by Daniel Hathaway
IN THE NEWS TODAY:
The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival is releasing a series of Tuesday podcasts in advance of its Virtual 88th Festival. “Bachcast Podcast Conversations” begin today with a program about the vision of the Festival featuring Dwight Oltmann, who directed it from 1975-2014, in conversation with current Artistic Director Dirk Garner. Subsequent podcasts will be accessible at 8:00 am on March 23 & 30, and April 6 and 13 (click here to listen). The Festival itself, which runs from April 24-26, will include new venues and guest artists. Read a press release here.
More about the Grammy Awards. The Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music have added details about prize-winning projects that involved their alumni. Read the Oberlin article here and the CIM release here.
Viewers of the Awards ceremony on Sunday were treated to some ironic technical glitches. “…seeing as the Grammys primarily award outstanding sound, the multiple acceptance speeches during the Premiere Ceremony that suffered from echoing, distortion or absent volume felt like a big miss for a show of its stature.” Read a Variety article here.
The New York Times reports this morning about the status of the MET Opera Orchestra. ‘The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.” Read more here.
Rubinstein Competition Returns. The 16th iteration of the Arthur Rubinstein Competition will adopt a hybrid format in 2021 of digital and live sessions, with stages I & II (April 1-10) to be recorded in New York, London, Beijing, Potsdam, and Tel Aviv, and the Finals (April 29-May 3) to be streamed from Tel Aviv concert halls with live audiences. Laureates include Emanuel Ax and Daniil Trifonov. More information here.
ONLINE TODAY:
A new weekly series, Trio Tuesdays with Dominick Farinacci & Songbook Watch Party debuts at the Bop Stop today, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society celebrates Telemann, and the MET Opera offers an archive production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West. Details in our Concert Listings.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
There’s quite a mixed list of arrivals and departures to acknowledge on this 16th day of March. Italian composer Giovanni Pergolesi (who died in 1736 in Pozzuoli of tuberculosis at the age of 26), American composer and conductor Edwin London (born in Philadelphia in 1929), English conductor Sir Roger Norrington (born in 1934 in Oxford), American composer David Del Tredici (born in 1937 in Cloverdale, California), Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (who died in Los Angeles in 1968), and American composer Roger Sessions (who died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1985 at the age of 88).
A pastiche of their compositions and performances would make a remarkably varied concert program.
We could start with Pergolesi’s popular Stabat Mater, performed here by Nathalie Stutzmann (conductor), Philippe Jaroussky (countertenor), and Emöke Barath (soprano) at the Château de Fontainbleau), and follow that with something completely different: Ed London’s The Declaration of Independence with saxophonist Howie Smith.
To end a rather long first half, how about Norrington’s take on Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique with the Royal College of Music Symphony?
Transitioning after intermission to another world of fantasy, we could launch the second half with one of Del Tredici’s Alice (in Wonderland) pieces — an obsession of his.
Then as an entremet, one of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s classical guitar works. There are a hundred to choose from, but here are some interesting possibilities: Korean guitarist Bokyung Byun performing his Escarraman for the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society this season; Petra Poláčková playing the first movement of his Omaggio a Boccherini; Chaconne Klaverenga playing the fourth movement of his Quintet with Rebecca Benjamin and Andrew Ma, violins, Mark Liu, viola, and Sarah Miller, cello, at the Cleveland Institute of Music in April, 2016; or Klaverenga performing his Capriccio Diabolico at CIM in May, 2015.
For a finale, why not the work that earned Sessions his Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Click here for a 1981 performance of his Concerto for Orchestra by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony. (His opera Montezuma, premiered in 1976 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston, is best left for another day.)