by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7:30 in Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, music director Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in the premiere of a co-commissioned work by Allison Loggins-Hull, Grit. Grace. Glory.
Read our interview with the composer (pictured) here. The new work shares the program with Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4, and will be repeated on Friday at 11 am and Saturday at 8.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Everybody should know the name Oscar Hammerstein II — the lyricist half of the Broadway creative team of Rodgers & Hammerstein — but did you ever wonder about Oscar I?
Born in Stettin, Germany on this date in 1846, Oscar II’s grandfather was an opera composer and impresario who also founded several opera houses, most notably the Manhattan Opera House in 1906, which engaged in a fierce competition with the Metropolitan Opera. Oscar I sold both the Manhattan and Philadelphia houses to the Metropolitan in 1910, agreeing not to produce grand opera in New York for the next decade. Along with Elektra, Thaïs, and Salome, he was responsible for the American premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Listen to Erich Leinsdorf’s arrangement of “Preludes and Interludes” from Debussy’s symbolist opera recorded live by The Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall in February 1945, shortly before Leinsdorf left the podium to serve in the U.S. Army. The Orchestra presented a production of Pelléas et Mélisande in 2017 staged by Yuval Sharon and conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, both of whom comment on the work in a promotional video.
