by Daniel Hathaway
BOX OFFICES ARE OPENING:
On June 18, the Cleveland Museum of Art will begin selling a limited number of timed admission tickets to Museum members for its June 30 opening and the month of July. Tickets for the general public will go on sale June 22. Details here.
The Museum has also begun posting “Behind the Beat,” a series of video conversations with composers and performers in the time of isolation. Watch here.
Apollo’s Fire has announced its 2020-2021 season, offering a number of options for its subscribers including in-person attendance at concerts and exclusive post-performance videos. Details here.
Les Délices will begin selling subscriptions to its 2020-2021 series on July 1. The four programs will be presented entirely online. Read more here.
And Tri-C JazzFest’s 41st season will go virtual, streaming across various online platforms on Friday and Saturday, August 21 and 22. More information here. Performers will be announced on June 18.
ON THE WEB TODAY:
Catch pianist Imogen Cooper anytime today in an on-demand version of her live lunchtime concert at London’s Wigmore Hall, enjoy Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and revisit the MET Opera’s 2010 production of Rossini’s Armida with Renée Fleming and Lawrence Brownlee. Details here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Today’s birthday boys are Edvard Grieg (1843 in Bergen) and Robert Russell Bennett (1894 in Kansas City).
Grieg hardly needs an introduction. Norway’s most celebrated composer, he left a significant collection of solo piano music, but only one piano concerto. Click here to listen to U.K. pianist Yuanfan Yang play the first movement with Gerhardt Zimmerman and the Canton Symphony in the finals of Piano Cleveland’s Young Artist Competition (Senior Division) at the Cleveland Museum of Art on May 21, 2015.
Grieg’s choral music is not so well known. Listen here to his Ave Maris Stella as sung by Contrapunctus at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland on June 6, 2014. David Acres conducts, and Judith Overcash is the soloist.
Robert Russell Bennett does require some background. Straddling the worlds of classical and theatrical music, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and wrote a vast amount of concert music, while earning most of his fame as an arranger of Broadway musicals, especially those composed by Richard Rodgers.
Roy Benton Hawkins chronicled Bennett’s career and compiled a comprehensive list of his works in his 1989 doctoral dissertation at Texas Tech University, noting that creating that catalogue wasn’t an easy task:
Almost certainly the largest collection of manuscripts of Bennett’s original compositions is held by the Philadelphia National Bank. Many of these manuscripts had been deposited by Bennett at the Library of Congress in 1972. However, for reasons unknown to the author, they were withdrawn by his estate following his death. Unfortunately they are now stored, uncatalogued, in large crates in a warehouse in a deteriorating neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Musicians looking to expand their repertory of American music should find many items worth tracking down.
One of Bennett’s best-known works is his Suite of Old American Dances. Click here to hear a performance he conducted with the University of Michigan Symphony Band in March of 1950.
