by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
No events on the concert calendar, but view upcoming performances in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEFS:
“The Cleveland Orchestra presented its 2024 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Service in the Arts Awards on Sunday to Darelle Hill, community programs manager at the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning; Christopher Jenkins of the Oberlin College and Conservatory and The Music Settlement; and the Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland. The awards presentation was part of the Orchestra’s 44th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Concert at Severance Music Center.” Read the press release here.
The Violin Channel reports that French conductor and composer Nadia Boulanger’s only opera, La ville morte, written in 1910, will receive its American premiere from April 19-21 at NYU’s Skirball Center, following performances this month by the Greek National Opera. (Boulanger pictured below.)
“Originally, the opera was set to premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, however, the outbreak of World War I prevented the performance, resulting in the music being lost.
“Almost 100 years later, the New York-based chamber company Catapult Opera commissioned one of Boulanger’s last protégés, David Conte, to compose a full score based on his former teacher’s recently discovered piano reduction of the orchestra part.” Conte, born in Lakewood, OH, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory. Read the article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Among those who have affected the history of classical music who were born or died on January 16:
Anton Schindler (died 1864), who falsely claimed a close relationship with Beethoven and manufactured bogus information about the composer, but perhaps not as extensively as his critics have claimed. Read the ClevelandClassical.com interview with Beethoven scholar Theodore Albrecht, who addresses the question of the composer’s lost conversation books as an aside while dispelling the myth of Beethoven’s alleged total deafness.
American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne (born 1934), who has been a regular guest for master classes at Oberlin after her retirement from a distinguished career in art song and opera. Watch her coach soprano Greta Groothuis in arias by Handel and Mozart in December, 2019 here.
Italian-American conductor Arturo Toscanini (died 1957), who led the NBC Symphony in groundbreaking radio and television broadcasts. Listen to him rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem here and to a brief recording of one of the conductor’s famous rages here.
And Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Gustav Leonhardt (died 2012), who mentored such young musicians as Jeanette Sorrell, founder of Apollo’s Fire. Watch the Dutch documentary Traveler in Music here (partially subtitled). I had the rare experience of being an audience of one for an impromptu performance in 1978 when Leonhardt was in town for a harpsichord recital at the Art Museum and wanted to try out the new Dutch organ by Flentrop in Trinity Cathedral. He improvised brilliantly for more than an hour and gave the instrument high marks on one of the only occasions when he played organ in the U.S.
