By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
From 2-4 pm, Eric Charnofsky (pictured) hosts the latest edition of Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music from the studios of WRUW (if power has been restored to the station’s transmitter after the dramatic weather of the last few days).
Look forward to hearing infrequently encountered music by Alec Wilder, Michael Leese, Ernest Gold, Jane Antonia Cornish, selections from Handel Goes Wild, and works by Charnofsky himself. Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.
Click here to visit the Concert Listings page for information about coming events.
INTERESTING READS:
Why should composers write for amateur musicians?
Tom Service asks, “Why is there a gap between today’s composers and the repertoires of most of the musical ensembles in the country – which are not the professionals, but the amateur groups of all kinds who are the fabric of our musical life? It’s a situation that’s a historical anomaly in the wider course of the story of music.
The clichés about the 18th and 19th centuries are largely true: markets for domestic and amateur music-making were driven by a desire for the new, in terms of what people wanted to play, with hundreds of composers only too happy to write for them.” Read the article here from BBC Music Magazine.
In Kentucky, a Maestro of the People
Teddy Abrams, the 36-year-old music director of the Louisville Orchestra, has embedded himself in his community, breaking the mold of modern conductors. Read the article here from the New York Times.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1749, German dramatist and social philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt. And on this date in 1949, the Aspen Music Festival was founded in Colorado by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and Elizabeth Paepcke as a two-week bicentennial celebration of Goethe’s birth. “The event, which included both intellectual forums and musical performances, was such a success that it led to the formation of both the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School” (Aspen Festival website.)
August 28 is also notable for bringing conductors Karl Böhm and Istvan Kertesz into the world in 1894 in Graz, Austria and 1929 in Budapest, Hungary respectively.
Kertesz was The Cleveland Orchestra players’ unanimous choice to succeed George Szell. In an informal poll taken in August of 1971, they voted 77 for Kertesz against 2 for Lorin Maazel, who received the position. An orchestra representative quoted in The New York Times said “I think their reaction will be one of disappointment. But I think the orchestra will rally around. There is too much integrity and too much personal pride in the tradition for which the orchestra is known.” Kertesz tragically drowned during a concert tour in Israel in 1973 while swimming in the Mediterranean.
Speaking of tragic denouements, August 28, 1767 will also be remembered for the death of German composer and harpsichordist Johannn Schobert and his entire family from mushroom poisoning in Nüremberg. (Rumor has it that the doctor who declared the mushrooms edible was among the diners.)
Czech composer Bohuslav Jan Martinů departed on a similarly tragic note — he died of gastric cancer on this date in 1959 in Liestal, Switzerland.
But back to beginnings. Other births on August 28 include Hungarian musicologist and critic Paul Henry Lang (Budapest, 1901), American bass Paul Plishka (Old Forge, PA, 1941), and British pianist Imogen Cooper (London, 1949), who played Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra in March of 2022.
