by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS:
Dramatic tenor Limmie Pulliam, a 1998 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory who gave life to a host of leading opera roles and as a classical soloist on prominent stages across America and around the globe — and whose unlikely rise to fame after years away from music buoyed the dreams of performers everywhere — has died. He was 50. Read the Oberlin Conservatory story here.
HAPPENING TODAY:
As the central event in its Opera and Humanities Festival, The Cleveland Orchestra presents the second of three performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Franz Welser-Möst, conducting, with Sara Jakubiak & Ashley Emerson, sopranos, David Butt Philip & Owen McCausland, tenors, Tomasz Konieczny & Dashon Burton, bass-baritones, Martin Summer, bass, and The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus (7 pm in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center).
HONORED:
On May 20, No Exit New Music reported that composer Andrew Rindfleisch has been named First Runner-up for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Music for American Descent, a work commissioned by No Exit as its Fall 2025 centerpiece. Read the story here and click here to watch a video of the performance.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Today we’ll raise a virtual glass to celebrate two European soloists born on the 21st of May: French trumpeter Maurice André who greeted the world in 1933 in Alès in the Cévennes, and Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger, who followed him six years later in Langenthal.
André espoused the piccolo trumpet, a small, modern instrument invented to allow players to negotiate the high trumpet parts favored by Baroque composers. Since then, the period instrument movement has spawned players who have mastered the art of playing clarino parts — like Steven Marquardt, who recently joined Amanda Forsythe and Apollo’s Fire in a wonderful performance of J.S. Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott.
Watch a video of André performing Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Concerto in E-flat in Madrid in 1986.
For listeners who have grown up with the French school of oboe playing represented locally by the late John Mack of The Cleveland Orchestra, Holliger’s European sound takes a bit of getting used to. Watch a video here where he performs several works with the Swiss Chamber Soloists in Geneva in 2021.
Holliger was also a composer who studied with Pierre Boulez. Listen along with the scrolling score to his Studie II from 1981 performed by Tamás Bartók. Judging from the comments, both the piece and Bartók’s playing made a strong impression.
