by Daniel Hathaway
LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS:
Youngstown’s Opera Western Reserve announces an online program to be streamed from Stambaugh Auditorium at 7pm on Wednesday, August 12. Summer Songs with soprano Marian Vogel and pianist Benjamin Malkevitch will include opera favorites, show tunes, and behind-the-scenes extras.
Youngstown State University and the University of Akron will hold its 2020 Northeast Ohio Keyboard Festival online from September 27-30. Director Caroline Oltmanns has announced this year’s artists in residence: Jeanette Yaryan and Ralitsa Georgieva-Smith. More information coming soon on Oltmanns’ website.
Oberlin organ professor Jonathan Moyer announces the August 28 release of the first volume in a series of recordings on the Gothic label, Voices of the Hanse, that will feature historic instruments in northern Germany as well as American organs influenced by them. The first volume features Moyer on the 1637 Stellwagen organ in St. Jakobi, Lübeck.
Cleveland-born pianist Nathan Carterette will be featured on Iowa Public Radio’s Virtual Steinway Café at noon on August 18, playing his program “Poets of the Piano — Heroes and Icons” from Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City. More information here.
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Each Tuesday this month, Opera Vision will present five short operas created during the lockdown by opera teams from around the globe. Viewers can vote for their favorites. Tune in at 1:00 pm.
WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra serves up Brahms and Tchaikovsky (the Violin Concerto with Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider), and the nightly MET Opera stream recovers a production of Carmen from 2008. Check the Concert Listings for details.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1873, American composer J. Rosamond Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Trained at the New England Conservatory and in London, he’s best known for his setting of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the poem by his brother, James Weldon Johnson. During his active career in show business, he produced several Broadway operettas, and edited two volumes of Spirituals in the mid-20s.
Click here to hear three of Johnson’s Spirituals sung by the late Cleveland soprano A. Grace Lee Mims.
And on August 11, 1996, Czech conductor, composer and pianist Rafael Kubelik died in Lucerne, Switzerland. He left Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948 to pursue a busy career guest conducting orchestras in Europe and the U.S., and spent short spans of time as music director of the Chicago Symphony (three years) and the Metropolitan Opera (six months). He was briefly regarded as a long-shot candidate to fill George Szell’s vacancy in Cleveland.
Click here to listen to a 1973 live Cleveland Orchestra broadcast where Kubelik leads Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto with Rudolf Firkusny at the keyboard. And if you’re looking for a long-term listening experience, in May of 2018, Deutsche Grammophon released a 66-disc set of the conductor’s complete recordings for that label.
