest episode of “Musical America Unscripted.” Today marks the anniversary of that venerable publication, which brought out its first issue in 1898. (And check out MA’s weekly survey of streaming events. There’s a link at the top of our Concert Listings page.)

HAPPENING TODAY:

We already mentioned Apollo’s Fire’s “Resilience” concerts that begin tonight in Akron (read our feature story here). Also tonight, organist Christopher Houlihan brings his Vierne 150th Festival to a conclusion with a solo recital of works by Louis Vierne from the chapel of Trinity College Hartford (see the Almanac below for more about the French organist).

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German composer Heinrich Schütz was born in Kostritz on this date in 1585. Renowned for his evocative settings of texts, Schütz’s vocal music comes in all shapes and sizes, from two-part motets that reflected the decimation of choirs during the Thirty Years War, to splendid polychoral works he wrote after study trips to Venice. It’s a pity that his only opera, Daphne, has been lost.

Listen here to Concerto Palatino perform his astonishingly expressive motet Anime mea liquefacta est from the Symphoniae Sacrae, and here to his funeral cantata, Ein Musikalische Exequien, a Protestant requiem commissioned long before it was needed by a patron who wanted to enjoy it while he was still alive. Lionel Bringuier leads the Belgian choir Vox Luminis, who sang most recently in Cleveland at St. John’s Cathedral in October, 2018.

French organist and composer Louis Vierne was born on this date in Poitiers. Legally blind, Vierne served as organist of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris from 1900-1937, collapsing at the console during a recital.

Tune in to the live stream of Christopher Houlihan’s all-Vierne recital tonight to hear him play selections from the 24 Pièces de fantaisie, Op. 51, and the Symphony No. 4, Op. 32. (Details in the Concert Listings).

There’s also a celebrated recording of Vierne’s Mass for choir and two organs recorded in Notre-Dame and featuring the composer’s later successor Pierre Cochereau. Listen here. (NB: most of the accompanying photos are of Notre-Dame in Montréal!)

On this date in 1930, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo. Two of his nature-inspired compositions are available in performances by the CIM New Music Ensemble, Keith Fitch, director. Click on the links to watch Water-ways (from a November, 2015 concert), and Rain Spell (from February, 2018).

And Australian composer Carl Vine was born on October 8, 1954 in Perth. His Piano Sonata No. 1 was among the works that Cleveland International Piano Competition laureate Spencer Myer played in the 2005 contest. Watch those performances here and here.

by Jarrett Hoffman

HAPPENING TODAY:

Buckle up and be sure to charge that computer, there’s plenty to catch today — all online.

At 11:30 am, hear the poetry of Langston Hughes and music of the Harlem Renaissance in a presentation by Prester Pickett, Coordinator of Cleveland State’s Howard A. Mims African-American Cultural Center.

Along with that celebration of Black artists, we recommend a 7pm webinar devoted to issues and perspectives around race in music. “Black Reflections: Three Conversations on Racial Justice in Concert Music — Experiences of Black Artists” will be moderated by saxophonist and former Baldwin Wallace faculty member Steven Banks.

For live music delivered via stream, look no further than Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert at noon featuring the Decho Ensemble. Saxophonists Jake Swanson and Sarah Marchitelli play works by J.S. Bach, Jean-Baptiste Singelée, and Brahms.

Another live-streamed event comes at 7: organist Christopher Houlihan continues honoring “Vierne at 150” with a lecture, demonstration, and Q&A in advance of tomorrow’s performance to cap off the festival.

And for the best in re-broadcasts of past performances, you have two options: “Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra” at noon (von Suppé, Mendelssohn, and Mozart) and the Met Opera’s HD Archives (Wagner’s Das Rheingold).

See our Concert Listings for links and details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Even people who want nothing to do with classical music have at least heard of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who was born on this date in 1955 in Paris. He’s a household name — perhaps the most famous classical musician of his time? And there are many ways to give a snapshot of his career, from his earliest days as a child prodigy, to his bounty of awards and honors, and his remarkable flexibility of genre, from the classics to contemporary music, bluegrass, tango, and more.

