Today's Birthdays

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756)
Pierre-Louis Couperin (1755-1789)
JohaPedro Elías Gutiérrez (1870–1954)
Johann Strauss Sr. (1804-1849)
Lawrance Collingwood (1887-1982)
Witold Rudziński (1913-2004)
Quincy Jones (1933-2024)
Phillip Joll (1954)
Britta Byström (1977)
and

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Sylvia Beach (1887-1962)
Max Shulman (1919-1988)
Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

Today's Birthdays

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
Alec Rowley (1892-1958)
Irène Joachim (1913-2001)
Jane Rhodes (1929-2011)
Alberto Ponce (1935-2019)
Lionel Friend (1945)
Julia Migenes (1949)
Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024)
Anthony Powers (1953)
Moses Hogan (1957-2003)
Terence Blanchard (1962)

and

Janet Flanner (1892-1978)
George Seferis (1900-1971)

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Arne (1710-1778)
Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911)
Hans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965)
Ralph Shapey (1921-2002)
Norbert Brainin (1923-2005)
Philip Jones (1928-2000)
Helga Pilarczyk (1935-2011)
Liza Minnelli (1946)
James Taylor (1948)

and

George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916)
Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Edward Albee (1928-2016)
Virginia Hamilton (1934-2002)
Naomi Shihab Nye (1952)
Carl Hiaasen (1953)
David Eggers (1970)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Ruggles (1876-1971)
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
Xavier Montsalvage (1912-2002)
Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
Sarah Walker (1943)
Tristan Murail (1947)
Bobby McFerrin (1950)
Katia Labèque (1950)

and

Torquato Tasso (1544-1495)
Ezra Jack Keats (1916-1983)
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

Today's Birthdays

Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838)
Dudley Buck (1839-1909)
Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908)
Arthur Honnegger (1892-1955)
Dame Eva Turner (1892-1990)
Bix Biederbecke (1903-1931)
Sir Charles Groves (1915-1992)
William Blezard (1921-2003)
Andrew Parrott (1947)
Stephen Oliver (1950-1992)

and

Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933)
Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948)
Heywood Hale Broun (1918-2001)
David Rabe (1940)

Today's Birthdays

Josef Mysliveczek (1737-1781)
Archie Camden (1888-1979)
Dame Isobel Baillie (1895-1983)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Thomas Schippers (1930-1977)
Ornette Coleman (1930-2015)
David Matthews (1943)
Kalevi Aho (1949)
Howard Shelley (1950)
Anna Clyne (1980)

and

Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512)
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)
Mickey Spillane (1918-2006)
David Pogue (1963)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1831, Italian violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini makes his Parisian debut a the Opéra. Composers in the audience include Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Halvéy. and Franz Liszt (who transcribes Pagnini's showpiece "La Campanella" for piano). Also in attendance are the many famous novelists and poets, including George Sand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Mussset and Heinrich Heine.

Today's Birthdays

Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613)
Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903-1998)
Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000)
Dick Hyman (1927)
Christian Wolff (1934)
Robert Tear (1939-2011)
Barthold Kuijken (1949)
Simon Halsey (1958)

and

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932)
Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003)
Neil Postman (1931-2003)
John McPhee (1933)
Leslie A. Fiedler (1948)
Jeffrey Eugenides (1960)

Today's Birthdays

John Wilbye (1574-1638)
Tomaso Antonio Vitali (1663-1745)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Heino Eller (1887-1970)
Christopher Seaman (1942)
Uri Segal (1944)
Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997)
Nicholas Kraemer (1945)
Clive Gillinson (1946)
Okko Kamu (1946)
Montserrat Figueras (1948-2011)
Michael Chance (1955)

and

William York Tindall (1903-1981)
William Boyd (1952)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1897, Johannes Brahms attends his last concerts and hears his Symphony No. 4 conducted by Hans Richter.

