by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2 pm, Ohio Light Opera debuts its 2024 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster, and puts the show into its summer rotation. Visit our Concert Listings for more information.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
June 13 marks anniversaries for Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chavez, who was born in Mexico City in 1899, and American composer David Diamond, who died in Rochester, NewYork in 2005. Although each of them have been championed by individual conductors, their music awaits wider attention.
A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music who taught for years at Juilliard, Diamond’s works — along with those of other mid-century tonal composers — were overshadowed by the rise of atonal music.
Diamond’s extensive works list includes eleven symphonies and ten string quartets. He was honorary composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony, with whom Gerard Schwarz recorded his 1948 orchestral fantasy The Enormous Room, based on e.e. cummings’ autobiographical novel of the same name. Listen here.
The music of Chavez has all but disappeared as Latin American culture has faded from the American consciousness. Here’s a video where Bard College president Leon Botstein talks about the composer and Latin American music. Click here to listen to his Toccata performed by the Eastman Chamber Percussion Ensemble in Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music, Andrea Venet conducting, or here to watch his Sinfonia India led by Gustavo Dudamel — apparently in a football arena.
