by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Tonight: Apollo’s Fire’s Irish-Appalachian Christmas
•BGSU has openings to teach viola, oboe, voice & composition
•R.I.P. clarinetist Stanley Drucker (pictured)
•Holiday podcast listening
•Our almanac, including a long, important, and strange day in music history with Beethoven
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Play House, Apollo’s Fire concludes the two-day run of its Irish-Appalachian Christmas program “WASSAIL!” The concert, which celebrates the American immigrant experience, features such instruments as fiddle, Medieval harp, hammered dulcimer, and bagpipes. Get tickets here.
BGSU MUSIC OPENINGS:
There are four available positions at Bowling Green’s College of Musical Arts at the moment, all tenure-track: Assistant Professor of Viola, of Oboe, of Voice (Soprano or Mezzo), and of Composition. More info here.
IN MEMORIAM:
Clarinetist Stanley Drucker, who joined the New York Philharmonic at the age of 19 and stayed on for an astonishing 60 years (1948-2009), passed away on Monday at the age of 93. That tenure spanned 10,200 concerts with the orchestra — including 191 solo appearances — and five music directors: Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, and Lorin Maazel. As Daniel J. Wakin writes in an obituary for The New York Times, Drucker presented “a style and sound that typified the Philharmonic’s character — soloistic, technically and sonically brilliant, flamboyant and on the verge of brash.”
HOLIDAY PODCAST LISTENING:
Here’s some holiday listening from Les Délices. First, an episode from the SalonEra podcast featuring excerpts from — and commentary about — the ensemble’s “Bach Cantatas for Advent” concert. And second, a new series on the Meditations Podcast (that’ll be useful in the days to come!) featuring poetry and carols from the Christmas program “Noel, Noel.”
For so many people, holidays are about family — which brings us to another podcast, “Parenting Musically.” Hosted by Case Western professor of music education Lisa Huisman Koops, it includes interviews with well-known musicians and their parents, paired with stories and research, with the aim of making music “an important and meaningful part of our families’ lives.” The most recent episode features violist James Rhodes, who you may know from the new music ensemble No Exit, or one of his many other musical pursuits. Listen here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
There are so many names to honor today that it’s best to just focus on those who are celebrating birthdays — a host of composers who were also instrumentalists or conductors.
Those include German composer and viola da gambist Carl Friedrich Abel (born in 1723 in Köthen), Italian composer and “Paganini of the double bass” Giovanni Bottesini (1821, Crema, Lombardy), Venezuelan composer and “Valkyrie of the Piano” Teresa Carreño (1853, Caracas), Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858, Lucca), French-American composer and conductor Edgard Varèse (Paris, 1883), American composer and conductor Rob Kapilow (1952), American composer-guitarist David Leisner (1953, Los Angeles), and Chinese-American composer Zhou Tian (1981, Hangzhou).
And that other kind of birth: premieres on this date in history include Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Paris, 1894) and several works by Beethoven at a concert in Vienna in 1808. As Daniel Hathaway wrote in an almanac entry from 2020,
Over the course of four hours in an unheated hall, the audience heard the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto, Choral Fantasy, mass movements, and an aria, performed by a hostile and under-rehearsed orchestra and a teen-aged replacement soprano, with Beethoven himself at the piano.
As good a paragraph as any to leave you with as the Diary goes into a quick holiday hibernation. We’ll see you in January!