Today's Birthdays

Oscar Straus (1870-1954)
Julius Rudel (1921-2014)
Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006)
Wes Montgomery (1923-1968)
Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015)
Lorin Maazel (1930-2014)
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (1944)
Stephen Schwartz (1948)
Marielle Labèque (1952)
Mark Gresham (1956)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin (1975)

and

Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Ring Lardner (1885-1933)
Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014)
Willie Mays (1931-2024)
Dick Fosbury (1947-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912)
Arthur Foote (1853-1937)
Pauline Donalda (1882-1970)
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Anthony Hedges (1931-2019)
Barry Tuckwell (1931-2020)
Sheila Nelson (1936-2020)
Richard Hickox (1948)

and

Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594)
Frank Norris (1870-1902)
Leslie Marmon Silko (1948)

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1750 that the first Shakespearean play was presented in America. Richard III was performed by the actors of Walter Murray and William Kean’s troupe from Philadelphia. Theater was still new in the colonies. And though it was popular in Philadelphia, that city still preferred to pride itself on its scientific and literary achievements, so Murray and Kean set out for New York City.

Through the 1700s, New York’s primary form of entertainment was drinking. By the time Murray and Kean arrived in February of 1750, there were 10,000 city residents and over 150 taverns. Murray and Kean set up shop in a two-story wooden structure on Nassau Street, slightly east of Broadway.

Review: Oregon Symphony dances with Vivaldi, Bologne, and Mozart gems

Photo credit: Oregon Symphony

 Light, crisp, fun, and insightful – with a new twist on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – that in a nutshell describes the Oregon Symphony concert that I heard Thursday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Guest conductor Jeannette Sorrell led the concert, which featured three pieces from the Baroque and Classical periods, and she inspired each piece so that the music danced with elan. That included a wonderful performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the amazing mandolin virtuoso, Avi Avital, as soloist – rather than the usual violinist.

Sorrell made her name as a harpsichordist and has thirty recordings, including many with the Apollo’s Fire, which she founded in 1999. With that ensemble, Sorrell won the 2019 Grammy for "Best Classical Solo Vocal Album" with Songs of Orpheus. She has built an impressive conducting resume, leading orchestras all over the world from the New York Philharmonic to the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León (Spain).

Using her storytelling talents, Sorrell, spoke to the audience before each movement of the Vivaldi, painting a picture of each movement with spot-on-descriptions that were briefly demonstrated by members of the orchestra. Introducing the first movement, for example, she highlighted the sound of birds, the brook, lightning, the sleeping shepherd, and the dog barking (perhaps a poodle or a German shepherd), and each mention was supported by a few bars of music.

Since the Four Seasons paints a bucolic picture, Sorrell noted that peasants might played a mandolin, and that served as the segue to introduce Avital. He then delivered an astonishingly moving and technically jaw-dropping performance as the soloist. There were a few moments, such as during the storm, in which the sound of the mandolin could not be heard over the orchestra. But otherwise, Avital’s playing perfectly enhanced all of the seasons – eliciting the joy of spring, hazy, lazy summers, a plentiful harvest, and the cold chill of winter – all of which was complemented superbly by chamber ensemble, which included a theorbo and Sorrell directing from the harpsichord. s

For an encore, Avital torched the hall with an amazing, off-the-cuff rendition of Bucimis, a traditional Bulgarian piece. On this YouTube video, Avital says that the piece has an unusual 15/16 rhythm and that he learned the piece from an accordion player. It started slowly and quietly, but ended in a madcap rush that brought down the house.

Photo credit: Oregon Symphony

The second half of the concert kicked off with the Symphony No. 2 of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a renown fencer and composer whose works have languished for a long, long time because of his African heritage. For his Second Symphony, the orchestra added a couple of horns and winds to a contingent of strings, and Sorrell conducted from the podium, encouraging delightful melodic lines to open the piece, transiting to a smooth and slightly slower pace in the middle section, and releasing a spirited, happy-go-lucky mood – with a little humorous pause that suggested Haydn – for the finale.

The concert closed with Sorrell leading the orchestra in a flat-out gorgeous performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 35, “Haffner.” From the outset, the orchestra created excellent dynamic contrasts and the piece danced in a free-spirited way. The exchange between the oboe and bassoon provided a subtle highlight and the vivacious Presto with the rolling sound of the kettledrums added to the thrilling conclusion of the piece.

