by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
The new month begins with concerts by two university orchestras — interim director David Becker and student conductor Jacob Kaminsky lead the BW Symphony in Brahms, Dvořák, and Saint-Saëns with faculty soloists Khari Joyner, cello, and Nicole Keller, organ. And Victor Liva and student conductor Jimmie Parker preside over the CSU Symphony for works by Haydn, Saint-Saëns and Fauré, featuring cello soloist Ovidiu Marinescu.
Meanwhile, CityMusic Cleveland plays Bruch, Kotoka Suzuki, Paul Schoenfeld, and Mozart at St. Noel in Willoughby Hills, and No Exit new music ensemble debuts works by Derrik Balogh, Giuseppe Desiato, and Jiří Trtík (pictured), along with pieces by Timothy Beyer and Agata Zubel, at SPACES Gallery.
Details in our Concert Listings.
MANDELS MAKE STUNNING GIFT TO THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA:
Cleveland Orchestra president and CEO André Gremillet announced on Thursday that the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation has bestowed a $50 million gift on the Orchestra — the largest in the ensemble’s 103-year history, as well as the largest in the 68-year history of the Foundation. $31.5 million of that will go to endowment funds that will support an annual Mandel Opera Festival, the Orchestra’s global digital offerings, and local programs and partnerships.
Gremillet added that “In recognition of the historic impact of this grant, we are naming our main performance space the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall.” The building, which also houses the Reinberger Chamber Hall, will henceforth be referred to as Severance Music Center, “or simply Severance.” Read the press release here. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni.)
NEWS BRIEFS:
Violinist Philip Setzer, already a member of the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music, has been named Artistic Director of String Chamber Music at CIM, a capacity in which he will work with Si-Yan Darren Li, now promoted to Program Director. Setzer, a native Clevelander both of whose parents played in The Cleveland Orchestra, is a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, which will disband at the end of the current season, and a longtime collaborator with cellist David Finckel and Wu Han in the piano trio that bears all three of their names.
VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH MARGARET BROUWER:
The Canton Symphony returns to live, in-person performances on October 10 with a program led by Gerhardt Zimmerman that includes Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn. Click here to watch a 25-minute interview in which associate conductor Matthew Jaroszewicz asks the composer about her life, career, and the inspiration behind her work.
TODAY’S ALMANAC
Last year on this date, we noted the births of French composer Paul Dukas and Russian American pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and the departures of Austrian American composer Ernst Toch and American composer Roy Harris. If you missed that diary, you can still read those entries here.
This October 1st we remember the launching of two American institutions.
On the first day of the tenth month of 1921, American choral conductor Margaret Hillis was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and three years later, the Curtis Institute of Music opened its doors in Philadelphia.
Margaret Hillis an institution? Like her mentor, Robert Shaw, the founder and first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Chorus was somewhat larger than life, and helped establish the tradition of large, professional-quality choruses attached to major symphony orchestras. Lured away from New York City by music director Fritz Reiner (where she had founded the New York Concert Choir), Hillis debuted her new Chicago ensemble in April, 1958, and later that year became the first woman to conduct subscription concerts with the CSO.
Hillis further burnished her reputation — she won nine Grammy Awards during her career — by leading Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1977 at Carnegie Hall, stepping in on short notice to replace the ailing Sir Georg Solti.
Writing her obituary in 1998, Alan Kozinn noted,
She had a sense of humor about her struggle for recognition in a profession dominated by men. ‘”There’s only one woman I know who could never be a symphony conductor,”’ she told The New York Times in 1979, “and that’s the Venus de Milo.”
Click here to watch a 1979 Margaret Hillis interview with John Callaway.
And the Curtis Institute of Music was founded in Philadelphia in 1924 with a $12 million donation from MaryLouise Curtis Bok from the fortune she amassed as publisher of The Saturday Evening Post. The tuition-free school was intentionally designed to be small, admitting only enough instrumentalists to form one symphony orchestra and an opera company, in addition to composers, conductors, pianists, organists, and guitarists.
Curtis sent its 2021 Ensemble to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in February of 2016 to perform Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Click here to watch the concert and hear introductory remarks by Dean of Artistic Programs David Ludwig, who uses the occasion to talk briefly about the Institute.