HAPPENING TODAY:
12:30 pm – The Concert Truck appears at the Akron Urban League. Presented by Tuesday Musical, pianists Susan Zhang and Maxim Lando will play classical, jazz, world music, Broadway show tunes, and more.
[POSTPONED] 5:30 pm – M.U.S.i.C. at The Van Aken District. Young musicians perform duets, string quartets, solos and vocal works by Boccherini, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Bernstein, and Piazzolla.
6:30 pm – Canton Symphony Summer Serenades brings a brass quintet to Tam O’Shanter Park.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Two string quartets have announced changes in personnel. The Jerusalem Quartet, which performed all of Dmitri Shostakovich’s quartets in April for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, has announced the departure of violist Ori Kam after 15 years with the ensemble. And The Callisto Quartet, founded at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2016, has named Eric Tsai as its new first violinist, replacing Cameron Daly, who has left the ensemble to play with the Seattle Symphony.
Arts Renaissance Tremont has announced that it will return to Pilgrim Church for its 34th season after relocating following the death of founder Christine Haff Paluck. Feza Zweifel has been named artistic director of the organization. Read more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1749, German dramatist and social philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt.
And on this date in 1949, the Aspen Music Festival was founded in Colorado by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and Elizabeth Paepcke as a two-week bicentennial celebration of Goethe’s birth. “The event, which included both intellectual forums and musical performances, was such a success that it led to the formation of both the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School” (Aspen Festival website.)
August 28 is also notable for bringing conductors Karl Böhm and Istvan Kertesz into the world in 1894 in Graz, Austria and 1929 in Budapest, Hungary respectively.
Kertesz (pictured) was The Cleveland Orchestra players’ unanimous choice to succeed George Szell. In an informal poll taken in August of 1971, they voted 77 for Kertesz against 2 for Lorin Maazel, who received the position.
An orchestra representative quoted in The New York Times said “I think their reaction will be one of disappointment. But I think the orchestra will rally around. There is too much integrity and too much personal pride in the tradition for which the orchestra is known.” Kertesz tragically drowned during a concert tour in Israel in 1973 while swimming in the Mediterranean.
Speaking of tragic denouements, August 28, 1767 will also be remembered for the death of German composer and harpsichordist Johannn Schobert and his entire family from mushroom poisoning in Nüremberg. (Rumor has it that the doctor who declared the mushrooms edible was among the diners.)
Czech composer Bohuslav Jan Martinů departed on a similarly tragic note — he died of gastric cancer on this date in 1959 in Liestal, Switzerland.
But back to beginnings. Other births on August 28 include Hungarian musicologist and critic Paul Henry Lang (Budapest, 1901), American bass Paul Plishka (Old Forge, PA, 1941), and British pianist Imogen Cooper (London, 1949), who played Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto with Dame Jane Glover and The Cleveland Orchestra in March of 2022.
