by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Live events today include a noontime Independence Day weekend carillon concert in University Circle by George Leggiero, and an Encore Chamber Music Institute Friday Classics concert, “Sparked by Albert” (Einstein) featuring violinist Jinjoo Cho and cellist Clive Greensmith.
Online, flutist and composer Hong-Da Chin (pictured) plays original works on Chinese instruments in a concert sponsored by No Exit, and Nicole Keller makes an appearance on the American Guild of Organists’ Organfest 2021, playing the new Muller/Aeolian-Skinner/Skinner instrument in Trinity Cathedral and the new Paul Fritts organ in First Lutheran, Lorain.
Details in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
On the latest Crain’s Cleveland’s Business Landscape podcast, Cleveland Orchestra CEO André Gremillet talks with Dan Poletta about the return of The Cleveland Orchestra.
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen died in a care home in North Holland on Thursday, July 1 at the age of 82. In an NPR story, Tom Huizenga wrote, “Celebrated for his eclecticism, Andriessen devised his own bold brand of minimalist-influenced music. He embraced the pulsating repetitions of his contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but also wove elements derived from Igor Stravinsky’s music, big band jazz, popular styles and the rigid tenets of serialism into his compositions.”
Organist David von Behren, who earned his bachelor’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music, his master’s at Yale, and now serves as Assistant Organist and Choirmaster at Harvard, has released a new album, French Flourishes from First-Plymouth. Recorded in First Plymouth in Lincoln, Nebraska, the album is available on iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon music, Spotify, and other streaming services.
INTERESTING READ:
“Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy and more: François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, are pushing historically informed practice into the 20th century.” Read David Allen’s article in The New York Times here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
At Noon today, because we’re not in a leap year and since we’re observing summer time, we’ll find ourselves exactly at the center of 2021, with 182 days and 12 hours behind us and 182 days and 12 hours yet to come. If you’re looking for a good moment to schedule a restart, midday today is as good a time as any.
In distant history, Austrian-German composer Christophe Willibald Von Gluck was born on July 2, 1714 in the Upper Palatinate, Swiss-French composer and critic Jean-Jacques Rosseau died in Ermenonville in 1778 at the age of 66, and French pianist and teacher Charles-Louis Hanon was born in Renescure in 1819.
For better or worse, Hanon is well-known among pianists for The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises, highly regarded by such keyboard luminaries as Sergei Rachmaninoff, and considered harmful by other pedagogues. Rumor has it that some schools have staged Hanon Marathons, which seems like one of the bad ideas of all time.
Three interesting 20th-century American figures were born on July 2: American composer William Herbert Brewster (1897 in Somerville, Tennessee), organist Carl Weinrich (1904 in Paterson, New Jersey), and conductor Frederick Fennell (1914 in Cleveland).
Brewster was an influential African American Baptist minister, but is best known for his 200-some published gospel songs, of which two were the first black gospel records to sell a million copies — Move On Up A Little Higher (with Mahalia Jackson in 1948), and Surely God is Able (by The Ward Singers in 1950). Brewster also wrote more than fifteen “Gospel Music Dramas,” of which From Auction Block to Glory was the first such work to feature original compositions. Among Brewster’s fans: a young Elvis Presley, who attended his services and tuned in to his radio broadcasts.
Weinrich, who was equally committed to Baroque and contemporary music, directed the chapel music at Princeton from 1943-1973 and also taught at Westminster Choir College, Wellesley, Vassar, and Columbia. Click here to listen to him playing J.S. Bach’s Passacaglia et theme fugatum on the organ of Vårfrukyrka in Skänninge, Sweden.
And Fennell, who returned to his home town after teaching for years at the Eastman School of Music, where he created the Eastman Wind Ensemble, should be well known to Clevelanders, but if not, check out our diary entry from a year ago, and enjoy an historic Telarc recording by the Cleveland Symphonic Winds (a.k.a. the winds, brass and percussion of The Cleveland Orchestra). They perform Holst’s Suite No. 1 In E-Flat, Handel’s Suite No. 2 In F, Music For The Royal Fireworks, and J.S. Bach’s Fantasia In G.
