by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 2:00 pm The Ohio Light Opera presents Guys and Dolls — Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser — in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster. Tickets are available online.
For details of upcoming concerts, visit our Concert Listings page.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Bartók is a new digital release by The Cleveland Orchestra under music director Franz Welser-Möst, recorded at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center. The new album features two works by the Hungarian composer: his String Quartet No. 3 (arranged for string orchestra by Cleveland Orchestra assistant principal viola Stanley Konopka), and his Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin.
Stream and download the album here. Access the digital booklet here.
NEWS BRIEF:
In a historic event, two girls from St. Paul’s Cathedral School formally joined London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir for the first time in its 900-year history. Read the Violin Channel story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
In the Diary for July 9, 2020, we marked anniversaries for Ottorino Respighi, Jester Hairston, Pierre Cochereau, Edward Burlington Hill, and Randall Thompson.
Thompson’s name came up again more recently in obituaries for the American avant-garde composer and pianist Frederick Rzewski. Unlikely as it may seem, Rzewski took much away from his studies with the conservative, tonal composer at Harvard.
As Rzewski told me in a 2010 interview, “[Thompson] was my teacher of counterpoint — modal counterpoint. And I think a very good teacher, also. He certainly understood and loved it, which seemed to me the most important thing about teaching counterpoint: you actually have to love it. It can be very boring. But one thing I remember about that class is that he made us sing our exercises. It wasn’t enough to write them — we had to sing them. He always insisted on that.”
This seems a good time to dig a bit deeper into Randall Thompson’s choral music, which many of us had our first opportunity to sing in high school and college — works like the famous Alleluia, the a cappella suite The Peaceable Kingdom, and Frostiana, subtitled “Seven Country Songs,” which I had the pleasure of singing with a massed choir for Thompson’s retirement concert in April of 1965 in their newly-orchestrated version.
Less well-known, and as sophisticated as his Frost settings are simple, are his Six Odes of Horace, composed when Thompson was on a three-year study grant at the American Academy in Rome.
For a sampling of Thompson’s choral music less traveled by, bring up the album The Legacy of Randall Thompson on Spotify. Performed by the United States Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus, the collection includes the Horace ode O fons Bandusiae, humorous settings of texts from H.L. Menken’s The American Mercury (1924-1933), the whole of The Peaceable Kingdom, and his arrangement of the Somersetshire folksong, The Lark in the Morn. And read more about the composer in the CD’s program booklet.
Another recording by Richard Sparks and Seattle’s Choral Arts introduces settings of two George Herbert poems, Walt Whitman’s The Last Invocation, and Five Love Songs (recorded here for the first time). Listen to sample tracks from The Light of Stars here.
