by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Featured artists performing in three June Festivals today include Randall Hawes, bass trombone of the Detroit Symphony, with pianist Kathryn Goodson (Cleveland Trombone Seminar at 5:30 in CSU’s Drinko Hall), the Olli Soikkeli Band — Olli Soikkeli, guitar, Brad Brose, rhythm guitar, Paul Sikivie, bass, and Evan Arntzen, clarinet & saxophone, in “Roma Jazz on a Starry Night” (ENCORE Chamber Music at 7:30 at Kendall Lake in Peninsula, Cuyahoga Valley National Park) and Nicolò Spera (pictured), 10-string guitar (Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival at 7:30 in Mixon Hall at CIM).
Also on tap for this evening: The Cleveland Opera presents Dorota Sobieska, soprano and Daniel Doty, tenor, with string orchestra conducted by Grzegorz Nowak in “Music for Orchestra… with a touch of voice” (7:30 at St. Ann Church in Cleveland Hts.)
NEWS BRIEFS:
Lakewood native David Conte, who is professor of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, will be honored as 2024 Distinguished Composer by the American Guild of Organists at its convention this summer in San Francisco (June 30-July 4) .
The biennial award has previously recognized such outstanding composers of organ and choral music in the U.S. as Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Daniel Pinkham, Dominick Argento, William Albright, William Bolcom, Alice Parker, Stephen Paulus, David Hurd, and Libby Larsen. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
…is themed around princes.
We begin with Prince Rogers Nelson, who was born on this date in 1958 in Minneapolis. Celebrate Prince with a selection of spectacular live recordings collected by David Remnick for The New Yorker, including his show-stealing tribute to George Harrison, and his 2007 Super Bowl halftime show, which ended, in the pouring rain, with Purple Rain. And if you’re looking for a classical music critic’s take on the artist, check out this short blog entry from Alex Ross, excerpted below:
The show I saw at Madison Square Garden in 2004…was one of the most staggering live performances I’ve ever seen, in any medium. It was a feast of lusty precision, and the sense of authority emanating from the man in the middle was almost frightening… Prince was, above all, a profoundly musical being whose most startling displays of virtuosity never lost sight of the fundamental harmonic landscape of a song…
It makes for nice alliteration to describe longtime Cleveland Orchestra music director George Szell (born on this date in 1897) as a prince of the podium, but he was definitely more of a king. As Wilma Salisbury wrote in 1978, when Szell received a posthumous award from the Cleveland Arts Prize,
A commanding authority figure and one of the 20th century’s greatest conductors, he quickly fired musicians who did not meet his high artistic standards, hired replacements who fit his concept of a homogenous ensemble, taught players to listen to one another like members of a string quartet and established uncompromising rehearsal techniques that required precise attention to details of phrasing, articulation, rhythm, balance and dynamics. His drive for perfection paid off. By the time the orchestra made its European debut tour in 1957, Szell had transformed it from an excellent regional ensemble to one of the finest orchestras in the world.
Here’s a recording that reflects those impressive qualities while still staying on brand today: Szell leads The Cleveland Orchestra in the Introduction to the “Polevetsian Dances” from — yes — Prince Igor.
And we’ll close with violinist and conductor Jaime Laredo, who turns 83 today. Laredo moved from his native Bolivia to the U.S. at the age of seven, and five years later came to Northeast Ohio to study with then-Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Joseph Gingold. Among the awards and positions making up his long and multifaceted career, he currently teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Music and has served as Music Director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.
In the realm of his solo and chamber music output, we’ll highlight the 2014 album Two x Four, featuring both Laredo and violinist Jennifer Koh, his colleague and former student. That project spanned four double concertos, including two new commissions — one of which was Anna Clyne’s Grammy-nominated Prince of Clouds.
