by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Tonight’s lone (and sold-out) event — but more to come on the horizon
•Voting for Cleveland Scene’s “Best of Cleveland 2022”
•Part-time openings from Piano Cleveland
•Almanac: Seiji Ozawa, Leonard Slatkin, the St. Louis Symphony, and Dennis Brain in a web of connections
HAPPENING TODAY:
Live performances on the calendar at this time of the year are scarce — and in some cases, tickets get snapped up quickly. That’s the case with the single event on today’s calendar, and tomorrow’s: a garden concert titled “Music and the Movies” presented by M.U.S.i.C. Stars in the Classics at 6:00 pm in Pepper Pike tonight and on Friday. Both evenings are sold out.
If you’re one of the lucky attendees, expect to hear works by Shostakovich, Schnittke, Korngold, Williams, Gershwin, and Morricone from movies such as West Side Story, The Red Violin, Casablanca, and Rocky III — plus the premiere of a new piece of movie music commissioned by M.U.S.i.C.
But keep an eye on our Concert Listings — the calendar gradually begins to come to a simmer this weekend and next week as the fall season gets underway.
YOUR TWO CENTS:
It’s voting time — for Cleveland Scene’s “Best of Cleveland 2022.” Across seven pages, the survey includes all kinds of categories, including Best Concert Venue and Best Jazz Club. Voting is open through September 15.
JOB LISTING:
Piano Cleveland is looking forward to its upcoming after-school program PianoLab, and the organization has part-time openings for a coordinator for the program, and for a piano instructor. Find out more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Among the important anniversaries on today’s date in history are four that connect together in a web — and of course, little connections are always fun to stumble upon in this compact world of classical music.
At the center of the web are two living conductors: Seiji Ozawa turns 87 today, while Leonard Slatkin turns 78. Among many items on their resumes, Ozawa spent 29 years with the Boston Symphony, and Slatkin put in 17 years atop the podium with the St. Louis Symphony. And in fact, that orchestra was founded on this same date in 1880 as the St. Louis Choral Society.
A well-known advocate of modern music, Ozawa’s many premieres in Boston included Henri Dutilleux’s five-part The Shadows of Time (1997), a work he and the orchestra recorded the following year. Listen to the first movement here, and browse an extensive list of the ensemble’s premieres here.
Speaking of contemporary music advocacy, one composer Slatkin has championed — including while directing the Blossom Festival in the ‘90s — is Donald Erb, who famously taught at CIM for over four decades. Cellist Lynn Harrel joins Slatkin and St. Louis in a recording of Erb’s Cello Concerto here.
Both conductors have held many posts, and for Slatkin that includes stints in London as principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. That brings up a connection — or rather, missed connection — between Slatkin and Dennis Brain, that famous principal horn in both of those orchestras, who died in a car crash at the age of 36 on this date in 1957, missing Slatkin by several decades.
Mozart was a particular specialty of Brain’s. Hear him solo in the last movement of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 in E here, where he’s joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Herbert von Karajan — an important mentor of Ozawa’s, capping off today’s web of connections.