Sorrell seems to inhibit this music with an extra-special, innate quality that is just contagious to hear. I hope that she can return to the Schnitz; so that listeners can benefit from another concert in the near future. And Avital is a force-of-nature with his extraordinary talent. Hopefully, he will return as well.

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Carlos Surinach (1915-1997)
Cecil Aronowitz (1916-1978)
Samuel Adler (1928)
Bernard Haitink (1929-2021)
Aribert Reimann (1936-2024)
Ralph Kirshbaum (1946)
Leanna Primiani (1968)

and

Khaled Hosseini (1965)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1801,the U.S. Marine Band performed for Thomas Jefferson's inaugural. Jefferson, an avid music lover and amateur violinist, gave the Marine Band the title "The President's Own." Since that time, the band has played for every presidential inaugural.

Today's Birthdays

Henry Wood (1869-1944)
Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982)
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)
Frank Wigglesworth (1918-1996)
Doc Watson (1923-2012)
Martin Lovett (1927-2020)
Florence Quivar (1944)
Roberta Alexander (1949)

and

James Merrill (1926-1995)
Ira Glass (1959)

From the Writer's Almanac:

Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata was published on this date in 1802. Its real name is the slightly less evocative “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 27, No. 2,” and its Italian subtitle is translated as “almost a fantasy.” In 1832, five years after Beethoven’s death, a German critic compared the sonata to the effect of moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne, and the interpretation became so popular that, by the end of the century, the piece was universally known as the “Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven himself had attributed the emotion of the piece to sitting at the bedside of a friend who had suffered an untimely death.

It was on this day in 1875 that the opera Carmen appeared on stage for the first time at the Opéra-Comique in France. When it premiered, the audience was shocked by the characters of Carmen, a gypsy girl, and her lover, Don José. The opera ran for 37 performances even though it came out late in the season, and it came back the next season, too.

Nietzsche heard Carmen 20 different times, and thought of it as a musical masterpiece. Tchaikovsky first heard Carmen in 1880. Bizet died of a heart attack just three months after the opera's debut.

It was on this day in 1931 that "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States.

The lyrics come from a poem written by Francis Scott Key more than a century before, "Defence of Fort McHenry." He'd spent a night toward the end of the War of 1812 hearing the British navy bombard Baltimore, Maryland. The bombardment lasted 25 hours — and in the dawn's early light, Francis Scott Key emerged to see the U.S. flag still waving over Fort McHenry. He jotted the poem "Defence of Fort McHenry" on the back of an envelope. Then he went to his hotel and made another copy, which was printed in the Baltimore American a week later.

The tune for the Star-Spangled Banner comes from an old British drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven," which was very popular at men's social clubs in London during the 1700s. Francis Scott Key himself did the pairing of the tune to his poem. It was a big hit.

For the next century, a few different anthems were used at official U.S. ceremonies, including "My Country Tis of Thee" and "Hail Columbia." The U.S. Navy adopted "The Star-Spangled Banner" for its officialdom in 1889, and the presidency did in 1916. But it wasn't until this day in 1931 — just 80 years ago — that Congress passed a resolution and Hoover signed into law the decree that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the official national anthem of the United States of America.

Today's Birthdays

Hélène de Montgeroult (1764-1836)
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)
Tom Burke (1890-1969)
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Marc Blitzstein (1905-1965)
John Gardner (1917-2011)
Robert Simpson (1921-1997)
Bernard Rands (1934)
Simon Estes (1938)
Robert Lloyd (1940)
Lou Reed (1942)

and

Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) (1904-1991)
Mikhail S Gorbachev (1931)
Tom Wolfe (1931-2018)
John Irving (1942)

and from the Composers Datebook:

Starting on this day in 1967 and continuing over the next two weeks, Russian cellist Mstsilav Rostropovich performed 26 works for cello and orchestra at 8 concerts with the London Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City -- including some world premieres!

