By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
This weekend at Blossom, Susie Benchasil Seiter will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in three performances of “Disney in Concert: the Sound of Magic,” a retrospective of the first hundred years of the Walt Disney Company, including Peter Pan, Moana, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Frozen, The Lion King, Fantasia, Encanto, & Disney Parks classics. The program debuts tonight, Friday at 7, and repeats on Saturday and Sunday.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Sir John Eliot Gardiner has withdrawn from all concerts to focus on his mental health after punching a singer. The world-renowned British conductor struck a member of his own chorus, William Thomas, in a furious backstage row following a concert in France, and has now decided to withdraw from all of his concert commitments to focus on his mental health with a counseling course. Read a story from The Telegraph here.
Click here to read a related article, John Eliot Gardiner and the stubborn archetype of the bully maestro, by Michael Andor Brodeur in The Washington Post.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Among the important anniversaries on today’s date in history are four that connect together in a web — and of course, little connections are always fun to stumble upon in this compact world of classical music.
At the center of the web are two living conductors: Seiji Ozawa turns 88 today, while Leonard Slatkin turns 79. Among many items on their resumes, Ozawa spent 29 years with the Boston Symphony, and Slatkin put in 17 years atop the podium with the St. Louis Symphony. And in fact, that orchestra was founded on this same date in 1880 as the St. Louis Choral Society.
A well-known advocate of modern music, Ozawa’s many premieres in Boston included Henri Dutilleux’s five-part The Shadows of Time (1997), a work he and the orchestra recorded the following year. Listen to the first movement here, and browse an extensive list of the ensemble’s premieres here.
Speaking of contemporary music advocacy, one composer Slatkin has championed — including while directing the Blossom Festival in the ‘90s — is Donald Erb, who famously taught at CIM for over four decades. Cellist Lynn Harrel joins Slatkin and St. Louis in a recording of Erb’s Cello Concerto here.
Both conductors have held many posts, and for Slatkin that includes stints in London as principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. That brings up a connection — or rather, missed connection — between Slatkin and Dennis Brain, that famous principal horn in both of those orchestras, who died in a car crash at the age of 36 on this date in 1957, missing Slatkin by several decades.
Mozart was a particular specialty of Brain’s. Hear him solo in the last movement of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 in E here, where he’s joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Herbert von Karajan — an important mentor of Ozawa’s, capping off today’s web of connections.
