by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY ON THE WEB:
The new daily Wigmore Hall live streams from London continue with a lunchtime recital by violinist Hyeyoon Park and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor (no audience present, and available on-demand), Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra features a Mozart piano concerto with Leif Ove Andsnes, a live feed from Carnegie Hall is hosted by pianist Emanuel Ax, a conversation from the Kennedy Center is emceed by soprano Renée Fleming, and the MET Opera’s nightly HD re-broadcast is a double bill of Tchaikovsky and Bartók. Details in the Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Danish composer Carl Nielsen was born on this date in 1865 in Norre-Lyndelse. The BBC “Workshop” Series chronicled his life and career in the 1970s in Espansiva: a Portrait, leading one viewer to write, “The BBC used to do this kind of thing very well back in the day, and since there weren’t many channels to choose from, many people had to learn new things despite themselves.”
Watch that documentary here, and enjoy a memorized and choreographed performance of his woodwind quintet by the Denmark-based Carion Quintet (who played on the Latvian Concert Association series in Cleveland in February). And here’s a video of his Flute Concerto from a CIM Master’s Degree recital in November, 2018. Moisés López-Ruiz is the soloist, and Yohan Kwon conducts the CIM Orchestra.
And on June 9, 1912, composer Ingolf Dahl was born in Hamburg. One of the German musicians who escaped to the United States in the late 1930s to join the expat community in Southern California, Dahl kept one foot in the classical world and the other in the entertainment industry, maintaining a career that included teaching classical lessons to Benny Goodman and arranging for Tommy Dorsey. Michael Tilson Thomas was among his students at UCLA, and he served as director of the Ojai Festival.
WCLV will feature his 1949 Concerto for Saxophone and Wind Ensemble in its Cleveland Orchestra on the Radio series this Saturday at 8:00 pm in a concert led by Franz Welser-Möst in May of 2005 featuring Joseph Lulloff as soloist. In the meantime, here’s a performance of the concerto, Dahl’s best-known work, by Katherine Weintraub and the Eastman Wind Ensemble from November, 2014.
INTERESTING READ:
This morning’s New York Times carries an obituary for hornist Robert Northern, “a masterly French horn player who hopscotched between the worlds of jazz and classical music before embarking on a solo career in which he made music that defied categorization.” Northern died in Washington, D.C. on May 31 at the age of 86.
Northern began his professional studies at the Manhattan School of Music. After being drafted into the Air Force in 1953, he briefly returned to New York, then moved to Austria to study with the solo horn of the Vienna Philharmonic, playing in Austrian and German orchestras while moonlighting as a blues singer. After returning to the States, he joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, “where, he later recalled, as its only African-American member, he was often subjected to racist abuse — reminiscent of what he had endured from white officers in the military. He was sometimes turned away from auditions he had been invited to after his racial identity became known.”
Read the obituary to learn more about Northern’s remarkable career and his experiences as a black musician in America.
