by Daniel Hathaway
AIRING T
ODAY ONLINE:
The second Cleveland Orchestra In Focus episode airs tonight at 7:30 pm and remains available to subscribers for three months. Pianist Yefim Bronfman joins Franz Welser-Möst and the Orchestra in Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra, and the strings play an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Harp’ Quartet.
Aidan Plank’s Pulse Quartet is live from the Bop Stop tonight, and the MET Opera — fixated on politics all this week — presents John Adams’ Nixon in China.
Details in the Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Whatever happened to Maria Anna Mozart, “Nannerl,” the composer’s beloved older sister, who died on this date in 1829? An accomplished pianist in her own right, she is said to have written music herself, although none survives. Her life was re-imagined in René Féret’s 2010 French language film, Nannerl, la sœur de Mozart. Watch a trailer here, and learn how you can rent the movie.
On October 29, 1911, Hungarian-born newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer died in Charleston, South Carolina. His estate endowed the Pulitzer Prizes, which, beginning in 1943, included an annual award for a classical musical composition by an American composer. In the late 1990s, the entry rules were expanded to include a wider range of American music, and the first such prize recognized Wynton Marsalis’ 1997 Blood on the Fields. George Gershwin and Duke Ellington were subsequently honored on their anniversary years in 1998 and 1999.
It’s interesting to read down the list of Pulitzer Prize winners in music, both to see what works have passed into wide use and which seem to have fallen by the wayside. Click here to view the list.
On this date in 1863, representatives from 18 countries met in Geneva to form the International Red Cross. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a piece to celebrate the centenary of the organization in 1963, resulting in his Cantata misericordium, Op. 69, a treatment of the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan which has been called a “miniature appendix to the War Requiem,” and featured two of the same soloists, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, at its premiere with Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande in Geneva on September 1, 1963.
Listen to a 1965 recording with the London Symphony, Britten, Pears, and Fischer-Dieskau here.
And on this day in 1929, dubbed “Black Tuesday,” the New York Stock Exchange crashed, launching the Great Depression. Just something to ponder, no music to suggest.
