by Daniel Hathaway.
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 12:15 Noon, organist Florence Mustric plays a free ‘Music Near the Market’ recital on the 1955 Rudolph von Beckerath organ in Trinity Lutheran Church in Ohio City. And at 6:30 pm, the Canton Symphony’s Summer Serenades presents a Saxophone Quartet in Faircrest Park.
INTERESTING READ:
Musical Manuscripts Are Intimate and Transporting. See Why.
“Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director, takes us on a tour through the handwritten score of Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony.’”
Click here to read the New York Times article by Joshua Barone (be sure to read the comments thread, and note that the performance of Mahler 2 at Blossom in 1970 — Leonard Bernstein’s only appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra — is available here.)
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1612, Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli died in Venice. He advanced the tradition of polychoral music at the Basilica of San Marco to the point where northern composers like Heinrich Schütz paid extended visits to study with him and take his techniques back home.
These works have provided great material for modern brass ensembles, as you can hear in the 1969 recording The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, reissued in 1996 and featuring brass players from the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras.
That recording inspired the National Brass Ensemble — 24 players from the major U.S, orchestras, to gather in California’s Sonoma County in June, 2014, to perform and record excerpts from Gabrieli’s 1597 Sacrae symphoniae in a partnership between Oberlin Conservatory, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Green Music Center. Watch the documentary The Making of Gabrieli here.
On this date in 1928, Moravian-Czech composer and folk song collector Leoš Janáček died in Ostrava (then part of Czechoslovakia) at the age of 74. His wonderful Sinfonietta inspired a 1966 landmark recording by George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, remastered by Sony in 2018 on the disc, One Hundred Musicians and a Perfectionist.
And on August 12, 1992, American composer John Cage died at the age of 79 in New York City. Meditate on his contribution to 20th century music with his most celebrated work, here performed by William Marx at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, California.
