by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Who hasn’t amused themself — and hopefully their dining companions as well — by applying a moistened finger to the rim of a wine glass? In technical terms, you’re creating a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, a type of friction idiophone. Benjamin Franklin, fascinated by the sound, created a mechanical version he called the armonica, a large spinning drum of glass bowls, which he announced on this date in 1762.
Click here to watch Dennis James play Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Harmonica on the Ars Lyrica Houston concert series, and here to join Mister Rogers on his final visit to Negri’s Music Shop. He meets seasoned performer Dean Shostack, and tries his own classically-trained pianist’s hands at the instrument. (Yes, the video is a mirror image with the bass and treble ends of the instrument reversed!)
On July 13, 1951, composer Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles — ironic because he was a triskaidekaphobic who was obsessed by the number 13. See below for the Opéra de Paris’ production of his unfinished work, Moses und Aron, and click here for a breezy introduction by Samuel Andreyev to Schoenberg’s fascinating progress as a composer.
One of his best-known works, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, was performed on July 16, 2017 by Encore Chamber Music on its Sunday Unplugged series in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Watch the performance by violinists Jinjoo Cho and Nancy Zhou, violists Ettore Causa and Dimitri Murrath, and cellists Amit Even-Tov and Mindy Park here.
And on this date in 2013, former Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Lorin Maazel died at his Castleton Farms estate in Virginia. His appointment in Cleveland to follow George Szell was fraught with controversy. In The Cleveland Orchestra Story, Donald Rosenberg quotes then Plain Dealer critic Robert Finn in a neat summation of the issue: “Lorin Maazel is a strong personality. Where his ideas suit the music, they create real sparks. Where they do not, they become annoying mannerisms.”
Decide for yourself in this 1973 Decca recording of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and in this memorial video that Japan’s NHK Symphony released of the Funeral March and Finale from Götterdämmerung that Maazel led in Tokyo in 2012.
Speaking of Wagner, Maazel anthologized a lot of the composer’s music in his arrangement, The Ring Without Words. Watch a 2018 performance here by the World Doctors’ Orchestra at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg led by Stefan Willich, frequent guest conductor of CityMusic Cleveland.
NEWS BRIEFS:
New York’s Metropolitan Opera has announced plans to stream a new 12-episode solo recital series beginning on July 18 with a performance by tenor Jonas Kaufman and pianist Helmut Deutsch, followed by such artists as Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, Joyce DiDonato, Bryn Terfel, Angel Blue and Lise Davidsen. The programs, an experiment in paid streaming, will be priced at $20 each. In announcing the series, General Manager Peter Gelb said, “These are not lieder programs. These are full-throated operatic arias.” Read the article here.
From today’s New York Times: “Marga Richter, a prolific composer whose determination to be heard in a male-dominated field once led her to rent Merkin Concert Hall to stage a program of her own works, died on June 25 at her home in Barnegat, N.J. She was 93.” Read the rest of the obituary here.
TODAY ONLINE AND ON THE RADIO:
Most of us were still shaking off sleep when the Paris Opera streamed its production of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron early today in commemoration of the composer’s death in Los Angeles on this date in 1951. It’s still available for on-demand viewing until July 19.
Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra today features Verdi’s Ave Maria, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, and the finale from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, while the MET Opera’s Free Nightly Stream rebroadcasts Puccini’s Manon Lescaut from March 5, 2016, with Fabio Luisi in the pit. Details here.
