by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
12:00 pm – Tuesday Noon Organ Plus Concert, Jonathan W. Moyer, organ. Heinrich Buttstett’s Fugue in e, Nicolaus Bruhns’ Praeludium in e, & Moyer’s Fanfare, Adoration, & Beef and Doodles, in the Form of a Batalha. Click here for the live stream. Church of the Covenant, 11205 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On September 22, 1989, Russian-American composer Irving Berlin (pictured) died at the age of 101 in New York City, having contributed some 1,500 songs to the mythical Great American Songbook over his 60-year career.
One of the most celebrated was “God Bless America,” indelibly linked to the singer Kate Smith, but sung by Berlin himself on the Ed Sullivan Show on May 5, 1968.
Polish-American violinist Isaac Stern died in New York City on this date in 2001 at the age of 81. In addition to his distinguished career as a soloist, Stern organized a campaign to save New York’s Carnegie Hall from developers in the 1960s. The renovated main auditorium is named in his honor.
Stern interviewed Christoph von Dohnányi in 2000 when The Cleveland Orchestra was invited to open the 110th season of the hall. And conductor Michael Stern reflected here on his father’s life in music as part of the centenary celebrations of the violinist’s birth.
Ironically, though Stern saved Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball, he was the reason that the hall lacks a pipe organ. He told New York Times critic John Rockwell “that any organ in Carnegie would interfere with the hall’s famed acoustics. And, Mr. Stern added, a pipe organ would be reinstalled at Carnegie Hall only ”over my dead body.”
In fact, a large organ had been ordered from Flentrop Orgelbouw in the Netherlands, and was on the high seas in 1969 when the contract was cancelled. The instrument was put into storage and ultimately acquired by the State University of New York at Purchase, where it moves between halls on a cushion of air and has been dubbed “the Hovercraft.”
But back to Isaac Stern. Before coming to Cleveland, I taught at Groton School in Massachusetts, where Isaac Stern was a favorite houseguest of the second headmaster and his wife, herself a keen amateur violinist. The story goes that Mary Crocker tried on several occasions to set up a concert for the students, but Stern’s management always turned them down. The solution: a rumor would be circulated that Mr. Stern would be “practicing” at a certain hour in the auditorium, and as if by magic, the entire school showed up to listen.
