by Caitlin Winston

TODAY’S ALMANAC: 

The New York Philharmonic was one of the first orchestras to offer live radio broadcasts of their concerts, and on this day in 1922, the Philharmonic was heard live on the airwaves for the first time. The program, held in the Lewisohn Stadium on the campus of  City College of New York, featured the Overture to Ambroise Thomas’ opéra comique Mignon, Franz Schubert’s entr’acte music from the play Rosamunde, Karl Goldmark’s “Rustic Wedding” symphony, and the Dream Pantomime from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and closed with two trumpet solos by Franz Schubert. On the podium: Willem van Hoogstraten, the Orchestra’s regular summer-event director.

The stadium, built in 1913 with a seating capacity of 8,000, was demolished in 1973. More information on New York Philharmonic history can be found in the archives section of their website.

French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Huguette Tourangeau, a musician remembered for her mind-blowing range, vocal agility, and rich chest voice, was born on this day in 1938. Tourangeau was a student at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, and made her operatic debut as Mercédès in Carmen in 1964, shortly before winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. After her win, she performed the opera’s title role with the Metropolitan Opera National Company in a 56-city tour.

Throughout her career, she was known as a frequent performance and recording partner to Joan Southerland, whose dramatic coloratura paired perfectly with Toruangeau’s beautifully dark “almost baritone.” Tourangeau’s voice was heard frequently on the stages of the New York City Opera and the Met, as well as in opera houses in London, Seattle, Santa Fe, Vancouver, and San Francisco. Click here for Tourangeau and Southerland’s 1977 performance of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda.

American composer and master of the postwar avant-garde John Cage died on this day in 1992, at age 79. While Cage is commonly remembered as the person who makes us sit through more than four minutes of sometimes-enlightening, mostly-awkward silence, we also honor him as the composer who challenged musicians to re-approach their performance methods, and encouraged audiences to reconsider their preconceptions of what music is.

Cage’s indeterminate compositional style shifted much of the control over his music’s tone, shape, and scale to the performer and their interpretation of his notation. His innovative approaches to form and sound production continue to influence music composition today. Click here to watch New England Conservatory faculty member Stephen Drury demonstrate the process of piano preparation for Cage’s Sonatas & Interludes.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING TODAY:

One live and one virtual event to highlight today.

German organist Mirjam Laetitia Haag will give a recital at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights tonight at 7. The program includes pieces by Muffat, J.S. Bach, Liszt, Dupré, Reger, Mendelssohn, Hermann Schröder, Ian Farrington and Franck, as well as original improvisations. A freewill offering will be received.

Several musicians familiar to Northeast Ohio audiences will be featured on a live feed from the Seattle Chamber Music Festival tonight at 10 pm. James Ehnes and Stephen Rose are in the ensemble that will perform Florence Price’s String Quartet in G, and pianists Andrew Armstrong and Orion Weiss will share the keyboard for Schubert’s Fantasie in f. Purchase $25 tickets and access the feed here, either at concert time or on demand.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Cleveland Arts Prize announced its 2021 awardees yesterday in a press release. The list includes the collective Mourning [A] BLKstar, Happy Dog proprietor Sean Watterson, and two Cleveland Orchestra figures: Clara Rankin, and Franz Welser-Möst. The 61st annual award ceremony will be held on October 13 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This is a good time to mention that Welser-Möst’s recently published book, From Silence, is now available in an English edition from the Cleveland Orchestra store.

Cleveland Pops Orchestra will play an outdoor family concert on Sunday, August 15 at 2 pm on the grounds of the Mandel JCC. Vocalists Connor Bogart and Lauren Berry will join conductor Carl Topilow in Disney favorites and music by ABBA, Queen, and Elvis. Blankets, lawn chairs and picnic lunches are welcome, and kosher drinks and snacks will be on sale. Click here for free tickets and details.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1880, African American concert violinist, composer and educator Clarence Cameron White (pictured above) was born in Clarksville, Tennessee. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory, from which his mother had graduated, from 1896 to 1901, then studied composition with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in England, and violin in Paris. He succeeded R. Nathaniel Dett as head of the music department of the Hampton Institute from 1932-1935. White’s compositions include a ballet (A Night in Sans Souci) and an opera (Ouanga), two works based on Haitian themes for which he collaborated with playwright John Matheus.

