by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
2:00 pm – Piano Cleveland presents a Contestant Community Concert at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
12:00 Noon – Music Near the Market. Robert Myers, plays works by J.S. Bach, Scheidemann, Pasquini, and J.C.F. Fischer on the Beckerath organ in Trinity Lutheran Church, Ohio City, Cleveland.
2:00 pm – Ohio Light Opera stages Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (pictured). Freedlander Theatre, Wooster.
6:30 pm – Canton Symphony Summer Serenades sends a String Quartet to Metzger Park in Louisville.
7:00 pm – Piano Cleveland presents a Contestant Community Concert at the Aurora School of Music.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Oberlin College & Conservatory have announced that subscriptions are now on sale for its 2026-2027 Artist Recital Series in Finney Chapel. Single tickets will be available from August 17.
Artistic Director Debra Nagy has announced Les Delices’ concert schedule for the coming season. Click here to read a press release.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1796, Cleaveland was established as a settlement by the surveyors of the Connecticut Land Company and named after their leader, General Moses Cleaveland. (Although Cleaveland supervised the design of what would become our modern downtown, he returned home shortly thereafter and never returned to Ohio.)
The name of the settlement was allegedly shortened in 1831 in order to fit on the masthead of The Cleveland Advertiser, and it wasn’t until 1836 that the settlement became incorporated as a city.
Culture took even longer to arrive on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, a history laid out by Cleveland State University professor J. Heywood Alexander in his article in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Jazz began to flourish in the early 20th century (read a parallel article by Joe Mossbrook and Chris Columbi here.)
Fast forward to 2020 to take a tour of the city with Cleveland Orchestra cellist Alan Harrell, who plays Bach in a number of different locations, and follows that up by popping up all over Northeast Ohio in a second video.
And on this date in 1933, soprano Caterina Jarboro appeared in the role of Aïda at the New York Hippodrome, the first Black female opera singer to perform with a major company in the United States. A year earlier, Jules Bledsoe made history by singing the role of Amonasro in the same opera, the first Black singer to appear in that role. His performance came in the second and last season of Stadium Opera at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, a series whose first season, sponsored by The Cleveland Press, also saw the premiere of Shirley Graham’s Tom-Tom. Alas, no recordings are available.
