by Daniel Hathaway
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PODCASTS:
The first two of ten episodes of “On a Personal Note,” featuring individual perspectives on Cleveland Orchestra recordings, are now available. In the first program, “The Sound of Crisis,” Music Director Franz Welser-Möst recalls the conflicting emotions he experienced leading the last performance before Severance Hall was shuttered due to the pandemic. In the second, “The Lasting Luster of Vinyl,” hornist Rich King shares his earliest memories of hearing Beethoven’s Third Symphony on the family phonograph, and how the disc ended up shaping his destiny.
FREE ONLINE COURSES FROM HARVARD:
Thomas Forrest Kelly’s fascinating book, First Nights, explores in detail the circumstances around the debuts of great works in the Western Classical Canon. Four free online courses derived from that book are available here, including “Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and the Birth of Opera,” “Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio,” “Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the 19th Century Orchestra,” and “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: Modernism, Ballet, and Riots.”
Before his appointment as Professor of Music at Harvard, Kelly directed the historical performance program at Oberlin and served as acting dean of the Conservatory.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Composer and Plain Dealer music critic Herbert Elwell died on this date in 1974. Having studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1921 (with classmates Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson) he moved to Cleveland in 1928 and served on the faculties of the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Cleveland Music School Settlement, and well as program annotator for The Cleveland Orchestra. George Szell programmed Elwell’s 1923 ballet suite The Happy Hypocrite for the Orchestra’s 1965 European tour. Click here to listen to the work in a 1961 recording by the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Louis Lane conducting. (At the time, the Pops was virtually the same ensemble as the Cleveland Orchestra.)
A poster advertising the performance of “A Grand Symphony composed by Herr Mozart” at Vienna’s Burgtheater on April 17 of 1791 might contradict the notion that the composer’s last three symphonies were never played during his lifetime. Although that Grand Symphony wasn’t identified by key, there’s evidence, including added clarinet parts, that Antonio Salieri led the g-minor Symphony, No. 40, on that occasion. Click here to watch a video of Jeannette Sorrell leading Apollo’s Fire in a dress rehearsal of the work for a concert in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art in October 2018.