Today's Birthdays

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960)
Glenn Miller (1904-1944)
Leo Brouwer (1939)
Moray Welsh (1947)
Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson (1954-2006)
Galina Gorchakova (1962)
Thomas Adès (1971)

and

Oskar Kokoschka (1866-1980)
Ralph Ellison (1913-1994)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Review: Vancouver Symphony celebrates Simon, Copland, and Gershwin in All-American program

 

The Vancouver Symphony celebrated the nation’s 250^th birthday in grand style at Skyview Concert Hall (February 21) with an All-American program that put the spotlight on the orchestra rather than on a soloist. The lineup was bookended with works by Carlos Simon and George Gershwin, drawing from African-American music, which aptly complemented Black History Month. Filling in the center were two beloved works by Aaron Copland, and all of the selections were led energetically by Music Director Salvador Brotons, who noted their challenging musical demands.

Simon, whose album Requiem for the Enslaved, was nominated for a Grammy-award in 2023, has emerged as one of our country’s best composers. His music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, and many other ensembles.

The VSO opened its concert with Simon’s Four Black American Dances, which was commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2023. In the first dance, “Ring Shout,” the percussion section created crispy snaps and dashes. The strings launched into a vigorous motoric sequence. Raspy trumpets and sliding trombones put everything into a groove that went full bore. The strings led the way in an elegant and leisurely second dance, “Waltz,” and the third dance “Tap!” took things up a notch with the snare drum accenting the sound. The final dance, “Holy Dance,” had a delightful mélange with tubular bells, snappy wood stick, and wah-wah-ing trombones that suggested a Hamond-organ sound. The piece wrapped up in big-band-symphonic style that reminded me of Gershwin.

Next on the program came “Four Dances Episodes” from Rodeo, which Copland originally wrote as a ballet for Agnes de Mille. The orchestra kicked things off with a feisty “Buckaroo Holiday,” that conveyed the lively goings-on at a rodeo. The gentle interplay between the bassoon and oboe, the dusky sound from the lower strings, and the soothing trumpets gave the “Corral Nocturne” a poignant quality. The famous melody permeated the “Saturday Night Waltz” with a lovely, relaxed feeling. The “Hoe-Down” charged up the atmosphere with toe tapping energy.

Copland originally wrote Appalachian Spring for thirteen instruments, but his version for full orchestra, which he uncorked a year later (1945) captures the original spirit of the piece perfectly. Brotons paced the orchestra deftly so that the music opened slowly and gracefully like a flower in bloom. The animated sections galloped along well, although the oboist struggled to play some phrases cleanly. The Shaker Hymn “Simple Gifts” sounded carefree and graceful, and the orchestra concluded the piece resolutely and with an air of hopefulness.

Saving the best for last, the orchestra gave an inspired performance of Catfish Row, which is a suite of tunes from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which is considered the greatest and most-well known American opera ever written. Inflected with musical style of Black Americans, including jazz, most of the audience recognized familiar numbers like “Summertime” and “Bess You Is My Woman Now.”  The brass section of the orchestra really got into the swing of the jazzy style from the opening passages, which have a busy, bustling openness and hopefulness. Michael Liu made the piano sing with the strains of honkytonk strains of “Jazzbo Brown’s Piano Blues” and special guest Peter Frajola (former associate concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony) brightened things up with his banjo for the “I Got Plenty of Nuttin” song. The orchestra aptly delivered passages that portray a hurricane, violent fights, and several other dramatic moments of the opera - all of led up to the thrilling finale when Porgy eagerly resolves to go to New York City to pursue Bess. It all made this reviewer wonder if there would be a way for the VSO to present a concert version someday.

Today's Birthdays

John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
Sergueï Bortkiewicz (1877-1952
Guiomar Novaes (1895-1979)
Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967)
Roman Maciejewski (1910-1998)
George Malcolm (1917-1997)
Joseph Rouleau (1929-2019)
Osmo Vänskä (1953)
Markus Stenz (1965)

and

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Linus Pauling (1901-1994)
Stephen Spender (1909-1995)
Zero Mostel (1915-1977)
Frank Gehry (1929-2025)
John Fahey (1939-2001)
Stephen Chatman (1950)
Colum McCann (1965)
Daniel Handler (1970)

and from the Composers Datebook

On this date in 1882, the Royal College of Music is founded in London.