But for once, the clearest picture of who a musician is might actually come from the first line of their own bio: “Yo-Yo Ma’s multi-faceted career is testament to his enduring belief in culture’s power to generate trust and understanding.” I’ll point out two examples of that statement: his Silk Road Ensemble, devoted in large part to cross-cultural collaboration, and his Bach Project, which he famously brought to the sister cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico last year.

Here’s just one performance to remember: Yo-Yo Ma joins violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, and pianist Gabriela Montero in John Williams’ Air And Simple Gifts at President Obama’s Inauguration in January 2009.

by Daniel Hathaway

NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PODCAST:

Released today, “Legendary,”  the fifth episode in the current series of Cleveland Orchestra On A Personal Note podcasts, features Trustee Clara Rankin with President and CEO André Gremillet. Rankin reminisces about conductors, visiting artists, her own family ties, and “the people and performances that define The Cleveland Orchestra. Listen here.

CMA’S  “BEHIND THE BEAT” EPISODE 7:

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, one of the most widely respected contemporary classical composers, talks from Helsinki with Director of Performing Arts Tom Welsh about her large orchestra work, Orion, which has “a unique link to the Cleveland Museum of Art—not publicly known until now.” Watch the video here.

HAPPENING TODAY:

Christopher Houlihan’s “Virtual Vierne at 150 Festival features an interview with Olivier Latry, since 1985 one of the three “titulares” or tenured organists of Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral (along with Philippe Lefebvre and Vincent Dubois). Latry, who was guest professor at Oberlin in the fall of 2010, will talk about the devastating fire in 2019 and the reconstruction of the Great Organ, which escaped major damage, but needed to be removed for cleaning. Latry is a successor of Louis Vierne, who famously presided over the instrument for 37 years until his death in 1937 —  in the saddle, so to speak. He collapsed at the console during his 1,750th recital on June 2 of that year.

The MET Opera has Wagner on its mind all of this week, and a 2015 production of Tannhäuser is waiting in the wings for streaming tonight.

Details in the Concert Listings.

HEADS UP FOR THURSDAY:

Former Akron Symphony Assistant Conductor Levi Hammer, now living in Berlin, spent his lockdown time during the pandemic learning all of J.S. Bach’s First Book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and will stream those 24 preludes and fugues on Wednesday, October 7 at 3:15 pm EDT from Berlin’s Norwegian Church. Join the stream here.

Hammer writes, “The first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, completed in 1722, already contains an encyclopedic summary of all music that came before and after it – even a 12-tone theme! It is a compendium of Bach’s expressive vastness, his musical science, and his pedagogy. For the performer it is an emotional, intellectual, and technical challenge like no other.

“It’s also the silver lining of my 2020. I offer it in the hopes that it brings joy and solace during uncertain times.”

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On October 6, 1882, Polish modernist composer Karol Szymanowski was born in Tomoshovka, Ukraine. Influenced by Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Scriabin, Debussy, and Ravel, as well as by Chopin and the folk music of the Polish Highlanders, his works were popular in the 1920s and 1930s and are experiencing a recent revival.

Szymanowski’s controversial opera Krol Roger was produced by Cleveland’s Opera Circle in October, 2011, and Frank Peter Zimmermann played his First Violin Concerto with Thomas Dausgaard and The Cleveland Orchestra in February, 2011.

Watch a performance of the First Violin Concerto in May, 2019 by Christian Tetzlaff and the Helsinki Philharmonic led by Susanna Mälkki here, and view the second half of pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin’s 2002 recital in Tokyo, devoted to works by Szymanowski, including the Second Piano Sonata.

And composer Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, NY on this date in 1938. Tower celebrated her 80th birthday with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra in March of 2019 (read a ClevelandClassical.com interview here), and her works appear frequently on Northeast Ohio concert programs.

