by Daniel Hathaway
CYO APPOINTS INTERIM CONDUCTOR:
The Contemporary Youth Orchestra has announced the appointment of Chia-Hsuan Lin as interim music director. Born in Taiwan and trained as a percussionist, she earned a doctorate in conducting at Northwestern and currently serves as associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony. Read the press release here. She fills the position recently vacated by founder Liza Grossman, who led the organization for 25 years.
ROSS DISCUSSES WAGNER BOOK WITH MIDGETTE:
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and Listen to This, has just had his third book published. He’ll discuss Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music in a free online conversation with former Washington Post critic Anne Midgette this evening at 6:00 pm sponsored by the Wagner Society of Washington D.C. Register here (where you can also order the book). “Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.”
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Did we mention Wagner? WCLV includes the Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger as well as Brahms’ First Symphony on today’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra. This afternoon, tune in to a virtual recital from the University of Akron and a convocation recital from Baldwin Wallace. This evening, Bop Stop and the Local 4 Music Fund of the Musicians’ Union present a live stream of a concert by pianist Jackie Warren, bassist Aidan Plank, and drummer Jim Rupp. And the MET Opera continues its 27th week of free streams from its archives with Rossini’s La Cenerentola during its Bel Canto Favorites week. Check the Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Going way back, on this date in 1179, the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen died at the monastery she had founded in Rupertsburg. Known as the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” the medieval polymath wrote a large body of chant, including one of the first morality plays, Ordo Virtutum. Click here to watch a full performance by the Polish women’s choir Flores Rosarum.
On September 17, 1803, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, student of Mozart and Salieri who was entrusted by Mozart’s widow with the unenviable task of completing his teacher’s Requiem, died in Vienna. That’s how we remember Sussmayr today, but in his own era, he was a well-regarded composer who wrote church music and opera, as well as a concerto for Mozart’s favorite clarinetist, Anton Stadler, left unfinished but later completed by Michael Freyhan. Give Sussmayr’s piece a listen here in a performance by Dieter Klökker and the English Chamber Orchestra.
American composer, pedagogue, and pianist Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born on this date in 1884 in Elmira, New York, and died of influenza in New York City during the 1918 pandemic. He became a leading American exponent of impressionism as exemplified in his orchestral works White Peacock, (a 1915 piano work he orchestrated in 1919), The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, (1912, revised in 1916), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). Like Gustav Holst, he wrote music in his spare time while teaching at a private school. Listen to a 2012 performance of Kubla Khan with the Texas Festival Orchestra at the Round Top music Festival, led by Micahel Stern.
On September 17, 1931, RCA Victor made history by introducing the first 33-⅓ rpm long playing record in a demonstration at the Savoy Hotel in New York, years later to be upstaged by Columbia Records, who released an improved version in 1948.
And on this date in 1998, American composer and organist William Albright died unexpectedly at the age of 53 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he had taught at the University of Michigan since 1970. Influenced by his studies with Oliver Messiaen in Paris, Albright contributed to the 20th century canon of organ music with solo works as well as with his introduction to The King of Instruments, played here by Painesville-born organist Tom Trenney and narrated by Oberlin alumnus Michael Barone at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2013.
Albright was also an enthusiastic performer of ragtime, having recorded many pieces by Scott Joplin and others. Here’s one of his own concert rags for the organ, Sweet Sixteenths, played by Frank Hoffmann at the Heiliggeistkirche in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2018.