by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Indoors on Saturday, Con Fuoco (Ann Yu, violin, Ryan Louie, cello & April Sun, piano) play Mendelssohn and Schoenfeld at 7 pm at Bop Stop. Outdoors on Sunday, Karina Canellakis (pictured) leads The Cleveland Orchestra in a 7 pm performance at Blossom featuring pianist Behzod Abduraimov and trumpeter Michael Sachs in Shostakovich’s First Concerto plus music by Dvořák and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. And the Akron Symphony Virtuosi perform works by Joplin, Amram, Handy, and Sousa in Akron’s Forest Lodge Park at 7:30 pm with Christopher Wilkins on the podium.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:
Four births to celebrate and three deaths to mourn — all more or less distinguished figures in the world of classical music.
On August 15, German inventor Johannes Nepomuk Maelzel, who developed the metronome, was born in Regensburg in 1772, African British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor entered the world in London in 1875, and French composer Jacques Ibert first saw the light of day in 1890 in the City of Light, as did Russian inventor Leon Theremin, creator of the pioneering electronic instrument that bears his name, but in St. Petersburg in 1896.
On August 14, 1972 American pianist Oscar Levant, who also worked as a composer, conductor, author, radio game show panelist, television talk show host, comedian and actor, checked out in Beverly Hills. On August 15, Hungarian violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, close associate of the Schumanns and Brahms, crossed the bridge into immortality in Berlin in 1907 at the age of 75, and Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, who first recorded Beethoven’s complete sonatas, bid this world adieu in Morschach, Switzerland in 1951 at 69.
That’s a potpourri of personalities that deserves an equally varied set of listening suggestions.
Here’s Oscar Levant playing Poulenc’s Pastourelle in 1945 (with a bonus: Vladimir Horowitz performing the same composer’s Presto in B-flat in 1947). Couple that with an episode of Levant on the Jack Benny Show in November of 1958 — dated in obvious respects, but showing the pointed wit of a multifaceted American figure who said of himself, “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
For something on the more exalted side, click here to listen to Artur Schnabel play Brahms’ First Concerto with George Szell and the London Symphony in 1938.
And here’s a 2013 documentary about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s visits to the U.S. in 1904, 1906, and 1910, and his influence on the African American Civil Rights Movement.
Ending on a lighter, but perhaps creepy note, watch a historic video of Leon Theremin playing one of the first electronic instruments to enter the concert world, or another video of an extraordinary gathering of 273 Theremin players going for a Guinness World Record in Japan in 2013.