Today's Birthdays

Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918)
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976)
Marian Anderson (1897-1993)
Elizabeth Welch (1904-2003)
Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006)
Mirella Freni (1935-2020)
Morten Lauridsen (1943)
Gidon Kremer (1947)
Frank-Peter Zimmermann (1956)

and

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024)
Ralph Nadar (1934)

Today's Birthdays

Anton (Antoine) Reicha (1770-1836)
Alfred Bachelet (1864-1944)
Emmy Destinn (1878-1930)
Frank Bridge (1879-1941)
Witold Rowicki (1914-1989)
Antoine Dominique "Fats" Domino (1928-2017)
Lazar Berman (1930-2005)
Johnny Cash (1932-2005)
Guy Klucevsek (1947)
Emma Kirkby (1949)
Richard Wargo (1957)
Carlos Kalmar (1958)

and

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
John George Nicolay (1832-1901)
Elisabeth George (1949)

Today's Birthdays

Armand-Louis Couperin (1727-1789)
Antoine Reicha (1770-1836)
Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965)
Victor Silvester (1900-1978)
Davide Wilde (1935-2025)
Jesús López-Cobos (1940)
George Harrison (1943-2001)
Lucy Shelton (1944)
Denis O'Neill (1948)
Melinda Wagner (1957)

and

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Karl Friedrich May (1842–1874)
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
John C. Farrar (1896-1974)

And from the New Music Box:

On February 25, 1924, the first issue of the League of Composers Review was published. Under the editorial leadership of Minna Lederman, this publication—which soon thereafter changed its name to Modern Music (in April 1925)—was the leading journalistic voice for contemporary music in America for over 20 years and featured frequent contributions from important composers of the day including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, Lehman Engel, and Marion Bauer. Its final issue appeared in the Fall of 1946.

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1682, Italian composer Alessandro Stradella, age 37, is murdered in Genoa, apparently in retaliation for running off with a Venetian nobleman's mistress.

Today's Birthdays

Antoine Boësset (1587-1643)
Samuel Wesley (1766-1837)
Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858)
Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)
Luigi Denza (1846-1922)
Oskar Böhme (1870-1938)
Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940)
Michel Legrand (1932-2019)
Renato Scotto (1934-2023)
Jiří Bělohlávek (1946)

and

Wilhelm (Carl) Grimm (1786-1859)
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
George Augustus Moore (1852-1933)
Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973)
Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
Jane Hirshfield (1953)
Judith Butler (1956)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1955, Carlisle Floyd's opera "Susannah" received its premiere at Florida State University in Tallahassee. According to Opera America, this is one of the most frequently-produced American operas during the past decade.

Today's Birthdays

John Blow (1649-1708)
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Sir Hugh Roberton (1874-1952)
Albert Sammons (1886-1957)
Dave Apollon (1897-1972)
Elinor Remick Warren (1905-1991)
Martindale Sidwell (1916-1998)
Hall Overton (1920-1972)
Régine Crespin (1927-2007)

and

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) - blogger of the 17th Century
W. E B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
William L. Shirer (1904-1993)
John Camp (John Sanford) (1944)

Tidbit from the New York Times obit: In the early 1930s, William Shirer and his wife shared a house with the guitarist Andres Segovia.

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1940 that Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land."

The melody is to an old Baptist hymn. Guthrie wrote the song in response to the grandiose “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin and sung by Kate Smith. Guthrie didn’t think that the anthem represented his own or many other Americans’ experience with America. So he wrote a folk song as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song that was often accompanied by an orchestra. At first, Guthrie titled his own song “God Blessed America” — past tense. Later, he changed the title to “This Land Is Your Land,” which is the first line of the song.

Today's Birthdays

Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817-1890)
York Bowen (1884-1961)
Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963)
Joseph Kerman (1924-2014)
George Zukerman (1927-2023)
Steven Lubin (1942)
Lowell Liebermann (1961)
Rolando Villazón (1972)

and

George Washington (1732-1799)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Gerald Stern (1925-2022)
Ishmael Reed (1938)
Terry Eagleton (1943)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
Leo Delibes (1836-1891)
Charles Marie Widor (1844-1945)
Kenneth Alford (1881-1945)
Andres Segovia (1893-1987)
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
Elena Duran (1949)
Simon Holt (1948)

and

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Erma Bombeck (1927-1996)
Ha Jin (1956)
Chuck Palahniuk (1962)
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Alexander Lingas to step down as Music Director of Cappella Romana

 

From the press release:

Cappella Romana announces today that the Board of Directors has accepted the request of Founder and Music Director Alexander Lingas to move into a new role as Music Director Emeritus.