Click here to watch a recent performance of White’s Suite Spirituale for Clarinet Quartet (at Clarinettissimo 2020), and here to watch an online video of his Levee Dance, Op. 27, No. 4 (performed by violinist Augustin Hadelich, and pianist Joyce Yang).

And on this date in 1909, Leo Fender, one of the pioneers of the electric guitar, was born in Anaheim, California. While this new, 20th century invention became synonymous with rock virtuosi like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, it also gained something of a foothold in classical music. Click here to read Christopher Fox’s article, “How The World Plugged into the Electric Guitar” in The Guardian, and here to read Anastasia Tsioulcas’ NPR article, “Electric Guitars Amp Up New Classical Music.”

Click here to listen to Bang on a Can All-Star Mark Stewart play Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, written in 1987 for Pat Metheny. And click here to hear the electric guitar introduction to s aria “Here Where Footprints Erase The Grave” from Missy Mazzoli’s 2012 chamber opera Song from the Uproar.

by Daniel Hathaway

HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:

One year ago, on August 8, 2020, the second three of the six finalists in PianoCleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition played their ultimate round via videos. Two of them are back in the flesh for the 2021 Cleveland International Piano Competition, this time for final rounds with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.

Byeol Kim played on Friday evening, and Lovre Marušić is on for tonight at 7 with Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, sharing the program with Martín García García, who solos in Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. You can attend in person (face masks required) or watch the performances via live stream and stick around to hear the results after the jury decides who won what prizes. Click here for tickets.

On Sunday at 4, Oberlin professor Steven Plank plays a recital on the Flentrop organ in Christ Church, Oberlin featuring music by Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck and Heinrich Scheidemann. It’s free.

Outdoor concerts fill out the schedule on Sunday. At 4, guest Carillonneur Keiran Cantilina previews the program he’ll be playing from Belgian bell towers later this month on the McGaffin Carillon in University Circle. At 7, Martin Herman conducts The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom in Classical Mystery Tour, a Beatles tribute concert (tickets here). And at 7:30, Christopher Wilkins and the Akron Symphony Virtuosi take music by Scott Joplin, Miguel del Águila, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa outdoors in Firestone Park.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has undergone emergency surgery in California for a brain tumor and has cancelled appearances through the end of October. Read more here.

The Baltimore Symphony announced on Thursday that it had fired Emily Skala, 59, its principal flute for more than three decades, after receiving complaints from musicians, audience members, and donors that she “shared Covid-19 conspiracy theories and other misinformation on social media.” Read the New York Times story here.

Since we’re now entering the Silly Season, the slow news period during late summer when frivolous news stories find their way onto front pages, our choice for today is a little Violin Channel feature about Paddy Moran, an Irish fiddler from County Mayo, who crafted a violin in 1972 made entirely out of parts from an old Ford Anglia. Read about that here (more such trivia to follow, we’re sure).

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC:

Czech-American composer Karel Husa was born in Prague on August 7, 1921, He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, and taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years. In a January, 2017 New York Times obituary, Steve Smith writes

Mr. Husa created works in most of the standard concert-music forms apart from opera, including two symphonies, several concertos, four string quartets and three ballets.

… 

In “Music for Prague 1968,” a response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire.

The piece, given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, became one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date. 

Click here to listen to a retrospective of Husa’s music, including Music for Prague, from a 2005 symposium in which the composer participated.

by Daniel Hathaway

CIPC MOVES TO SEVERANCE:

The grand finale of the Cleveland International Piano Competition begins tonight at Severance Hall and continues on Saturday evening, as the four 2021 finalists play concertos with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra. At 7 pm Friday, Byeol Kim plays Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in b-flat, and Yedam Kim solos in Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in d. And on Saturday at 7, Lovre Marušić plays Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in G, and Martín García García solos in the second final round performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.

You can attend in person (face masks required) or watch the performances online. Tickets for both live and virtual attendance are available online.

ONLINE TODAY:

Last Monday’s Diary linked to a New York Times article that previewed the Bard Music Festival’s two week-long exploration of the world of French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. The opening concert, which pairs several of her own compositions  with music by some of her female students goes online today at 5:00 pm.