Among the videos of performances of Tower’s music by musicians with local connections: Tower’s Rising with flutist Carol Wincenc and the Escher Quartet, Wild Summer by the Jasper Quartet, and Wild Purple by solo violist Serena Hsu in Mixon Hall at CIM in April, 2019.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

Two virtual events tonight are built at least in part around conversation. The virtual “Vierne at 150” festival begins at 7 with an interview with Phillip Truckenbrod, author of the recent memoir Organists and Me about his half-century career as organists’ manager.

And at 7:30, Les Délices continues SalonEra with “Strike the Viol.” That series combines music and conversation — and perhaps as soon as tonight’s episode, some interesting visuals as well. (Nagy hinted during our recent conversation that interpretation will be one focus of the evening — audiences might see manuscript pages that require “some decoding” from the episode’s featured musicians, including Arnie Tanimoto, pictured above.)

See our Concert Listings for details and links.

LISTENING CHOICES DURING THE PANDEMIC:

When classical music organizations began to venture online in mid to late March, the editors of ClevelandClassical.com held a roundtable discussing different questions around that transition. One issue we brought up: what repertoire is appropriate for this moment? Josh Terry explores a similar topic in his article “Is Pandemic Brain Changing Your Taste in Music? You’re Not Alone” in Vice.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German-born French composer Jacques Offenbach died on this date in 1880 in Paris. His most famous work was his last one, the opera Tales of Hoffmann, which he left unfinished — he died four months before the premiere. But providing a better snapshot of his career are his nearly 100 operettas, which would go on to influence composers such as Johann Strauss Jr., Arthur Sullivan, and Franz Lehar.

That style is right up the alley of Ohio Light Opera, which in recent years has put on Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne and La Périchole, which Kelly Ferjutz described as “a screwball comedy disguised as an operetta” in her review of the production for ClevelandClassical.com. More recently, during OLO’s 2020 online season, members of the company came together virtually for performances of “Ne’er for a Trip” and “Love the Deceiver” from Offenbach’s Voyage to the Moon.

by Daniel Hathaway

EVENTS LIVE AND OTHERWISE THIS WEEKEND:

Some organizations are making the most of outdoor performing possibilities this weekend, although Heights Arts has postponed its 20th Anniversary Concert to next weekend due to chilly weather conditions. You can still catch Akron Symphony Interlude performances at Hale Farm and Museum, a front yard concert by the Blue Streak Ensemble playing music by Margaret Brouwer, Tuesday Musical’s percussion shows at Akron’s Historic Barder House, and an open-air Brahms String Sextet on the Sacred Heart Series in Oberlin (note: the last concert has now been moved indoors).

Indoors (or wherever you open up your laptop), you can catch the first pre-recorded large ensemble performances from Oberlin, watch a recital by organist Christa Rakich at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron, and hear what CIM composition students are up to. Check the Concert Listings for details.

INTERESTING READS:

New York Times critic Joshua Barone reports that American orchestras are suddenly on a roll to program music by Black composers, but wonders if that trend will last. Read the article here.

In a WQXR article, Heather O’Donovan polls a dozen scholars about changes in the academic field of (ethno)musicology. Two separate streams of research seem to be combining as scholars broaden the scope of their inquiries. “Today, music scholars (note the conspicuous absence of terminology) are grappling with the field’s complex, colonial history, its purpose and articulation, and even its name in novel ways. Their work is a reflection of the field’s proverbial coming of age.”

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

On October 3, 1923, Polish American conductor and composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski was born in Lwow. He escaped the communist regime in 1958 to settle in the United States. Read a ClevelandClassical.com interview where he talks about that escapade and his first gig with The Cleveland Orchestra at the invitation of George Szell. (He was scheduled to return to Blossom after an absence of three decades, but had to cancel due to illness.)

Skrowaczewski led what is now the Minnesota Orchestra for fourteen years, and was a favorite guest conductor with many other ensembles. One of his highly regarded performances was Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in 2014, preserved in this video.