 

Dr. Lingas will conduct the final concerts of Cappella Romana’s current season on March 6 and 7, 2026, featuring Maximilian Steinberg’s extraordinary Passion Week. Following these concerts, the Board will name Dr. Lingas as Music Director Emeritus. He has decided to step down as Music Director in order to concentrate on his academic work in the fields of Eastern Orthodox liturgy and music. Cappella Romana will look forward to inviting Dr. Lingas to take the podium as a guest director in the years to come following the appointment of a new Music Director.

 

Alexander Lingas writes, “I gathered a group of friends under the name ‘Cappella Romana’ to offer a benefit concert in 1991 representing, in embryonic form, a vision of combining passion with scholarship to explore the musical traditions of the Christian East and West. I am deeply grateful to all the artists, staff, board members, volunteers, generous benefactors, and audiences who joined me in cultivating that vision over the last 35 years. It has yielded a bountiful harvest: a world-class ensemble with an international reputation for its broadcasts, commissions and premieres of new works, educational outreach, live performances, recordings, research initiatives, and publications, both pastoral and scholarly.”

 

He continues, “Having discussed with Cappella Romana’s Board the idea of succession over the past few years, I decided that the time had now come for me to relinquish my current role in order to give priority to scholarship and theological education. I will continue to serve the liturgical and musical traditions of the Christian Roman oikouméne through my affiliations with the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge (UK) and the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York.”

 

The Board has appointed John Michael Boyer, currently Associate Music Director of Cappella Romana, as Interim Music Director for the 2026-27 season, the concerts of which will be announced in March. Guided by Cappella Romana’s strategic plan, over the next year the organization will conduct an international search for a new Music Director.

 

Commenting on this change, John Paterakis, President of the Board of Directors, said: “I am so grateful for the work done by Alexander, not only in creating Cappella Romana, but in growing us into the premier artistic organization for the establishment of Byzantine and Orthodox music in the greater canon of global music. From the very beginning Cappella Romana was far more than a modest regional organization and made a national and international impact almost immediately. That impact has now expanded considerably with our recording label Cappella Records and Cappella Romana Publishing. Alexander and I have been friends for many decades, and I have always admired his steady scholarship in this field. He is clearly the leading scholar on Byzantine music in the English-speaking world, and we support his decision to focus now on his important written contributions to the field.”

Cappella Romana will hold two receptions around the March concerts of Steinberg’s Passion Week, celebrating Dr. LIngas and his many achievements while also marking Cappella Romana’s 35th anniversary:

 

Seattle: A pre-concert reception will take place on Friday, March 6, 2026 at 6:30pm prior to the concert at 7:30pm at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church.

 

Portland: A post-concert reception will take place on Saturday, March 7, 2026 at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral. The concert at St. Mary’s Cathedral in NW Portland begins at 2:00pm and all audience members are welcome to join the reception after the concert, across town at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (3131 NE Glisan Street), the site of Cappella Romana’s founding in 1991.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Peter Salomon (1749-1815)
Charles‑Auguste de Bériot (1802-187)
Mary Garden (1874-1967)
Vasyl Oleksandrovych Barvinsky (1888-1963
Robert McBride (1911-2007)
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-1997)
Christoph Eschenbach (1940)
Barry Wordsworth (1948)
Cindy McTee (1953)
Riccardo Chailly (1953)
Chris Thile (1981)

and

Russel Crouse (1893-1966)
Louis Kahn (1901-1974)
Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
Robert Altman (1925-2006)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Today's Birthdays

