HAPPENING TODAY:
Ohio Light Opera continues its run of Damn Yankees (2pm in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster), Kent Blossom Music Festival presents a Young Artist Concert (7:30 in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State University), and also at 7:30, the Quintet of the Americas plays music for wind quintet at the LatinUS Theater in Cleveland.
For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1914, conductor Frederick Fennell was born in Cleveland (he died in 2004 in Florida).
He played timpani in the John Adams High School band before going on to study at Interlochen, then at the Eastman School of Music, where he founded the Eastman Symphonic Wind Ensemble and launched a long career reinventing and directing wind bands.
Fennell also studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood (with classmates Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss), and served on the conducting staffs of the Minnesota Orchestra, the University of Miami and the Miami Philharmonic, the Interlochen Arts Academy, and the Dallas Wind Symphony.
One of America’s most-recorded conductors, Fennell’s credits include 29 recordings on the Mercury label. He also made history for his collaboration with Jack Renner and Robert Woods, founders of Cleveland’s Telarc Records, who made the first-ever symphonic digital recording with Fennell conducting the Cleveland Symphonic Winds — including the wind, brass, and percussion sections of The Cleveland Orchestra — in Severance Hall in April, 1978.
The recording of Gustav Holst’s suites for military band similarly made history in 1983 when it became part of one of the first recordings to be released in the new compact disc format.
Read the story of making that recording in an article on Engineering and Technology Wiki, and listen to those performances of Holst’s Suite No. 1 in E-flat and Suite No. 2 in F here and here (where you can follow along with the reduced conductor’s score). And watch Frederick Fennell in action rehearsing the Indiana State University Wind Ensemble in 1997.
