by Daniel Hathaway
NEWS BRIEFS;
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced that this season’s Summers at Severance concerts will take place on July 10, 17, 31 and August 21.
Conductors will include Marie Jacquot, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Christoph Koncz, and Dima Slobodeniouk. Violinist Randall Goosby and pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii will be the featured soloists.
Read a press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
This is one of those rare days without any live classical events in Northeast Ohio to promote. But there are four historic figures in classical music to raise up, and an important first performance to put into context.
American composer Roy Harris was born on this date in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma. With the help of Aaron Copland, Harris studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and went on to write numerous works on American themes. His big breakthrough was his Third Symphony, captured here in a live performance by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra in 2010.
French composer, conductor, and pianist Emile Waldteufel died in 1915 in Paris. His principal claim to fame is as the composer of the Skater’s Waltz, known in French as Les Patineurs and less elegantly in German as Die Schlittschuhkläufer.
French composer Henri Duparc departed the world stage in Mont-de-Marsan in 1933. Beset by increasing blindness, he destroyed all but some 40 of his works. The best-known survivors of that purge are his 17 Mélodies or art songs, a number of which can be enjoyed here in performances by such singers as Measha Bruggergosman, Susan Graham, Natalie Dessay, Régine Crespin, Jessye Norman, Lawrence Brownlee, and Renée Fleming.
And American composer and inventor George Antheil died in NewYork in 1959. An American original, his Wikipedia biography includes vivid descriptions of his music, concerts, and inventions, one of which was a radio-controlled torpedo he developed in cahoots with the actress Hedy Lamarr during World War II. The article is well worth a read, and you can watch his famous Ballet méchanique here in a performance by René Bosc and Percussions de l’Orchestre National de France.
That first performance was the debut of George Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue by Paul Whiteman and his concert orchestra, arranged by Ferde Grofe, with the composer at the piano. The context was a concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music” on February 12, 1924, in New York’s Aeolian Hall. Listen here to a digitally remastered version of the first recording, made acoustically on June 10, 1924.
