by Jarrett Hoffman
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Here are three birthdays to celebrate today: Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-1886), Israeli-American violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman (born in 1945), and American composer Lee Hyla (1952-2014).
Highly accomplished but not widely known, Hyla won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and taught at the New England Conservatory and Northwestern University. He deserves another look.
Perlman needs no introduction, and is still writing a remarkable legacy that includes sixteen Grammys, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a performance at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, among so many honors. (“75 is pretty good,” Perlman told Howard Reich in a recent interview for the Chicago Tribune. “Things are still working!”)
Today we’ll focus on Ponchielli (above), and just for fun, we’ll do it by imagining his career as a set of matryoshkas. If we say that the composer himself is the largest doll, then nesting just inside is his best-known work, La Gioconda. And inside that is the act-three finale for which the opera is most famous, the charming Dance of the Hours.
And to take it a step further, that little doll surely belongs within yet another set of matryoshkas, one representing the 1940 film Fantasia. Which brings me back to December 2014, when then-assistant conductor Brett Mitchell led The Cleveland Orchestra in Disney Fantasia Live in Concert at Severance Hall. As Mitchell said to the audience after the Dance of the Hours, “You’ve never lived until you’ve conducted hippos in tutus.” (See what he means here on YouTube.)
At the 2015 celebration of “Opera in the Italian Cultural Garden,” mezzo-soprano Laura Avdey of Opera Circle Cleveland (now The Cleveland Opera) sang another famous excerpt from La Gioconda: the aria “Voce di donna o d’angelo.” Watch that performance on YouTube.
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Catch your daily streams from the archives of The Cleveland Orchestra (Shostakovich 5) and the Met Opera (Strauss’s Elekra) — check our Concert Listings for details.