By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
There are no performances on the calendar for August 9. Click here to visit the Concert Listings page for information about coming events.
SEMI-INTERESTING READ:
A review by David Allen in today’s print edition of The New York Times reports on Bard College’s current two-week festival devoted to a re-evaluation of the legacy of Ralph Vaughan Williams (pictured). Devotees of the British composer, who died in 1958, may have issues with Leon Botstein’s choice of repertory and the author’s conclusions. Read At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi passed away on August 9, 1988 in Rome, leaving behind a fascinating catalog of works that still sound quite fresh.
The most famous of those is the 1959 Quattro pezzi su una nota sola, where each movement adheres almost exclusively to a single note — F, B, Ab, and A (albeit with a healthy dose of microtonality). With those constants in the recipe, the focus turns to ingredients such as range, dynamics, and timbre. Click here to follow along with the score while you hear a performance by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by Peter Rundel.
No Exit violist James Rhodes has performed the third movement of another single-note-heavy work of Scelsi’s: Xnoybis (originally for solo violin) in a virtual concert. The improvisatory nature of the work reflects what is known as Scelsi’s second period, during which time he would often record improvisations, then transcribe and orchestrate them.
Among Scelsi’s prominent collaborators were the Arditti Quartet, fellow composers John Cage and Morton Feldman, and cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, to whom Scelsi dedicated all of his music for that instrument, including La Trilogia, recorded here by Arne Deforce. Feldman described the work as Scelsi’s “autobiography in sound,” and Deforce writes that the opening is a musical testimony to untamed youth. And so: put on your leather jacket, play hooky, and listen to Scelsi use a metal mute to make the cello rattle.
In another edition of our almanac, we honored Venezuelan-French composer, conductor, and music critic Reynaldo Hahn, who was born on August 9, 1874 in Caracas, and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who died on this date in 1975 in Moscow.
Closely associated with Marcel Proust, Hahn is best known for his salon songs. Click here to listen to Venezia, songs in the Venetian dialect sung by Matthew Polenzani with pianist Julius Drake. One of Hahn’s most-recorded pieces is A Cloris, sung here by Matthew Maisano in a 2016 Cleveland Institute of Music master’s recital, and here by Joyce DiDonato, accompanying herself from her home as part of 2019’s “Call to Unite” global initiative.
And the symphonies of Shostakovich have figured in Cleveland Orchestra programs for decades. Artur Rodzinski recorded No. 1 in 1940 (it took up eight sides of 78 records), and No. 5 in 1942 (on a monophonic LP). There’s also an interesting live performance of No. 10 from December of 1967, when George Szell passed his baton to David Oistrakh after the violinist had just played the Brahms Concerto.
The Fifth Symphony is the subject of a San Francisco Symphony “Keeping Score” episode hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The full-length concert performance was recorded at the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Watch here.
