by Daniel Hathaway
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Summit Choral Society invites singers to register for its 35th season. Click here for information about singing opportunities for adults and children.
The opening concert of the University of Akron’s Kulas Concert Series will be performed by Youngstown State University piano professor Caroline Oltmanns and German violinist Julia Kuhn (pictured), who is artistic director for the St. Blasius Early Music Summer Concert Series in Kaufbeuren. They will play Beethoven’s two last sonatas — No 9 in A, op. 47 (the “Kreutzer”) and No. 10 in G, op. 96 — on Sunday, September 8 at 3 pm in Guzzetta Recital Hall.
Members of Cleveland Chamber Choir will perform at Re:Source Cleveland’s annual fundraiser, RE:AP the Benefit 2024, which supports Cleveland’s newcomer communities. The event will take place on September 28 at the Re:Source home office on the Urban Community School Campus, and will include music, performances, awards, and an array of international cuisine by local chefs and restaurateurs.
BlueWater Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Meyer, artistic director, will celebrate its fifteenth season with concerts in various neighborhood venues throughout greater Cleveland, beginning with “Threads of Time, Struggle, and Hope,” to be presented October 5 and October 6 at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland and St. Noel Church in Willoughby. Neil Mueller, former principal trumpet and assistant artistic director, will premiere River of Time, a concerto written for him by David Biedenbender. Click here for the season press release.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On August 21, 1893, French composer Juliette Marie Olga Lili Boulanger was born in Paris, American soprano Queena Mario (née Queena Tillotson) made her first vocalizations in Akron in 1896, English mezzo-soprano Janet Baker debuted in 1933 in Hatfield, Yorkshire, and the celebrated American choral conductor Gregg Smith was born in Chicago in 1931. Add to that list American composer Lansing D. McLoskey, who arrived more recently — in 1964 in Cupertino California.
Queena Mario, a lyric soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera Company from 1922 to 1938 passed to her reward in New York City in 1951 at the age of 54. As her obituary in the New York Times notes, she began her career in New York as a writer, penning columns for several daily newspapers, which earned her enough cash to take singing lessons. Despite two unsuccessful auditions at the Metropolitan Opera, after singing with the San Carlo company and San Francisco Opera, she made her debut at the Met on Thanksgiving Day, 1922 as Micaela in Carmen, later becoming famous for her portrayal of Gretel in the Humperdinck classic.
On the side, while teaching at Curtis and Juilliard, she reintroduced herself as a writer with three murder mysteries, Murder at the Opera House, Murder Meets Mephisto, and Death Drops Delilah. Something about opera companies seems to inspire homicide…
This is a good time to get to know Lansing McLoskey, first through his faculty bio on the website of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. He prefaces it with two quotations:
Music is the only art form with equal power to move the mind, heart, soul, and pelvis. I have an insatiable and omnivorous appetite for music, and am as moved by Berio’s Sinfonia and DuFay’s Nuper rosarum flores as I am by a J.S. Bach cantata. In my lessons, I may reference Steve Reich, Machaut, William Schuman, Claude Vivier, Miles Davis, Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, and The Ramones…in the same lesson.
Debussy perfectly encapsulated my feelings when he said “Music in its essence is not a thing that can be poured into a rigorous and traditional mold. It is made of colors and rhythmical beats. All the rest is fraud, invented by cold-blooded imbeciles riding on the masters’ backs.”
Here’s a sampling of his music: This Will Not Be Loud and Relentless (2017), performed and commissioned by Passepartout Duo (Nicoletta Favari, prepared piano & Christopher Salvito, percussion), #playlist (2018) for reed quintet (English horn, clarinet, alto sax, bassoon, bass clarinet), premiered by Splinter Reeds on April 13, 2019 at the Frost School of Music (the bassoonist is Oberlin’s Dana Jessen), and the first movement of his Zealot Canticles, performed by The Crossing, Donald Nally, conducting.