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Louis Aubert (1877-1968)
Arthur Shepherd (1880-1958)
Grace Williams (1906-1977)
Stan Kenton (1912-1979
Timothy Moore (1922-2003)
George Guest (1924-2002)
György Kurtág (1926)
Michael Kennedy (1926-2014)
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988)
Smokey Robinson (1940)
Penelope Walmsley-Clark (1949)
Darryl Kubian (1966)

and

André Breton (1896-1966)
Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Amy Tan (1952)
Siri Hustvedt (1955)
Jonathan Lethem (1964)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632-1692)
Pietro Giovanni Guarneri (1655-1720)
Gustave Schirmer, Jr. (1864-1907)
Marchel Landowski (1915-1999)
Rolande Falcinelli (1920-2006)
Rita Gorr (1926-2012)
Yoko Ono (1933)
Marek Janowski (1939)
Marlos Nobre (1939)
Donald Crockett (1951)

and

Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
Len Deighton (1929)
Toni Morrison (1931-2019)
George Pelecanos (1957)

Today's Birthdays

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)
Sr. Edward German (1862-1936)
Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947)
Paul Fetler (1920-2018)
Ron Goodwin (1925-2003)
Fredrich Cerha (1926-2023)
Lee Hoiby (1926-2011)
Anner Bylsma (1944)
Karl Jenkins (1944)

and

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904)
Ronald Knox (1888-1957)
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
Chaim Potok (1929-2002)
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015)
Mo Yan (1955)

From the New Music Box:

On February 17, 1927, a sold-out audience attends the world premiere of The King's Henchman. an opera with music by composer, music critic and future radio commentator Deems Taylor and libretto by poet Edna St. Villay Millay, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The New York Times review by Olin Downes on the front page the next morning hailed it as the "best American opera." The opera closed with a profit of $45,000 and ran for three consecutive seasons. It has not been revived since and has yet to be recorded commercially.

Today's Birthdays

Charles Avison (1709-1770)
Willem Kes (1856-1934)
Selim Palmgren (1878-1951)
Maria Korchinska (1895-1979)
Alec Wilder (1907-1980)
Sir Geraint Evans (1922-1992)
Eliahu Inbal (1936)
John Corigliano (1938)
Sigiswald Kuiljken (1944)

and

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895)
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963)
Richard Ford (1944)

Report from Banff International String Quartet Competition in Chamber Music magazine

Last summer I attended the Banff International String Quartet Competition and wrote an article about it for the winter issue of Chamber Music, the magazine published by Chamber Music America. You need to have a subscription unless it is put online in the future.

Today's Birthdays

Michael Praetorius (1571-1621)
Jean‑François Lesueur (1760-1837)
Friedrich Ernst Fesca (1789-1826)
Heinrich Engelhard Steinway (1797-1871)
Robert Fuchs (1847-1927)
Marcella Sembrich (1858-1935)
Walter Donaldson (1893-1947)
Georges Auric (1899-1983)
Harold Arlen (1905-1986)
Jean Langlais (1907-1991)
Norma Procter (1928-2017)
John Adams (1947)
Christopher Rouse (1949)
Kathryn Harries (1951)
Christian Lindberg (1958)

and

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Art Spiegelman (1948)
Matt Groening (1954)

Reviews of Portland Opera's La Boheme and Everest in Opera magazine

 

My reviews of La Boheme and Everest are in the March issue of Opera. You will need a subscription to Opera in order to read the reviews. Multnomah County library used to carry it as subscription, but I am not sure that they still do.

Today's Birthdays

Pietro Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676)
Alexander Dargomizhsky (1813-1869)
Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948)
Jack Benny (1894-1974)
Wyn Morris (1929-2010)
Steven Mackey (1956)
Renée Fleming (1959)

and

Frederick Douglass (1814-1895)
Carl Bernstein (1944)

and

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London. He wrote the first draft in just 21 days, the fastest he’d ever written anything.

Rest in Peace Helmuth Rilling (1933-2026)

The great conductor Helmuth Rilling has passed. Especially renown for his work on Bach's music, Rilling co-founded the Oregon Bach Festival. As a member of the Portland Symphonic Choir, I got to sing with him when he led the Oregon Symphony in a performance of Haydn's "The Creation." That memorable performance featured Thomas Quasthoff. Here is a link to Rilling's obituary.

