by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Farewell to Gabriel’s horns at Trinity
. Scottish Chamber Orchestra soloist Nicola Benedetti profiled, anniversaries of Ravel’s Pictures, Gershwin’s Lullaby, and the premature departure of Jacqueline du Pré
TODAY’S EVENTS:
At noon, Trinity Cathedral’s Brownbag Concert features the popular big band Gabriel’s Horns (pictured). If you’re a fan, you should know that bandleader James Mays is retiring, so this will be the horns’ final appearance on the lunchtime series at Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering.
IN THE NEWS:
Violinist Nicola Benedetti, who will appear on Akron’s Tuesday Musical Series on Thursday with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the Max Bruch Concerto, is profiled in The Guardian in conjunction with her recent appointment as director of the Edinburgh Festival.
“Seventy-five years since it was founded, the Edinburgh international festival finally has its first female director — and its first Scot. In March, it was announced that the concert violinist Nicola Benedetti would be taking over from Fergus Linehan, who had held the position for eight years. Benedetti was born in West Kilbride, Ayrshire. Now 35, she has spent her life at the pinnacle of British classical music, leading the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain aged eight; studying at the Yehudi Menuhin school for young musicians under the maestro from 10; and winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year award at 16.
“Benedetti is confident that this total immersion in the highest of high culture has given her the vision and expertise to lead Scotland’s foremost arts festival. “I’ve watched an average of 90 to 100 concerts a year since I was 16 years old,” she tells me over mint tea in the lobby of a fancy hotel in London’s West End. “I can’t tell you how much I’d like champagne and salmon,” she says, “but I’m not going to have that.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1922, Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition premiered in Paris, commissioned and conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. He recorded the work in late October of 1930 with the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall (listen here), and there are numerous other orchestral adaptations and rearrangements of the Russian composer’s popular piano suite. Click here to watch John Scott play his solo arrangement on the 1895 organ in Albion Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, UK.
A smaller work was first heard on this date in 1967 at the Library of Congress when the Juilliard String Quartet debuted George Gershwin’s lovely Lullaby for string quartet (1919-20). Give that and other 20th-century American string quartets a listen on the CD American String Quartets 1900-1950.
Twenty years later, English cellist Jacqueline du Pré left us at the age of 42 in London. Married to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, she was permanently associated with the Elgar concerto. Her life, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis, has been the subject of the partly fictionalized Broadway play, Duet for One (1981) and film about the cellist and her flutist sister, Hilary and Jackie (1998).