Program: Nadia Boulanger’s Vers la vie nouvelle and Lux aeterna, Lili Boulanger’s Faust et Hélène and Pie Jesu, Priaulx Rainier’s Reminiscence, Louise Talma’s Alleluia in the Form of a Toccata, Grazyna Bacewicz’s Music for Strings, Trumpet, and Percussion, and Julia Perry’s Stabat mater. Performers include J’Nai Bridges mezzo-soprano, Fei-Fei piano, Joshua Guerrero tenor, Samantha Hankey mezzo-soprano, Joelle Harvey soprano, Joshua Hopkins baritone, Renée Anne Louprette organ, Nicholas Phan tenor, Bard Festival Chamber Players, and The Orchestra Now conducted by Rebecca Miller and Leon Botstein. Tickets are $10. View the live stream here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this date in 1904, German music critic Eduard Hanslick died in Baden at the age of 78. One of the most divisive figures in the demi-monde of music criticism, Hanslick allied himself with the traditions represented by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann that culminated in the music of Brahms, eventually waging a personal war on the “Music of the Future” represented by Wagner and Liszt and leading to Bruckner. This 1890 cartoon from the Vienna satirical magazine Figaro lampoons his position.

Summing up Hanslick’s achievements in The Hungarian Review, Nicholas T. Parsons writes: The times were propitious and newspapers were expanding to meet the demand from an increasingly cultivated bourgeois public for accessible but authoritative cultural journalism. When his career began mid-century, the Viennese competition in Hanslick’s speciality of music criticism was lamentable, as he put it: “stuffed with epithets and shallow enthusiasms, limp wit and phrase-making, unmanly heroisations and idolatry – echt wienerisch!” His first and perhaps greatest achievement was to raise musical appreciation to a professional level, diffusing his knowledge effortlessly in urbane prose, but dedicating himself to his task by playing every score right through before a performance. He would also do extensive background reading, for example of a Shakespeare play and commentary on it, before reviewing a Verdi opera. One lasting impact of his approach was that he addressed the work primarily and the performance secondarily, from which it followed that the quality of a work might not necessarily be obscured by inadequacy of performance, or, of course, vice versa…

And in a world-changing event, on August 6, 1945, the United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom, detonated the first of two atomic bombs over the city of Hiroshima, Japan (a second bomb was dropped over Nagasaki three days later).

Click here to watch a performance of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1960 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 string instruments, as performed by Sinfonia Varsovia led by Krzysztof Urbański at Penderecki’s 80th Birthday Celebration in Warsaw in November, 2013.

by Mike Telin

TODAY’S ALMANAC: 

Today we celebrate the 95th birthday of Franco-American composer Betsy Jolas. Born in Paris, her mother was a translator and singer, her father a poet and journalist and the founder of the magazine transition. Along with her family, Jolis settled in the United States in late 1940.

While living in the States, she studied music at Bennington, but upon returning to Paris in 1946 she continued her studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, where she was a student of  Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. Jolis served as Messiaen’s assistant at the Conservatoire from 1971 to 1974, and was appointed to the faculty in 1975.

An active composer since 1945, her output includes Opera, works for Orchestra and solo works with orchestra or ensemble, pieces for large ensemble, chamber music, and choral and vocal works which have been performed by Kent Nagano, Anssi Karttunen, William Christie, Håkan Hardenberger, and Sir Simon Rattle, as well as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Jolas also has amassed a collection of awards from the Copley Foundation of Chicago, ORTF, the American Academy of Arts, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Grand Prix National de la Musique, Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris, and the Grand Prix de la SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique).

In 1983 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has held teaching positions at Yale, Harvard, Mills College, Berkeley, USC and San Diego University, Tanglewood, and the University of Michigan.

In recent years, her career has enjoyed a resurgence after she was “rediscovered” by Sir Simon Rattle. Click here to listen to a thoroughly engaging conversation with Berlin Philharmonic hornist Fergus McWilliam.

Click here for a performance of A Little Summer Suite (2015) and here for Letters from Bachville for orchestra (2019). Both performances are by the Boston Symphony under the direction of Andris Nelsons.

by Stephanie Manning

EVENTS TODAY:

The Chamber Round of the Cleveland International Piano Competition continues tonight at 7:00 pm with Session 2. Finalists Lovre Marušić & Martín García García will both perform Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in g, Op. 57 with the Escher String Quartet. Tickets available online both for the in-person concert (in the Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art) and the live stream.

