by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S FEATURED VIDEO:
While on exile from Severance Hall, Cleveland Orchestra musicians are keeping up their chops at home in interesting ways both musical and technological. Assistant Principal Trombone Shachar Israel has produced a delightful video featuring seven players that passes the prelude from J.S. Bach’s Third Cello Suite off seamlessly from Mark Kosower to Alan Harrell, Max Dimoff, Brian Thornton, Israel himself, Derek Zadinsky, Jonathan Sherwin, and back to Kosower. The Bach suites provide primary practice, warmup, and interpretational material for a variety of instrumentalists, but some of these performances may surprise you. Watch here (and enjoy other episodes of the Orchestra’s Living Room Concert videos nearby).
TODAY ON THE WEB AND AIRWAVES:
Today’s playlist includes Dvořák, J.S. Bach, and Debussy on WCLV’s Lunchtime with The Cleveland Orchestra, an Oberlin Stage Left conversation with four Oberlin Conservatory faculty members about teaching virtually this semester, Wagner’s Lohengrin from the MET Opera, and, a Live from Carnegie Hall episode hosted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s history at the New York venue. Details here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1954, the iconoclastic American composer Charles Ives died in New York. Son of a Civil War bandmaster, Ives began playing organ and composing at an early age in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, studied composition at Yale with Horatio Parker, and wrote music in his spare time while working as an executive in the insurance industry. Ives’ music, most of it produced before 1918 when he suddenly stopped writing, shows numerous and widespread influences. Leonard Bernstein devoted Volume 2 of his famous New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts to a survey of the composer’s life and works. Watch the February 23, 1967 broadcast of Charles Ives — American Pioneer here.
