by Daniel Hathaway
NEW CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA BRITTEN VIDEO:
In the latest in a series of summer sessions, Cleveland Orchestra Associate Concertmaster Jung-Min Amy Lee, Principal Oboe, Frank Rosenwein, violist Joanna Patterson Zakany and cellist Tanya Ell returned to the Severance Hall stage to record Benjamin Britten’s “intricate, and at times bright and striking” Phantasy Quartet. Watch the performance here.
CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF LINCOLN CENTER CHAMBER MUSIC:
The Violin Channel is celebrating the half-century mark of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with a two-day festival featuring eight full-length concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 8 & 9. Details and streaming links here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1613, Italian composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died in Naples. Distinguished for his harmonic adventures in madrigals and sacred music, Gesualdo was also notorious for having murdered his first wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante delicto. Cecil Gray and Peter Warlock (the nom de plume for composer Philip Heseltine) tell the story in their 1926 book, Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer. A court refused to prosecute.
Click here to watch Gesualdo, Death for Five Voices (described by the poster as “an odd documentary film about a very odd man”). There are English subtitles. And here to watch a performance of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae factae sunt (a responsory for Good Friday) by TENET Vocal Artists, including tenors Owen McIntosh and Jason McStoots, who have recently performed in Cleveland with Apollo’s Fire and Les Délices. Or take a deep plunge into his madrigals courtesy of Ensemble Métamorphoses with this recording of his Sixth Book (score included).
This date in September also witnessed the births of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841) and Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Laureate Christoph von Dohnányi (1929), as well as the death of composer Richard Strauss (1949).
Listen to Dohnányi’s interpretations of Dvořák’s 6th Symphony and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche with The Cleveland Orchestra as an efficient way of celebrating three anniversaries with two recordings!