Also at 7:00 pm is an online concert from the Cleveland Composers Guild. Small chamber music groups made up of wind players, string players, pianists, and a vocalist from the Guild will present works by Ty Alan Emerson, Larry Baker, Karen Grieblin, William Rayer, Dolores White, & Maxwell Lowery. Click here to view. Freewill offering accepted online.

Tonight at 8:00 pm, catch a radio broadcast from Apollo’s Fire on 104.9 WCLV. The program, Virtuosity: Fireworks from J.S. Bach, includes the Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, the Violin Concerto in d Minor with Alan Choo, and “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” featuring acclaimed soprano Amanda Forsythe and virtuoso trumpeter Steven Marquardt.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this day in 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart married his wife Constanze, née Weber (pictured). One of four daughters, all of them singers, Weber was a musician in her own right and would later go on to inspire some of Mozart’s most renowned compositions.

Intelligent and musically trained, Weber made a great match for Mozart. The composer wrote the soprano solos in his Mass in c minor for her, and she sang them in the premiere of the unfinished work. Additionally, her love for Baroque counterpoint influenced many of her husband’s works in that style.

“My dear Constanze is really the cause of this fugue’s coming into the world,” Mozart wrote to his sister Nannerl, attached to a copy of his Fantasy and Fugue, K. 394. “She scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistically beautiful of all musical forms and never ceased to entreat me until I wrote down a fugue for her.”

When Mozart died in 1791, his 29-year-old widow stepped up to save herself and their two children from financial ruin. Proving herself to be a shrewd businesswoman, Weber paid off Mozart’s debts and became quite wealthy by obtaining a pension from the emperor, organizing memorial concerts, and publishing many of her husband’s works.

Mozart’s connection to the Weber family extended beyond his wife. Years before falling in love with Constanze Weber, he became smitten with (and was rejected by) older daughter Aloysia Weber, who later became a renowned singer and performed in multiple Mozart operas. The eldest daughter of the family, Josepha Weber, became Mozart’s first Queen of the Night.

When it came to his marriage to Constanze Weber, Mozart was hesitant to tell his father, who often disapproved of his romantic affairs. Eventually, however, Mozart wrote him a letter announcing his intentions.

“But who’s the girl I love? Well, don’t blow your top. ‘Surely not one of the Webers?’ Yes, actually, one of the Webers. Not Josepha, not Sophie… Constanze!”

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S EVENTS:

Do they play well with others? Now that the solo rounds have shown the audiences and jury what they’re individually capable of producing from those 88 keys, four finalists in the Cleveland International Piano Competition will play piano quintets with the Escher String Quartet to test their mettle as ensemble players.

The first session takes place tonight at 7 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, when Byeol Kim joins the Escher in César Franck’s Quintet in f, followed by Yedam Kim in Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. Both in-person and virtual tickets are available. Click here. The second session happens on Wednesday, same time, same place.

Garage Opera? At noon today, Lyric Opera Chicago presents a filmed version of Yuval Sharon’s drive-through reimagining of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, produced last April in Millennium Lakeside Parking Garage. You may have read about its debut in October of 2020 by Michigan Opera in Detroit, and Cleveland Orchestra patrons will remember Sharon’s stagings of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande in Severance Hall. Register here to view Raphael S. Nash’s 70-minute digital feature until October 29. It’s free.

Support your local principal cello! The Cleveland Orchestra’s Mark Kosower joins other prominent musicians at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival in Stewart Goodyear’s Piano Quartet and Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 1. The performance debuts at 10 pm this evening and will be available here and on demand. Tickets are $25.

MAKE NO SMALL PLANS:

London’s 600-seat Wigmore Hall, which has to be one of the busiest recital halls in the world, has announced that its forthcoming season will feature 2,500 artists from more than 30 countries performing in 500 concerts. 150 of those will be live-streamed — a service that some 7 million viewers enjoyed during the past 18 months. Read more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

It’s a slow day for mentioning milestones in classical music, but here are two.

