by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Tonight at 8:30, Cleveland musicians will be featured in the online Sun Valley (Idaho) Festival program “Strings and Mallets.” Si-Yan Darren Li and Marc Damoulakis will perform Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel for cello and marimba, and Damoulakis and his Cleveland Orchestra colleague Thomas Sherwood will join Ian Ding and Joseph Tomkins for Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet. Damoulakis and Li talk about recording the Cleveland segments in Mixon Hall at CIM here.
And tonight at 7:30, Piano Cleveland winds up the First Round of its Virtu(al)oso Competition. Performers in Session 6 will be Abuzar Manafzade, Michael Lu, Michael Davidman, Anna Han, and Martin James Bartlett.
WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra presents a single work: Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and the MET Opera nightly stream revisits a production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann from 2015.
INTERESTING READS:
An article in The Times of London describes the struggle to save Britain’s cathedral choirs during the pandemic, largely through the reorganization of the former Friends of Cathedral Music into the Cathedral Music Trust, which is now led by Harry Christophers of “The Sixteen.”
And an article from Boston Public Radio’s WBUR asks why it took 80 years for acclaimed Black composer Ulysses Kay’s Sonatine for viola and piano to receive its first performance.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
American composer, educator, and administrator William Schuman was born on this date in 1910 in New York. He served as president of the Juilliard School and of the new arts complex, Lincoln Center, while writing a large catalogue of music in all classical genres. That includes ten symphonies and the 1953 opera The Mighty Casey, based on Ernest Thayer’s poem, Casey at the Bat (Schuman was a lifelong baseball fan).
George Szell recorded his A Song of Orpheus — Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra in 1964 with Leonard Rose and The Cleveland Orchestra (listen here). In a lecture co-sponsored by the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Dartmouth professor Steven Swayne discusses Schuman’s Seventh Symphony.