by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
7:00 pm – The Cleveland Orchestra and Blossom Festival Chorus. Summers at Severance: A Night at the Opera. John Fiore, conductor, Latonia Moore, soprano (pictured with Franz Welser-Most), and Russell Thomas, tenor (replacing Brandon Jovanovich.) An evening of operatic highlights, including “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot and the “Anvil Chorus” from Verdi’s Il trovatore.
7:00 pm – Cleveland Chamber Choir. A Night at the Cabaret. Gregory Ristow, conductor. A program of showstoppers, torch songs, and Broadway favorites at The Bop Stop.
INTERESTING READ:
Anthony Hopkins, composer? How the actor collaborated with Gustavo Dudamel on his debut album
“The music on the new record is vivid in its storytelling and unapologetically emotional, lyrical and expressive. Languid piano tunes give way to surging, keening tides of strings. Hopkins weaves in old Welsh folk tunes and nods to impressionistic inspirations like Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius. “Life Is a Dream” is, essentially, a collection of love letters: to his wife Stella, to Margam, to the life he knows won’t last forever.”
Click here to read the Los Angeles Times article by Tim Greiving, and here to read a related article by Mark Swed.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1655, German instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner was born in Leipzig. Often credited with the invention of the clarinet — well, he did add a register key to the chalumeau, a single reed instrument with many historical antecedents — Denner’s innovations helped pave the way for the future development of one of the most versatile instruments in the woodwind family.
The clarinet achieved an important level of sophistication during Mozart’s time, as his concerto and quintet for the instrument demonstrate. They were written for Anton Stadler, the composer’s favorite clarinettist, but the concerto can hardly have had more loving treatment than it did in the hands of Franklin Cohen and his “all-star” ChamberFest Orchestra in 2015. Watch the performance here.
A more recent work that Cohen introduced to the ChamberFest audience just this summer is Carbarkapa Maljokovic’s Sonata for Four Clarinets. Click here to watch the performance of the adagio movement by Cohen, Benjamin Chen, Amitai Vardi, and Hugh Shihao Zhu on June 11, 2021 at the Grove Amphitheater in Mayfield Village.
And since the instrument comes in all sizes from the shrill, E-flat clarinet to the subterranean contrabass, it has inspired various arrangements like the Orchestra Siciliana di Clarinetti-Choir’s version of Gustav Holst’s Suite in F for military band.
And on August 13, 1900, English musicologist Sir George Grove died in London at the age of 79. Trained as an engineer, Grove’s love for music got him appointed director of orchestra concerts for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. He continued administering a concert series there after the building had been moved to Sydenham, and crafted admirable program notes for the benefit of amateur listeners. “I wrote about the symphonies and concertos because I wished to try to make them clear to myself and to discover the secret of the things that charmed me so; and from that sprang a wish to make other amateurs see it in the same way.”
One thing led to another, and Groves was invited by the publishers Macmillan and Company to produce a musical encyclopedia. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians was eventually issued by Macmillan in alphabetical volumes over a dozen years, ending in 1889.
One of Grove’s passions was the music of Schubert, then little appreciated in England. He was instrumental in discovering the score and parts for the incidental music to Rosamunde, the 1823 play by Helmina von Chézy, during an exploratory visit to Vienna in 1867. In honor of that find, listen to a studio recording of excerpts from Rosamunde with George Szell and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra made in Amsterdam in December, 1957.
Grove ended his career as director of the refounded Royal College of Music. His Encyclopedia lives on — online.