On June 3, 1929, German-born inventor Emile Berliner died in New York City of a heart attack at the age of 78. Like many second-wave innovators, Berliner has largely gone unmentioned for his pair of contributions to the classical music recording industry. The first was his development of the circular disk that replaced Edison’s cylinders and made the mass production of recordings possible. To that end, he founded several companies, including Deutsche Grammophon and the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Berliner was also among those responsible for the invention of the microphone. His achievements are on display at the Library of Congress (click here to view), including such non-musical inventions as a loom for mass producing cloth and an early version of the helicopter. Somewhere in between falls his invention of a type of acoustical tile.

The second milestone for which we can thank August 3 is the introduction of the Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80 personal computer through Radio Shack, a model that was snapped up by thousands of early adopters within weeks of its release in 1977 for $600  each (some $2,600 in today’s currency).

Lacking such mod cons as the ability to render lower case letters, the machine eventually became a device for tinkerers, even though until 1982, it outsold the Apple II series five to one. Most importantly, the TRS-80 presaged today’s ubiquitous PCs through which we’ve been notating and streaming music, attending classes on Zoom, and conducting our business affairs throughout the Pandemic. It’s difficult to imagine 1977 without access to that magic box, much less 2021.

by Stephanie Manning

IN THE NEWS:

Starting August 6, the Bard Music Festival — on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York — will present “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” a two-week exploration of the composer and pedagogue’s life and legacy. The most renowned composition teacher of the 20th century, Boulanger was also a talented composer and conductor. In addition to her music, the twelve concerts of the Festival will also feature the music of her precursors, contemporaries and students as well as works by her sister Lili. Read more in the New York Times here.

SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Rocky River Chamber Music Society has announced its 63rd season, which will begin in October. The lineup includes the Auryn String Quartet, Russian pianist Arsentiy Kharitonov, Oberlin Clarinet Professor Richard Hawkins and Faculty Friends, Bob Sneider and Friends from the Eastman School of Music, and the Grigoryan Brothers Guitar Duo. All concerts are free and will take place both in person at the West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church (health conditions permitting) and online. Learn more here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

Today marks one year since pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher died in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of 92. A child prodigy, Fleisher performed at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic at the age of 16.

But it was the Cleveland Orchestra with which the pianist formed the strongest relationship. Fleisher became known for his outstanding recordings with the Orchestra and George Szell from the 1950s and 60s — particularly the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms. Listen to his recording of Beethoven’s five piano concertos here.

Focal dystonia in his right hand created a major setback for the pianist in the 1960s, but Fleisher persevered, turning to one-handed works like Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. His career path expanded into conducting and teaching, and he eventually made a triumphant return to two-handed playing in the 1990s.

Fleischer returned to Cleveland time and time again, resulting in the longest relationship of any visiting artist with the Orchestra. In 2013, he took to the podium for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Beethoven’s second and third piano concertos. His student Jonathan Biss stepped in to replace Mitsuko Uchida, a testament to Fleisher’s teaching legacy.

In our interview before that concert, Biss (pictured below left, with Fleisher) said of his former teacher: “He really has earned his legend. Not through any razzle dazzle or publicity, but just because he is so inarguably great.”

Photo by Roger Mastroianni

by Daniel Hathaway

WEEKEND EVENTS:

Today at 2:00 pm, the Semifinal rounds of the Cleveland International Piano Competition continue in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art (pictured: Thursday’s duo photo by Gregory Wilson). 

Rafael Skorka (32, Israel) performs Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story (arr. Kurbatov), Leighton’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Op. 24 (“Homage to Bach”) (1956) and Brahms’ Sieben Fantasien, Op. 116.

Martín García García (24, Spain) will play Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie in C, D. 760, Liszt’s “Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne)” from Années de Pèlerinage I, S. 160, Étude de Concert, S. 145, No. 2 (“Gnomenreigen”) and Transcendental Etude, S. 139, No. 10. Skorka and García García will then team up for Schubert’s Fantasie in f. Tickets are available online.

The Semifinal rounds continue on Sunday at 2:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium. Byeol Kim (31, South Korea) performs Clara Schumann’s Notturno in F, Op. 6, No. 2, Robert Schumann’s Arabeske in C, Op. 18, Gottschalk’s The Union, Op. 48, Mendelssohn’s Fantasie in f-sharp, Op. 28, Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arr. Kurbatov) and Jalbert’s Toccata (2001).

