by Daniel Hathaway
ONLINE PERFORMANCES DEBUTING NOW:
The all-Czech Bennewitz Quartet has recorded an exclusive, full-length concert in lieu of their cancelled performance on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series this season. Violinists Jakub Fišer and Štěpán Ježek, violist Jiří Pinkas, and cellist Štěpán Doležal play Haydn’s Quartet in G, Op. 17/5, Schulhoff’s Five Pieces, and Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Op. 135. Watch free on-demand here.
And yesterday, Apollo’s Fire released a special playlist for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Episode 18 in its Music for the Soul video series includes selections from AF’s “Resilience” concert featuring Ashlee Foreman, an aria from Bach’s Matthew-Passion sung by countertenor Reggie Mobley with Tenet, Joseph Bolognes’ Symphonie Concertante in G played by the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 featuring Stewart Goodyear with the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra. Watch here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On January 19, 1955, English conductor Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool. After leading the Berlin Philharmonic for 16 years, he returned to England to lead the London Symphony. A few days ago, he surprised the British classical music world when he announced that he was cutting his London ties in 2023 to lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich and applying for German citizenship. From The Guardian on January 16:
“My passport is on the way,” Rattle told a news conference on Friday, when asked if he had followed many EU-based Britons in applying for citizenship that will let them continue to work freely around the bloc. “The fact that musicians and artists in general suddenly have to get visas for Europe is absolutely not the Brexit bonus we were talking about,” he said. “We will have to fight it.”
Watch a full-length interview with Rattle by Classic FM presenter and soprano Catherine Bott here, and enjoy a live performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican Center in September, 2017.
And here’s live video of “Hope & Harmony,” a special concert that Rattle led in Boston in 2019 to raise funds for underserved women with breast cancer. The Orchestra for the performance in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory included members of Mistral, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the MET Opera Orchestra and others.
And on this date in 1961, Leonard Bernstein’s 36-second long Fanfare was performed at the Inaugural Gala for President John F. Kennedy by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band.
More fanfares are planned for the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Alexandria, VA-based Classical Movements has organized “Inauguration Fanfares” in association with Marin Alsop and the Hope & Harmony Ensemble, featuring musicians from 14 professional orchestras performing Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1. That project streams at 12 Noon today. Watch here and read more here.
Composer Peter Boyer has been commissioned by the United States Marine Band to compose a special fanfare for the 2021 ceremony. His Fanfare for Tomorrow will be featured in hour-long prelude music to the Inauguration conducted by Colonel Jason K. Fettig.