by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•News: Cleveland Orchestra announces $1 million gift from the late Gay Cull Addicott (pictured)
•Interesting read: tenor Limmie Pulliam talks to the Times about his 12-year break from the industry
•Almanac: when to premiere an opera (seemingly on January 26), and listening to du Pré play Elgar
IN THE NEWS:
Earlier this week, The Cleveland Orchestra announced a $1 million gift to its general endowment, establishing the Gay Cull Addicott and Robert R. Cull Fund. The gift comes from the estate of the late Gay Cull Addicott, a Cleveland Orchestra trustee who served for twenty years and was appointed “Trustee for Life” on the Orchestra’s board. She passed away in August of 2022. Read an obituary here.
INTERESTING READ:
“As a rising young tenor in the 1990s, Limmie Pulliam dreamed of a career that would take him to the world’s top stages,” Javier C. Hernández writes in The New York Times. “But Pulliam, who has struggled with excessive weight for much of his life, quit singing in his early 20s because of concerns about body shaming in the music industry, finding work instead as a debt collector and a security guard.”
Having since rebuilt his career, Pulliam — who made his Carnegie Hall debut last week with the Oberlin Orchestra and Choral Ensembles (read our review here) — sat down with the Times to reflect on “his 12-year break from singing and the challenges facing larger artists, who once were common in the industry but have faced pressure in recent years to slim down.” Read here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
They say it’s best to book a flight on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Well, maybe it’s also best to premiere an opera on January 26.
Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790 at the Burgtheater in Vienna), Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911 at the Königliches Opernhaus in Dresden), and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957 at La Scala in Milan) all had their first performances on this date in history.
Moving over to musicians’ anniversaries, English cellist Jacqueline du Pré was born on this date in 1945 in Oxford, and Venezuelan-born conductor Gustavo Dudamel turns 42 today. And turning back the clock a couple hundred years, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach died on this date in 1795.
Here’s one choice recording to share today. Du Pré joins Daniel Barenboim and the London Philharmonic in one of the pieces she made famous: Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Listen here.
That concert took place in 1967 (the same year du Pré and Barenboim were married). Doing the math, that puts her in her early 20s, sadly not long before her career ended at age 28 due to multiple sclerosis. She would die at 42 — one of the tragic early departures of classical music.