Lovre Marušić (28, Croatia) plays Scarlatti’s Sonata in E, K. 380, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16 and Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arr. Kurbatov). Kim and Marušić will conclude with Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos. Tickets are available online.

On Sunday at 7:00 pm at Blossom Music Center it’s The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Herbert Blomstedt. Garrick Ohlsson plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and Blomstedt leads the Orchestra in the composer’s Symphony No. 7. Tickets are available online.

At 7:00 pm at Guzzetta Lawn, outside Guzzetta Hall on Buchtel Common, University of Akron, Tucker Jolly leads the 21st Annual TubaSummer. The program features summer favorites performed by tuba, sousaphone, baritone and euphonium players from throughout the region. Lawn chairs and blankets are welcome. The event is free.

Then at 7:30 pm, the Akron Symphony continues its Outside Voices Concert Series at Goodyear Heights Metro Park. Christopher Wilkins leads the ASO Virtuosi in orks by Scott Joplin, Miguel del Águila, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa. The concert is free.

THIS WEEKEND’S ALMANAC: 

On July 31, 1886, Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany at the age of 74. The 19th-century classical equivalent of a 20th-century rock star, Liszt’s solo piano performances gave rise to such pan-European fame that the poet Heinrich Heine characterized audience acclaim as “Lisztomania.” The composer ended his career as “the Abbé Liszt” after taking minor orders in the Catholic Church.

Listen to two Cleveland performances that feature his forward-looking piano music. Vladimir Horowitz played Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata at Severance Hall on October 31 of 1976, and third-place winner François Dumont programmed his tone poem, Vallée d’Obermann, for his semi-final round in the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition.

There are no special Cleveland connections to celebrate for August 1 but how about a little quiz that references classical music figures who died on the first day of August?

1. English pianist John Ogdon died on August 1 in 1952. Which of these composers did he especially promote? a) Alkan. b) Reinecke. c) Busoni. c) Scriabin.
2. Russian pianist Svyatoslav Richter died of a heart attack on August 1, 1997. True or false: In 1952, Richter was invited to play Franz Liszt in a film based on the life of Tchaikovsky.

Click here for the answers to the quiz.

by Mike Telin

TODAY’S EVENTS:

At 7:00 pm, Semifinal rounds of the Cleveland International Piano Competition continue in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jiarui Cheng (22, China) will play Scarlatti’s Sonata in b, K. 87, Chopin’s Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op. 60, Rachmaninoff‘s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 and Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story (arr. Kurbatov). Yedam Kim (32, South Korea) will perform Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat, Op. 61, Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 4 in c, Op. 29, and Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (arr. Kurbatov). Chen and Kim will then team up for Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos. Tickets are available online. You can attend in person, or watch remotely.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On this day in 1970, George Szell, Cleveland Orchestra music director for 24 years, died in Hannah House at University Hospitals — during a Blossom concert conducted by Pierre Boulez.

In his book, The Cleveland Orchestra Story “Second to None,” Donald Rosenberg recounted the evening.

That night at Blossom, the musicians were applying their efforts to Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with Mischa Dichther as soloist and Boulez on the podium, when the phone rang backstage. Szell had just died at 9:50 p.m., of complications from a heart attack he had suffered the previous month. News of Szell’s deteriorating health had spread throughout the day, but the orchestra wouldn’t learn of his death until after the concert. 

Rosenberg continues — The Plain Dealer saluted him in an editorial the next day: “Few men did more to enhance Cleveland’s reputation than did the late Groege Szell. To many people around the world he and the Cleveland Orchestra symbolized the city . . . . Szell will be best remembered for what he leaves behind — the Cleveland Orchestra. Seldom has a richer legacy been left to a city.”    

It is in the spirit of legacy that I share some of my favorite Szell recordings. I’m sure many of you have your own list, so spend some time listening. And if possible, share them with a young person who may not have had the opportunity to hear the Orchestra under the direction of the late maestro.

Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra 

Janáček: Sinfonietta

Dvořák: Symphony No. 7

Mahler:  Symphony No 4 (Judith Raskin, soprano)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4  (Leon Fleisher)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24 ( Robert Casadesus)

Dvořák: Slavonic Dances Op. 72 No. 2 

Beethoven: Symphony No. 4

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Choral)

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Gary Graffman)