In 1931, Danish composer Carl Nielsen died on October 3 in Copenhagen. Celebrated for his six symphonies, which demonstrate a highly individual compositional voice, his music was championed by Leonard Bernstein.  Listen to his Fifth Symphony (the one where the snare drum is given permission to play out of time and interrupt the story) in a 1967 performance by The Cleveland Orchestra under Sixten Ehrling.

And on October 3, 1936, American composer Steve Reich was born in New York City. In 2015, ChamberFest Cleveland programmed two of his works: New York Counterpoint (for amplified clarinet and tape, featuring Franklin Cohen in CIM’s Kulas Hall) and Nagoya Marimbas (played by Scott Christian and Alexander Cohen at The Wine Spot).

On October 4, 1982 Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died in Toronto. We featured Gould recently when his birthdate came up, but it seems appropriate to celebrate the other end of his lifeline with the last work he performed with orchestra before withdrawing into a private world of highly-edited studio recordings.

The ensemble was the Toronto Symphony, the conductor was Karel Ančerl, and Gould’s participation in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto came about when Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli withdrew 72 hours before the performance. Gould was persuaded to take over and play from memory a work he hadn’t touched in four years. The concert, televised and aired on September 12, 1970, was a triumph. Watch it here.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY ON THE WEB:

No Exit new music ensemble begins its season tonight at 7 with an online concert of solo works by Adam Roberts, Harald Genzmer, and percussionist Luke Rinderknecht (the premier of his Downfall), plus works by Villa-Lobos and William Grant Still. Read a preview article here. And looking ahead to Saturday evening, No Exit will host an online concert by Boston-based Transient Canvas.

And Youngstown State University continues its Dana Alumni Recital Series with a pre-recorded concert by pianist Sean Baran. Details in the Concert Listings.

INTERESTING READ:

In an interview for the Harvard Gazette, New Silkroad artistic director Rhiannon Giddens talks about mission and music-making in the age of COVID. Read Charting a path for the Silkroad here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

German composer Max Bruch died on this date in Berlin-Friedenau in 1920. Inspired by Brahms and mostly known as a choral composer during his lifetime, Bruch is now celebrated for a few instrumental works that have remained popular.

The first of his three violin concertos is one of those, performed here by Rachel Barton Pine and CityMusic Cleveland at St. Stanislaus in October, 2012. Another is his Kol Nidrei, played here in the same venue by CityMusic artistic director and cellist Amit Peled in October, 2019. And ChamberFest Cleveland featured selections from his Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano on a June concert in 2019 (with Franklin Cohen, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Evren Ozel).

And on this date in 1943, Canadian American composer R. Nathaniel Dett died of a heart attack in Battle Creek, Michigan while on tour with a USO orchestra. Born in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls), Dett moved across the border with his family at the age of 11, was the first Black student to graduate from the Oberlin Conservatory’s 5-year degree program, and studied composition during the summers at Harvard with Arthur Foote.

Dett reflected the opinions of Antonín Dvořák when he wrote, in 1918

We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people … But this store will be of no value unless we utilize it, unless we treat it in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music—unless our musical architects take the rough timber of Negro themes and fashion from it music which will prove that we, too, have national feelings and characteristics, as have the European peoples whose forms we have zealously followed for so long.

Dett’s popular Juba Dance is included on the Oberlin Stage Left episode Linking Legacies, played by pianist Dianna White-Gould, and his Don’t Be Weary, Traveler, which won Harvard’s Francis Boot Award, was sung by Quire Cleveland at Historic St. Peter Church in April, 2014. And click here to listen to Canada’s Nathaniel Dett Chorale perform his popular spiritual, Listen to the Lambs.

Perhaps Dett’s most ambitious work is his 1937 oratorio, The Ordering of Moses, premiered at Cincinnati’s May Festival in 1937. James Conlon, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the May Festival Chorus revisited the work in 2016. Listen here.