by Daniel Hathaway
LIVE AND IN-PERSON THIS WEEKEND:
On Saturday evening, ChamberFest Cleveland ends its season with a Festival Finale at St. Pascal Baylon Church in Highland Heights. The ticketed event includes a champagne toast. On Sunday, organist Karel Paukert plays Music from Prague at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights, and members of the Akron Symphony perform at the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.
ONLINE EVENTS:
On Saturday and Sunday, Local 4 Music Fund continues its three-part series “She Scores,” and on Saturday, Burning River Baroque presents a one-time only, climate-based program, “Elements Worth Fighting For.” Details in our Concert Listings.
NEWS BRIEF:
Earlier this week, fire destroyed the Dobson Pipe Organ Builders Ltd. workshop in Lake City, Iowa, including an instrument being built for an Anglican Church in Australia. The firm, founded by Lynn A. Dobson, has built distinguished instruments for such venues as Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, and St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York. Read a New York Times story here.
INTERESTING READ:
This week, British oboist Nicholas Daniel will premiere one of the late John Tavener’s last works, eight years after the composer’s death. He explains the delay in a Guardian article, and writes about the complex web that frustrates musical creativity in the U.K.
THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC
On June 26, we note the birth of American pianist and conductor Antonia Brico in 1902 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the death of Dutch composer Henk Badings in Maarheeze, a well as the birth of Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg in Helsinki in 1958.
On June 27 in music history, French composer and claveciniste Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre died in Paris in 1729, and several 20th century composers were born: George T. Walker (1922, in Washington D.C.), Jack Gallagher (1947, in New York), Daniel Asia (1953, in Seattle), and Magnus Lindberg (1958 in Helsinki).
We wrote in some detail about Jacquet de la Guerre, Walker, Gallagher, and Asia in the Diary for June 27, 2020, so today we’ll throw a bit of light on the more obscure composers.
Born to a Dutch single mother, Brico emigrated to California with her foster parents in 1908, where she studied at Berkeley and worked as assistant to the director of San Francisco Opera. She returned to Europe for conducting studies in Berlin and made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930. Back in the States, she was the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and after settling in Denver, became conductor of what was eventually named the Denver Philharmonic.
Brico’s life and career are dramatized in the Shooting Star Filmcompany’s The Conductor. Watch a trailer here (the R-rated full-length film can be rented on YouTube). There are also some poor-quality documentaries about the conductor, but you can listen here to her interview with Northwest Public Radio.
Like a number of his fellow Netherlanders, Henk Badings was born in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period, but was orphaned early on and returned to the Netherlands to study mining and palaeontology in Delft and worked as a mining engineer before turning to a career in music. His fifteen numbered symphonies and other orchestral works were championed by such conductors as van Beinum and Mengelberg, and his catalogue of 1,000 works includes various experimental pieces.
For a taste of Badings’ music, listen to his 1954 symphony Louisville, dedicated to the Louisville Orchestra and performed by the Janacek Philharmonic under David Porcelijn.
Not that Magnus Lindberg is all that obscure, having served as composer in residence with the New York Philharmonic at the invitation of incoming music director Alan Gilbert, and having commissioned works performed by The Cleveland Orchestra, but his larger works haven’t been heard locally for several years now. The composer has passed through various stylistic episodes, with side excursions into Japanese drumming and German punk rock. One of his works that has gained popularity is his Clarinet Concerto, performed here by Emil Jonason at Concertgebouw Brugge.
