by Daniel Hathaway
MOURNING THE PASSING OF BRUCE EGRE:
News has reached us of the death on Wednesday of Bruce Egre, founder of Cleveland’s Grammy-winning Azica Records and head of the audio recording degree program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, after a nearly two-year battle with cancer. An obituary and tributes will follow. (Photo: Egre with his Azica Records partner Alan Bise in the background.)
NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA VIDEO OUT TODAY:
Inspired by cellist David Alan Harrrell’s “Cleveland Bachs” project, more than a hundred Cleveland Orchestra musicians performed an excerpt from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony in sixteen locations around metropolitan Cleveland this summer. Locations include the steps of Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, Cleveland Botanical Garden, Holden Arboretum, Lake Erie shore, historic League Park, Progressive Field, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland Metroparks’s polo fields, Soldiers and Sailors memorial in Public Square, and President Garfield’s tomb in Lake View Cemetery. A 2018 performance of the Ninth at Severance Hall, led by Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, is used as the soundtrack. Watch the “Beethoven 9 Project” here.
MET OPERA TAKES A PASS ON 2020-2021 SEASON:
After originally planning to re-open its house for a New Year’s gala, New York’s 137-year-old Metropolitan Opera — the largest performing arts institution in the United States — has now cancelled its entire 2020-2021 season, simultaneously releasing an ambitious schedule of performances for 2021-2022. Read the New York Times article here.
ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Tune in at 7 tonight to a virtual concert by the Cavani String Quartet live streamed from the Bop Stop at the Music Settlement. Annie Fullard & Catherine Cosbey, violins, Eric Wong, viola, and Kyle Price, cello will offer “Creating Common Threads, a musical tapestry program” featuring the music of Beethoven, Eric Gould and a few special surprises (one involves jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, whose birthday was celebrated yesterday).
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
September 24 was the birthdate of two Eastern European figures who emigrated to the West: Czech composer Vaclav Nelhybel in 1919 (who ended up in the United States writing music especially for student musicians), and Andrzej Panufnik in 1914 (who fled Poland — under circumstances said to resemble a John le Carré spy novel — to settle in England).
No Cleveland connections to note, except that Frederick Fennell recorded the Adagio from Nelhybel’s Trittico with the Dallas Wind Symphony. Listen here.
And on this date in 1945, English composer and conductor John Rutter was born in London. Founder of the Cambridge Singers and editor with Sir David Willcocks of five volumes of Carols for Choirs, Rutter is wildly popular with choral ensembles in the United States. Quire Cleveland sang his carol, There is a flower at Historic St. Peter Church in 2015 (Ross W. Duffin conducts, and Margaret Carpenter Haigh is the soloist), and JR Fralick led his Requiem with the Old Stone Choir in 2015 (Brenda Pongracz sings the soprano solos). Another Cleveland performance of the Requiem featured the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School Choirs and Orchestras at the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus in 2013.