by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS AND UPDATES:
We’ve just received news of the death of Kathleen Shamp (pictured, right) on June 10 at the age of 93. The Wooster native served as music librarian at the Cleveland Public Library for 50 years (1950-2000), sang with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under George Szell and Robert Shaw (1954-1974), and served on the music staffs of Epworth-Euclid (now University Circle) United Methodist and Plymouth churches. A Memorial Service will be held at 11:00 am on Saturday, July 24 at the University Circle United Methodist Church, 1919 E. 107th Street. Read an obituary here.
Pianist Conrad Tao will replace Benjamin Grosvenor with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra on Sunday evening, July 11 at Blossom, and the Mozart concerto has been changed to No. 23 in A, K. 488.
The Cleveland Philharmonic announces auditions for the new season under music director Victor Liva. Openings are available in all string sections as well as percussion and oboe. Details here.
The Cleveland Institute of Music has named Alison King as its first-ever Director of Digital Media. She comes to CIM from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she served as director of marketing and business development.
HAPPENING TODAY:
Round One, Session Two of the Cleveland International Piano Competition will be conducted via pre-recorded videos made from around the world. Tune in at 7:00 pm to hear Lucas Thomazinho (25, Brazil), Zhi Chao Juli Jia (29, China), Jiarui Cheng (22, China), and Yedam Kim (32, South Korea). It’s free.
The next-to-last ENCORE Chamber Music Institute Concert of the season features guitarist JIJI, with Jinjoo Cho, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Minhye Choi, violins, Stephen Wyrczynski, viola, and Max Geissler, cello in “Sparked by Frida [Kahlo].” Music by Albeniz, Ponce, Isabella Leonarda, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla, Frantz Casseus, Boccherini, and Roland Dyens. The in-person event begins at 7 pm in the Dodero Center for the Performing Arts at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills.
And the Akron Symphony plays “Outside Voices” — outside, of course, at 7:30 pm, and free — at Hale Farm and Village in Peninsula. Christopher Wilkins conducts the ASO Strings in works by Clarice Assad, Julia Perry, Antonín Dvořák and Michael Abels.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
A year ago in the Diary, we marked anniversaries of Ottorino Respighi, Jester Hairston, Pierre Cochereau, Edward Burlington Hill, and Randall Thompson.
Thompson’s name came up again more recently in obituaries for the American avant-garde composer and pianist Frederick Rzewski. Unlikely as it may seem, Rzewski took much away from his studies with the conservative, tonal composer at Harvard.
As Rzewski told me in a 2010 interview, “[Thompson] was my teacher of counterpoint — modal counterpoint. And I think a very good teacher, also. He certainly understood and loved it, which seemed to me the most important thing about teaching counterpoint: you actually have to love it. It can be very boring. But one thing I remember about that class is that he made us sing our exercises. It wasn’t enough to write them — we had to sing them. He always insisted on that.”
This seems a good time to dig a bit deeper into Randall Thompson’s choral music, which many of us had our first opportunity to sing in high school and college — works like the famous Alleluia, the a cappella suite The Peaceable Kingdom, and Frostiana, subtitled “Seven Country Songs,” which I had the pleasure of singing with a massed choir for Thompson’s retirement concert in April of 1965 in their newly-orchestrated version.
Less well-known, and as sophisticated as his Frost settings are simple, are his Six Odes of Horace, composed when Thompson was on a three-year study grant at the American Academy in Rome.
For a sampling of Thompson’s choral music less traveled by, bring up the album The Legacy of Randall Thompson on Spotify. Performed by the United States Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus, the collection includes the Horace ode O fons Bandusiae, humorous settings of texts from H.L. Menken’s The American Mercury (1924-1933), the whole of The Peaceable Kingdom, and his arrangement of the Somersetshire folksong, The Lark in the Morn. And read more about the composer in the CD’s program booklet.
Another recording by Richard Sparks and Seattle’s Choral Arts introduces settings of two George Herbert poems, Walt Whitman’s The Last Invocation, and Five Love Songs (recorded here for the first time). Sample tracks from The Light of Stars here.