By Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Meet the Sonic Sphere
. Check out the rarities in Eric Charnofsky’s Monday playlist
. Birthday salute to the late Jacob Druckman
HAPPENING TODAY:
2:00 pm – Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music, Eric Charnofsky, host. Richard Strauss’s Violin Concerto in d,, Charles Norman Mason’s Anthem of Despair and Hope (choir), Suzanne Farrin’s Undecim (string quartet), Frederick Delius’s Marche Caprice & A Song Before Sunrise (orchestra), Jacob Druckman’s Dark Upon the Harp (mezzo-soprano, brass quintet & percussion) & Franz Liszt’s Second Book of Songs for Solo Piano. Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.
INTERESTING READ:
“At the Shed in Manhattan, audience members can take in live, spatially designed music inside a suspended hall called the Sonic Sphere.” Click here to read the New York Times story, “Enter the 50-Ton Concert Hall That Hangs Like a Disco Ball.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Only one birthday to mark today: that of the late composer Jacob Druckman, born on June 26, 1928 in Philadelphia. At Juilliard, The Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Brooklyn College, Bard College, and Yale University, he mentored a number of composers, including Daniel Asia, Conrad Cummings, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Kevin Puts, and Augusta Read Thomas.
Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra performed Windows, his 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for large orchestra, in October of 1974. Listen to a live performance at Severance Hall here. Druckman described the work in his composer’s notes:
The ‘Windows’ of the title are windows inward. They are points of light which appear as the thick orchestral textures part, allowing us to hear, fleetingly, moments out of time – memories, not of any music that ever existed before, but memories of memories, shadows of ghosts. The imagery is as though, having looked at an unpeopled wall of windows, one looks away and sees the afterimage of a face.
Edwin London and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony recorded Druckman’s The Sound of Time in September, 1992. Soprano Marlene Rosen, then Professor of Voice at Oberlin, is the soloist in the composer’s setting of texts from Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies (and other Disasters). Listen here.
And Eric Charnofsky includes Druckman’s Dark Upon the Harp for mezzo-soprano, brass quintet & percussion in today’s Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music playlist.
