CLASSICAL MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS:
The Blossom Music Festival opens with its traditional Independence Day weekend festivities featuring The Cleveland Orchestra with conductor Edwin Outwater and tenor Russell Thomas (Friday at 8) and the Blossom Festival Band with conductor Michelle Rakers and baritone Brian Keith Johnson (Saturday at 8).
Ohio Light Opera continues its run of Rodgers & Hart’s Damn Yankees (Friday at 2) and presents a Fourth of July Pops Concert in downtown Wooster (Saturday at 7), and the Kent Blossom Festival presents its Young Artists in four concerts (Friday at 2 and 7 in Ludwig Recital Hall, and Sunday at 2 and 7 at the Hudson Library and Historical Society.
For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
INTERESTING READ:
Douglas W. Shadle, a scholar of American musical history, reflects on Niagara, George Frederick Bristow’s monumental Fifth Symphony, that connects centuries of our nation’s cultural life.
“The only thing ‘fixed’ about American identity, musical or otherwise, is that it remains in a constant state of flux.” Read the article in Early Music America (via ArtsJournal).
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
July 3:
Music lovers of a certain age may recall hearing Deems Taylor’s intermission features on broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic, and others may recall his commentary as emcee for the 1940 version of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (for which he helped choose musical selections). 
The writer, broadcaster, and music critic who died on this date in 1966, was also a composer whose operas were enormously popular for a time on the stage of the Met. Click here to listen to one of his most celebrated works, Through the Looking Glass, on subjects from Lewis Carroll, played by the Columbia Symphony under Howard Barlow in 1938.
And click here to enjoy Taylor’s analysis of Strauss’ tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.
July 5 (by Jarrett Hoffman):
At a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on this date in 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his speech What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? — considered by many to be the greatest piece of anti-slavery oratory in American history.
Composer Dorothy Rudd Moore turned to that prominent abolitionist as inspiration for her opera Frederick Douglass. One powerful moment that critic Tim Page noted in his review of the 1985 premiere is a musical setting of excerpts of that famous speech — “when Douglass contemplates the bitter irony of a pre-emancipation Fourth of July,” Page writes.
Watch a performance of that aria by baritone José Pietri-Coimbre and pianist Richard Liebowitz from 2019. You can also read about the speech here from the Library of Congress, read the full text of the speech here from BlackPast, or listen to five descendants of Douglass reading and responding to excerpts from it here.
