by Stephanie Manning
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two free seasonal offerings await this evening, both at 7:30.
At Judson Manor, the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra (pictured) presents their holiday concert, and at Painesville United Methodist Church, Matthew Saunders directs the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in a program of light classics and holiday favorites.
For more details and to check out what else is coming up this week, visit our Concert Listings.
ON THE RADIO:
Over the weekend, NPR’s Elissa Nadworny spoke to Rhiannon Giddens and Limmie Pulliam about performing Omar with Oberlin Conservatory. Listen to that interview here, which includes snippets from the opera.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Daniel Hathaway
German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born on this date in 1915 and passed away in her sleep at age 90 in 2006. 
She was most celebrated for performing Lieder, and in that arena, she helped inaugurate Blossom Music Center — listen here to Strauss’s Four Last Songs performed live by Schwarzkopf, George Szell, and The Cleveland Orchestra in a radio broadcast from the venue’s first season. (Read more about that first season of Blossom here.) Or head to Spotify for those Strauss works in another Schwarzkopf-Szell pairing, this time in a recording with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin.
Complicating Schwarzkopf’s legacy is her involvement with the National Socialist Party, including ways that were far from routine at the time, as Michael H. Kater wrote in The Guardian in the weeks after the soprano’s death.
