by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
2:00 pm – Ohio Light Opera opens George and Ira Gershwin’s Tip-Toes in Freedlander Theatre, at the College of Wooster.
6:30 pm – Canton Symphony Summer Serenades presents a string quartet at Bimeler Park in Brewster.
7:30 pm – Oberlin Organ Academy Faculty Recital by Jonathan Moyer at Peace Community Church.
7:30 pm – ChamberFest Cleveland’s “Sing Hallelujah!” in Mixon Hall at CIM is sold out.
8:00 pm – Tri-C JazzFest opens with Trombone Shorty (pictured) & Orleans Avenue at Connor Palace.
For details, addresses, and ticket information, please visit our Concert Listings.:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Cooper International Competition has released the names of the 21 pianists ages 13-18 who will compete in its 2025 event at the Oberlin Conservatory and Severance Music Center from July 20-24. Three finalists will play concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Music Center. Read the Violin Channel article here.
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that “Tickets go on sale this Friday, July 27 at 10 AM for An Evening with Yo-Yo Ma, who joins The Cleveland Orchestra for one performance only in November. Season subscribers and donors giving $180 or more annually have access to a presale beginning on Thursday. Also included in the presale are vocalist Helen Welch’s Carpenters. The Songs. The Stories. (October 17) and a performance by Baroque music specialists Apollo’s Fire (November 8).”
INTERESTING READ:
On Smaller Opera Stages, Daring Art Has More Room to Breathe. “Unlike most countries, Germany has a network of minor but generously subsidized theaters whose vitality is remarkable, and unmatched.” Jeffrey Arlo Brown spent the season visiting German theaters in Darmstadt, Dessau-Rosslau, Lübeck, Magdeburg, Bielefeld, Hildesheim and Kassel. Read his article in the New York Times here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Only one birthday to mark today: that of the late composer Jacob Druckman, born on June 26, 1928 in Philadelphia. At Juilliard, The Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Brooklyn College, Bard College, and Yale University, he mentored a number of composers, including Daniel Asia, Conrad Cummings, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Kevin Puts, and Augusta Read Thomas.
Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra performed Windows, his 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for large orchestra, in October of 1974. Listen to a live performance at Severance Hall here. Druckman described the work in his composer’s notes:
The ‘Windows’ of the title are windows inward. They are points of light which appear as the thick orchestral textures part, allowing us to hear, fleetingly, moments out of time – memories, not of any music that ever existed before, but memories of memories, shadows of ghosts. The imagery is as though, having looked at an unpeopled wall of windows, one looks away and sees the afterimage of a face.
And Edwin London and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony recorded Druckman’s The Sound of Time in September, 1992. Soprano Marlene Rosen, then Professor of Voice at Oberlin Conservatory, is the soloist in the composer’s setting of texts from Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies (and other Disasters). Listen here.
