by Daniel Hathaway
INTERESTING READS:
In his Critic’s Notebook in today’s New York Times, Zachary Woolfe asks, “People love Janáček’s music when they hear it. So why isn’t my favorite composer more popular?
“On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra (pictured by Roger Mastroianni) finished an elegant but crushing concert version of Jenůfa, which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.” Read the article and comments by readers here.
And marking the centennial of his birth, German baritone Benjamin Appl remembers his teacher Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as one of the 20th century’s greatest singers and a complicated, conflicted man. Read the New York Times article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was born on this date in Camprodón. Taste just one of his iconic Iberian portraits in a 2010 performance of Sevilla by Jason Vieaux in Kulas Hall at CIM.
Born on May 29 of 1897 in Brno, Bohemia, Eric Korngold was one of several European composers who settled in Hollywood in the 1930s and contributed distinguished scores to the motion picture industry. Jinjoo Cho talks about his Violin Concerto, which she played with the Akron Symphony in March, 2019, in a 3-Questions interview here. And 16-year-old violinist Christina Nam won the 2019 Frieda Schumacher Award and the opportunity to play a concerto with the Cleveland Philharmonic. She chose the Korngold. Listen to her performance here, led by music director Victor Liva.
And in 1935, Czech composer Josef Suk died in Benesov. He wrote his Second Symphony (“Asrael”) in 1905-1906 in memoriam both of his teacher and father-in-law Antonín Dvořák, who died in 1904, and his wife, Dvořák’s daughter, who died in 1905. Guest conductor Jakub Hrůša led The Cleveland Orchestra in a performance of the work in April 2018. No recording of that is readily available, but click here to watch a video of the work by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek.
