ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Oberlin Conservatory has announced that Amy Lee, Cleveland Orchestra associate concertmaster, will join the faculty full-time, having been a visiting professor for the last year. Read the article on the Violin Channel here.
HAPPENING TODAY:
At Noon, Kachofugetsu Japanese Handbells, Kaori Hongo, director, perform at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle.
Tonight at 7, The Singers’ Club of Cleveland, Christopher Clark, director, celebrates the holiday season at Trinity Cathedral.
At 7:30, Vinay Parameswaran leads The Cleveland Orchestra in James Horner’s underscore to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, performed live-to-picture at obSeverance Music Center.
Also at 7:30, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra, Raphael Jiménez, conducting, performs Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, Jessie Montgomery’s Coincident Dances, and Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs with faculty baritone Timothy Lefebvre in Finney Chapel.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born on this date in 1915 and passed away in her sleep at age 90 in 2006.
She was most celebrated for performing Lieder, and in that arena, she helped inaugurate Blossom Music Center — listen here to Strauss’s Four Last Songs performed live by Schwarzkopf, George Szell, and The Cleveland Orchestra in a radio broadcast from the venue’s first season. (Read more about that first season of Blossom here.) Or head to Spotify for those Strauss works in another Schwarzkopf-Szell pairing, this time in a recording with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin.
Complicating Schwarzkopf’s legacy is her involvement with the National Socialist Party, including ways that were far from routine at the time, as Michael H. Kater wrote in The Guardian in the weeks after the soprano’s death.
