by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
There’s nothing scheduled in the concert calendar today, but plenty of comings and goings in classical music history to memorialize.
Composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (caricatured) was born on this date in Kalischt, Bohemia. Instead of remembering him with one of his enormous works, why not watch cellist Oliver Herbert and pianist Teddy Abrams play Abrams’ lovely arrangement of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 at WQXR New York’s Greene Space on June 3, 2019.
Conductor, composer, and double bass virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini left the world on this date in 1889. He took up the instrument that made him famous in order to win a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory, later endearing himself to opera patrons by playing fantasies on opera tunes from the stage at intermission of shows he conducted. Enjoy a rare performance of his Gran Duetto No. 1 played by Cleveland Orchestra principal Max Dimoff and his student Russell Thompson in 2013 at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
In 1897, composer and educator Quincy Porter was born on July 7 in New Haven, Connecticut, and later studied in his home town at Yale. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music twice with a sojourn in Italy in between, moving on to Vassar and the New England Conservatory before returning to Yale. Cleveland Orchestra member Eliesha Nelson performed his 1948 Viola Concerto on her all-Quincy Porter album in 2009. Listen to her performance here with John McLaughlin Williams and the Northwest Sinfonia, and click here to hear the violist and the conductor answer some questions.
Opera composer Gian-Carlo Menotti was born on July 6 in Cadegliano, Italy. His theater pieces are well-known, but not so often performed is his delightful fable, The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore for chorus, dancers and chamber ensemble. In the days when network television was interested in cultural programming, the piece was telecast in November of 1957. A more recent performance in February, 2019, combined The Chamber Orchestra of the Springs, Colorado Ballet Society, and the Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble, conducted by Thomas Wilson.
And on this date in 1968, American composer and organist Leo Sowerby died in Port Clinton, Ohio while teaching at a summer choir camp. The Grand Rapids, Michigan native made his career in Chicago, where his works appeared on programs of the Chicago Symphony every season from 1917 through 1945, save two. As organist and choirmaster of Chicago’s St. James Cathedral for 35 years, and as founding director of the College of Church Musicians at Washington Cathedral from 1962-1968, he produced a large body of organ and liturgical music.
Watch a St. James Cathedral video narrated by Stephen Buzard celebrating the 150th anniversary of Sowerby’s birth in May of 2020, check out a performance of his organ work, Pageant, by the fleet-footed Ken Cowan at St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, and hear a performance of his popular 1920 anthem I will lift up mine eyes sung virtually under COVID in 2021 by the choir of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, the late Karel Paukert conducting and Steven Plank at the Holtkamp organ. And a 2018 performance of his 1941 work, I was glad, by the choir of Dallas’s Church of the Incarnation features former Clevelander L. Graham Schultz at the Aeolian-Skinner/Noack organ.
NEWS HEADLINES:
Indiana University Bloomington to Eliminate or Suspend Over 100 Academic Programs in Sweeping Restructuring. Read the June 30 Bloomingtonian article here.
INTERESTING READ:
A Musician on a Mission to Make Us Pay Attention to the Viola
“Lawrence Power’s instrument has been overlooked throughout its history. He has made a career of changing that.” Read the report from London by Hugh Morris in Sunday’s New York Times.
