by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Today you can have lunch with The Cleveland Orchestra (Wagner and Brahms with Yefim Bronfman), coffee with cornettist Bruce Dickey, and dessert with Ohio Light Opera (selections from Let ‘Em Eat Cake), take a video tour of Oberlin’s organ fleet on Oberlin Stage Left, watch Massenet’s Manon from the MET Opera, and join Northeast Ohio artists in support of UNICEF. Check our Concert Listings for details.
RYAN ANTHONY OBITUARY:
Dallas-based music critic Scott Cantrell’s extensive obituary for trumpeter Ryan Anthony appears in the Dallas Morning News. Read it here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1767, the super-prolific German composer George Philipp Telemann died in Hamburg, where he had earlier used his pending appointment to cantorships in Leipzig to negotiate a raise from the Hamburg authorities (J.S. Bach, Leipzig’s third choice after No. 2 had turned them down, remained a friend).
Click here to watch a performance of Telemann’s funeral cantata, Du aber, Daniel, gehe hin by the Oberlin Conservatory HIP Baroque Ensemble on Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival in June, 2011 at First Lutheran Church in Boston. Coached by Webb Wiggins and Kathryn Montoya, the group includes students who have gone on to distinguished careers in historical performance.
For a funereal work on a lighter subject, watch bass Jeffrey Strauss sing (and act out, with props) Telemann’s Funeral Cantata for an Artistically Trained Canary-Bird Whose Demise Brought the Greatest Sorrow to its M
On June 25,1940, African American composer William Grant Still’s choral ballad And They Lynched Him on a Tree was first presented in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. Cleveland Orchestra music director Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic with the Schola Cantorum and Wen Talbert Choir. Philip Brunelle later recorded the work with William Warfield, the Hilda Harris Choir, VocalEssence, and the Leigh Morris Chorale. Listen to the 2010 recording here.
For more insights into Still’s music, listen to a Voice of America interview about his opera Troubled Island before its premiere in 1949. (The U.S. State Department recorded the work for distribution abroad.)
And on this date in 1983, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera died in Geneva. Yolanda Kondonassis performed his Harp Concerto with Jiménez and the Oberlin Orchestra in October, 2016. Watch that performance from Finney Chapel here. The performance was later released on Oberlin Music as part of the CD Ginastera: One Hundred.
Cleveland Orchestra Principal Cello Mark Kosower has been a strong advocate of Ginastera’s music. In advance of his performance of the Second Cello Concerto in October, 2018, the Orchestra released two short promotional videos. In the first, Kosower discusses the work and plays excerpts. The second is a short clip of a rehearsal led by guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno.
Kosower recorded the complete concerto with his former orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, led by Lothar Zagrosek. Listen here.