by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Apollo’s Fire takes its Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered program to St. Raphael Church in Bay Village, Franz Welser-Möst leads The Cleveland Orchestra in music by George Walker (pictured) and Erich Korngold at Severance (repeated on Saturday), and Oberlin’s Luce Initiative for Asian Studies and the Environment screens The Awakened Steppe — Traditional and Contemporary Music from Mongolia in Stull Recital Hall at the Conservatory.
Details in our Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
Remember Tom Lehrer, the Harvard and MIT math teacher whose night job as a satirical singer-pianist delighted many (and angered some) in the 50s and 60s? He lives on at the age of 93 in Denmark, as Jeremy Bernstein reports in his article in The London Review of Books. The author enjoys the distinction of having been in the audience both for Lehrer’s debut in 1949 and his final public performance in 1972. “By the 1970s he had had enough. He said that ‘political satire became obsolete’ after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.” Read They’re Playing Our Song here, and here for the lyrics to all of his songs, which Lehrer has released into the public domain through December 31, 2024.
NEWS FROM CIM:
The Cleveland Institute of Music has announced a new Artist Diploma program “designed to launch recent CIM alumni into professional orchestral performance careers. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of noted Cleveland philanthropist Barbara Robinson, the inaugural Fellows – CIM alumni Caleb Cox, viola, and Grace Roepke, harp – are recipients of the Robinson Orchestral Career Fellowship.” Read the press release here.
SAVE THE DATES:
Akron’s Urban Troubadour announces the resumption of its roving concert experiences beginning in the spring with Piazzola’s 100th Birthday Bash on March 13. Click here to check out what else Jane Berkner has planned for the first half of 2022. There are videos of past events to enjoy as well.
And Cleveland Opera Theater and Baldwin Wallace Opera director Scott Skiba writes to alert us to three upcoming events: Operas in Place, nine newly commissioned Micro Operas, available on Demand on December 1, 2, and 3, the world premiere of Griffin Candey’s La casa de Bernarda Alba on February 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the Kleist Center at Baldwin Wallace, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro on March 24, 25, 26, and 27 in BW’s Gamble Auditorium.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Raise a glass today for the births of conductors Alexander Schneider and Sir Georg Solti, and the first performances — also births if you will — of works by Aaron Copland, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Scott Joplin.
Schneider, born on this date in 1908 in Vilnius, Lithuania (then part of Russia), was touring to the U.S. in 1939 as second violinist with the Budapest String Quartet when war broke out, and, long story short, the ensemble decided to stay put. From 1940 to 1960, the quartet was hired to regularly play the five Stradivarius instruments in the collection of the Library of Congress. Click here to listen to Schneider talk about those early days, including the quartet’s rescue from Ellis Island by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who sent a boat to convey the visa-less musicians directly to a concert hall in New York. And click here to listen to the quartet, which also included Alexander’s older brother Mischa as its cellist, perform the Ravel Quartet in 1958.
Between 1944 and 1958, Alexander Schneider left the Budapest to pursue other conducting and performing activities, including the yearly New York String Orchestra, a year-end seminar-performance for young string musicians, founded in 1969.
And speaking of Budapest, conductor Georg Solti was born there on this date in 1912. The rise of the Nazis inspired several moves around Europe and finally to the United States, where he was appointed music director of the Chicago Symphony in 1967, beginning a reign of 25 years. In the meantime, his work at Covent Garden earned him two royal honors and an official knighthood when he became a British citizen.
Solti’s directorships were fraught with tensions and discord, but you’d never know that from this video of his rehearsal of Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser with the Süddeutsche Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra. More on the subject of Solti’s temperament in the BBC TV documentary, Maestro or Mephisto: The Real Georg Solti.
Those first performances include Copland’s Piano Sonata in Buenos Aires (on this date in 1941), Menotti’s madrigal-fable The Unicorn, the Gordon and the Manticore at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in 1956, and the much-delayed debut of Scott Joplin’s 1911 “ragtime” opera Treemonisha in New York in 1975, where it ran for 64 performances.
Watch the Menotti in a 1957 black and white kinescope recording by the New York City Ballet here, the Joplin in a (pirated) Houston Grand Opera video (with commentary in .Portuguese!) here, and the Copland in a recent video by Timo Andres here.
