by Daniel Hathaway.
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7, the Gruca White Ensemble (Robert Gruca, classical guitar, and Linda White, multiple flutes) gives a free concert in Cain Park’s Alma Theater in Cleveland Heights.
RIP Bassist Dave Morgan, 68.
Posted on Cleveland.com. “The well-known double bassist Dave Morgan passed away peacefully at his home in Poland, Ohio on August 15. A native of Parma, Ohio, Dave began his musical career playing bass around Northeast Ohio as a young man. After finishing undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, Dave entered their master’s program in music theory and received his PhD in Composition from UT Austin in 1996.
“D
ave’s impact on students, colleagues, and music lovers is a tribute to his gifts. His creativity, compositions, and love of improvisation lay at the heart of all his projects. After teaching and working in Austin as a musician, he returned to Ohio in 1994 and taught for several years at Tri-C and the Oberlin Conservatory before beginning his 25-year tenure at Youngstown State University. Dave was a member of the Jazz Unit, Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, and played regularly at the Bop Stop and across the region.” Read the complete obituary here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On August 18 in 1750, Italian composer and conductor Antonio Salieri was born in Legnago, near Verona. During his long career as the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister in Vienna (1788-1824), he composed 37 operas and mentored Liszt, Schubert, Beethoven, Hummel, and Mozart.
Victim of a major shift in musical styles as well as the subject of an 1832 poetic drama (Mozart and Salieri) by Alexander Pushkin that inspired an 1897 one-act opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, not to mention the almost completely fictional 1979 play by Peter Shaffer that became Miloš Forman’s 1984 hit film Amadeus, Salieri’s popular reputation as an arch-rival of Mozart has obscured his historical legacy. (The Cleveland Orchestra played two performances of the score during Severance Hall screenings of the film in February, 2020, conducted by Vinay Paramesawaren.)
Toward the end of his career, Salieri switched from opera to composing sacred music. His Requiem received its premiere at his own funeral. Click here to hear the Agnus Dei performed by Cleveland’s Mastersingers Inc. Chorale and Orchestra, led by the late J.D. Goddard.
On this date in 1942, Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff died of tuberculosis at the German concentration camp in Wülzburg. Highly influenced by jazz, Schulhoff went through a Dada phase, was then influenced by the Second Viennese School, and at the end of his career, settled into soviet realism. A 2016 ChamberFest Cleveland program featured young artist Marjorie Maltias in Schulhoff’s Sonata Eroica for Solo Female Vocalist.
And on August 18, 2004, celebrated American film score composer Elmer Bernstein died in Ojai, California. Two years later, the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music orchestras celebrated the career of its former faculty member in a tribute concert. Listen here.
