MIRÓ QUARTET PHOTO GALLERY:
Oberlin College and Conservatory have posted photos of the Miró Quartet’s complete Beethoven string quartet cycle celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ensemble’s founding at Oberlin in six concerts last weekend. Pictured: Saturday afternoon’s performance at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (credit: Abe Frato).
HAPPENING TODAY:
Unless you’ve already reserved free tickets to tonight’s recital by James (Zijian) Wei, the 2024 Mixon First Prize winner of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, you’re out of luck – the event in Kulas Hall at CIM is sold out.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
German philosopher, philologist, poet, cultural critic and sometime composer Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844. His ideas exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history, and on the music of Gustav Mahler, Frederick Delius, and Richard Strauss, although Nietzsche admitted that he himself was probably “a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” Conductor Hans von Bülow agreed, describing one of Nietzsche’s pieces as “the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time.”
Strauss incorporated Nietzsche’s philosophy into his tone poem based on the book Also sprach Zarathrustra. Listen here to a rare, 1944 high-fidelity recording of the composer conducting the work with the Vienna Philharmonic. And the Cleveland Institute of Music marked the passing of conductor Louis Lane with a recording of the piece by Lane and the CIM Orchestra in March, 2000.
Moving from people to edifices, two important concert venues held their first events on this date in history.
On October 15, 1900 The Boston Symphony — founded in 1881 — inaugurated Symphony Hall with a gala program. Based on such traditional European halls as the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the venue has been celebrated for its excellent acoustic, partly due to its coffered ceiling and sixteen statues in niches that help distribute the sound. While performances are on hold for the foreseeable future, take a tour of the building with Amariah Condon and meet one of the Orchestra’s librarians here.
And 32 years later on this date, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, the first municipally-owned opera house in the U.S., opened its doors with a performance of Tosca. Take a look behind the scenes of San Francisco Opera’s 2011 Ring cycle here.
