by Daniel Hathaway
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that single tickets for the 2025-2026 season will go on sale today for subscribers, donors, and membership club members, and will be available to the general public on Wednesday, August 13 beginning at 10 am. View the announcement here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1873, American composer J. Rosamond Johnson (pictured) was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Trained at the New England Conservatory and in London, he’s best known for his setting of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the poem by his brother, James Weldon Johnson, that has come to be known as the Black National Anthem. During his active career in show business, he produced several Broadway operettas, and edited two volumes of Spirituals in the mid-20s.
Click here to hear three of Johnson’s Spirituals sung by the late Cleveland soprano A. Grace Lee Mims.
And on August 11, 1996, Czech conductor, composer and pianist Rafael Kubelik died in Lucerne, Switzerland. 
He left Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948 to pursue a busy career guest conducting orchestras in Europe and the U.S., and spent short spans of time as music director of the Chicago Symphony (three years) and the Metropolitan Opera (six months). He was briefly regarded as a long-shot candidate to fill George Szell’s vacancy in Cleveland.
Click here to listen to a 1973 live Cleveland Orchestra broadcast where Kubelik leads Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto with Rudolf Firkusny at the keyboard. And if you’re looking for a long-term listening experience, in May of 2018, Deutsche Grammophon released a 66-disc set of the conductor’s complete recordings for that label.
