by Daniel Hathaway
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Molly Walsh reports on Cleveland.com that The Ohio Arts Council has awarded nearly $182,000 in grants to arts organizations in Lake and Geauga counties as part of a record $23.3 million funding round for the agency.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1612, Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli died in Venice. He advanced the tradition of polychoral music at the Basilica of San Marco to the point where northern composers like Heinrich Schütz paid extended visits to study with him and take his techniques back home.
These works have provided great material for modern brass ensembles, as you can hear in the 1969 recording The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, reissued in 1996 and featuring brass players from the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras.
That recording inspired the National Brass Ensemble — 24 players from the major U.S, orchestras, to gather in California’s Sonoma County in June, 2014, to perform and record excerpts from Gabrieli’s 1597 Sacrae symphoniae in a partnership between Oberlin Conservatory, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Green Music Center. Watch the documentary The Making of Gabrieli here.
On this date in 1928, Moravian-Czech composer and folk song collector Leoš Janáček died in Ostrava (then part of Czechoslovakia) at the age of 74. His wonderful Sinfonietta inspired a 1966 landmark recording by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, remastered by Sony in 2018 on the disc, One Hundred Musicians and a Perfectionist.
And on August 12, 1992, American composer John Cage died at the age of 79 in New York City. Meditate on his contribution to 20th century music with his most celebrated work, performed here by William Marx at McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, California.
