by Daniel Hathaway
ALBUM RELEASES BY HAMMER & MUELLER
Levi Hammer, who served as assistant conductor of the Akron Symphony for its Porgy and Bess project, will release his solo piano album Gershwin in Vienna on the Descurio label on April 17. Read a press release here.
And Neil Mueller, one of the founders of BlueWater Chamber Orchestra who also serves as its assistant conductor and principal trumpet, has released Call and Response with two trumpeter colleagues. Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
From the sublime to the ridiculous.
Austrian composer Alban Berg was born in Vienna on this date in 1885. A student of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg is credited with humanizing his mentor’s 12-tone compositional system, overlaying it with a veneer of expressive Romanticism. His fame is inversely proportional to his output, which includes two operas — Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu — a violin concerto, and some smaller works.
Alas, the pandemic resulted in the cancellation of Cleveland performances of the two-act concert version of Lulu, starring Barbara Hannigan, which was to have anchored The Cleveland Orchestra’s “Censored: Art and Power” Festival in May of 2020.
The BBC highlighted Berg’s life in a documentary, and ChamberFest Cleveland included his Adagio for violin (Diana Cohen), clarinet (Franklin Cohen), and piano (Roman Rabinovich) on a concert in CIM’s Mixon Hall on June 21, 2018. That movement was extracted from Berg’s Concerto de chambre for piano, violin, and 13 instruments. And Pierre Boulez chose Berg’s Der Wein to open the 2011 Salzburg Festival with soprano Dorothea Roeschmann and the Vienna Philharmonic.
Sir George Guest, an important figure in British choral music, was born on this date in Wales in 1924. Guest was the longtime organist and choirmaster of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he saved the day school that provided trebles for the chapel choir, and developed a choir that rivaled that of King’s College. Perhaps by design, John’s and King’s scheduled their Choral Evensong services so you could catch both at the expense of a brisk walk.
Guest is the subject of the documentary, “A Guest at Cambridge,” and his last Evensong service, including Gerald Finzi’s Lo, the Full Final Sacrifice was broadcast by the BBC in 1991.
