by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
CIM Museum Melodies, brings one-hour programs featuring pianists from the Cleveland Institute of Music to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Tonight at 7:30 at Severance Music Center, guest conductor Osmo Vänskä steps in for Franz Welser-Möst on The Cleveland Orchestra’s season openers, which include a rare performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto featuring Frank Peter Zimmerman, Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 (“Classical”), and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”).
Visit our Concert Listings for details of upcoming performances.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The October issue of the U.K.’s Gramophone magazine will feature Swedish violinist Johan Dalene, who won first prize in the Thomas and Evon Cooper International Piano Competition at Oberlin in July, 2017. Click here to preview the issue and read about his new album “paying tribute to virtuoso icons from the past.”
The Oberlin Conservatory has announced that “The 2025 Cooper International Competition for violinists will take place January 5 through 10. After the drawing for order on January 5, live rounds in Oberlin begin on Monday, January 6 and conclude with the Concerto Finals with the Columbus ProMusica Chamber Orchestra on Friday, January 10. Each round is open to the public and will be streamed live.
And speaking of competitions, Pierre van der Westhuizen, Executive and Artistic Director of the Gilmore, has announced that “the Gilmore Piano Festival will become an annual festival beginning in the spring of 2026. The decision to shift the festival from biennial to annual was reached after consulting with a wide variety of stakeholders… In addition to the change in frequency, the festival will also be shorter in duration each year.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On September 19, 1972, French pianist Robert Casadesus died in Paris. Known especially for his interpretations of Mozart’s concertos, he recorded a number of them with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra (sometimes credited as “The Columbia Symphony” for contractual reasons). Listen here to nos. 21 and 24 in recordings remastered in 2018. Beginning in 1975 and for its first ten seasons, the Cleveland International Piano Competition was known as the Casadesus Competition.
On this date in 1829, German music publisher Gustav Schirmer was born in Saxony. After moving to New York, in 1866 he founded the music publishing house that bears his name. (Another Schirmer, Gustav’s nephew Ernest C., founded E.C. Schirmer Music Company in Boston in 1921).
In addition to publishing the influential journal, The Music Quarterly, G. Schirmer printed and distributed the works of such composers as Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Percy Grainger, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Virgil Thomson, and later — after acquiring othcompanies — Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Charles Ives, Walter Piston, and William Schuman.
The company also provided music students and choral singers with such ubiquitous collections and editions as 24 Italian Arias and Songs of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 371 Bach Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with Figured Bass (edited by Baldwin Wallace Conservatory founder Alfred Riemenschneider), and Handel’s Messiah (edited by T. Tertius Noble, who was hired away from England’s York Minster to be organist of the new St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York).
