by Daniel Hathaway
ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES TODAY:
Principal Flute Joshua Smith is featured in Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 on today’s 12 Noon Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra on WCLV104.9 Ideastream, and also in the latest edition of the Orchestra’s podcast series, which is now available for listening. In “The Boy With the Dragonfly Tattoo,” Episode 5 of On a Personal Note, Smith explains how performing Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen left a lasting impression, and why the dragonfly just may be his favorite insect. Listen here.
Also on today’s agenda: Brahms from CIM’s archives with violist Tess Krope and pianist Alicja Basinska, and Lucia de Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland from the MET Opera vault. Check times and links here.
On Thursday, conductor Alan Gilbert of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie (and former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor) held a wide-ranging Zoom conversation with conductor colleagues Karina Cannelakis (Dutch Radio), Daniel Harding (Swedish Radio) and Simon Rattle (London Symphony) that attracted some 117,000 attendees. You can still access it here. Gilbert follows up at 12:00 pm EDT today with a second live roundtable discussion hosted from his home in Stockholm. Marin Alsop, Sir Antonio Pappano and Esa-Pekka Salonen join him to discuss how COVID-19 has affected concert life around the world, and other topics. Click here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On today’s date in 1501, Venetian printer Ottaviano del Petrucci published Harmonice musices odhecaton A, the first musical score to be printed from moveable type — a feat similar to Johannes Gutenberg’s technical advances of 60 years earlier. Clevelanders will recall the Cleveland Museum of Art performance by the viol ensemble Fretwork in November, 2019 that featured music from Petrucci’s collection in conjunction with the Museum’s Michelangelo exhibit. Click here to watch an Early Music Midi presentation of music from the Odhecaton.
And on May 15, 1941, American composer and pianist Richard Wilson was born in Cleveland. Influenced at an early age by George Szell’s performances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Wilson went on to study at Harvard and Rutgers, and taught for 50 years at Vassar. After spending a month in hospital in April 2019, Wilson took on his lifelong ambition of learning Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a piece he had avoided ever since hearing Glenn Gould’s definitive recording of 1955. After giving recent performances in the New York area, he was invited for further concerts in the Washington DC area — before the pandemic hit. He ended up recording the work on March 12. Watch the performance here.
INTERESTING READ (IN GERMAN):
Eight Berlin Orchestras have joined to commission a study, “Opinion on the operation of orchestras during the COVID-19 pandemic” from Charité, Berlin’s medical university. One of the authors is doctor/musician Stefan Willich, who has appeared as guest conductor with CityMusic Cleveland. If you’re fluent in German, you can read the 13-page report here while awaiting an official translation. Norman Lebrecht offers a brief summary of their findings here, with a link to a story (also in German) from the Wiener Zeitung.