Today's Birthdays

Fernando Sor (1778-1839)
Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938)
Feodor Chaliapin (1873-1938)
Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919-1991)
Eileen Farrell (1920-2002)
Yfrah Neaman (1923-2003)
Colin Matthews (1946)
Peter Gabriel (1950)
Raymond Wojcik (1957-2014)
Philippe Jaroussky (1978)

and

William Roughead (1870–1952)
Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927)
Grant Wood (1891-1942)
Georges Simenon (1903-1989)
Elaine Pagels (1943)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1914, ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) is formally organized in New York City, with composer Victor Herbert as its first director.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812)
Roy Harris (1898-1979)
Franco Zeffirelli (1923-2019)
Mel Powell (1923-1998)
Paata Burchuladze (1951)

and

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Max Beckmann (1884-1950)
Judy Bloom (1938)

And courtesy of the New Music Box:

On February 12, 1924 at New York's Aeolian Hall, self-named 'King of Jazz' Paul Whiteman presented An Experiment in Modern Music, a concert combining "high art" and "hot jazz." The concert featured newly commissioned works from Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Edward MacDowell, Irving Berlin, Ferde Grofé, and Rudolf Friml, but the highlight of the program was the world premiere performance of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Review of Newport Symphony concert featuring Rachel Barton Pine

Guest review by Joshua Lickteig

NEWPORT, Ore. — As crisp as the cool sunny sea of January’s 17th day this year in Newport, the only year-round symphony of Oregon’s coast played a program of works spanning the 20th century, in a chronology that progressed from impressionism to post-minimalism and looped back to the late Romantic. Unifying the thread, each work has clear roots in dance, even if at times more about the idea of dancing than act itself.

Falla’s folk-musical remnants of pre-urban life, Stravinsky’s sometimes wry polystylistic assemblage of former worlds from scraps of evidence, Adams’ meta-foxtrot depicting Mao and Madame Mao perhaps in a ballroom during the Cultural Revolution, and the brief motivic interlacings and lilts and waltz-like qualities of lyrical sections of Glazunov.

The night began with a light though pensive mood altogether as music director and conductor Adam Flatt addressed the audients of the 371-seat (Alice Silverman) proscenium theatre, nearly seven-eighths full. In his preconcert talk, Flatt (also director of Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra and Colorado Ballet), considered the early 1900s as discourse amongst composers, exploring the personal worlds, styles of life, and artistic methods of the era’s and its preceding ‘große Persönlichkeiten’, or big personalities. Onstage, the emerald-green chairs and purple-lit glow from behind white acoustic panels was giving ethereally to the room.

Rachel Barton Pine – acclaimed violinist known for dazzling performance across repertoires, who debuted with the Chicago Symphony at age 10 and became the first American and youngest gold medal winner of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition – joined the discussion with her instrument, a 1742 Guarneri del Gesù violin, which she jested one day would be called the ‘ex-Pine’ (it has illustrious history with virtuosos like Antonio Bazzini and Brahms’s protégé Marie Soldat and passed through the Wittgenstein family). She talked amiably with the concertgoers and noted, “I love variety. My favorite piece is whatever I’m playing that night.” About Concerto for Violin in A Minor, Op. 82 by Alexander Glazunov (b. 1865), the featured soloist shared, “It is a wild romp of lots of colorful instruments . . . Incredible lyrical writing.” Pine first learned the work at the age of fifteen and has recorded its performance with the Russian National Orchestra. She spoke about the overall flow of the piece, its micro-details of phrasing and the violin’s imitation of other instruments; also of a secondary theme that weaves through the opening and middle sections, while loose hints of cadenza seek their culmination in the finale’s accelerated and exhilarating conclusion. On the notorious finger-twisting solo passage, Pine mentioned it requires about as much practice as the rest of the concerto itself, and added, “There is no coincidence [the notes] are all in that rich dark [lowest] G-string.”

After the talk, Executive Director Dan Howard reminded the crowd of a baroque event, “Music On the Bayfront”, on Valentine’s Day (a Saturday), at Pacific Maritime Heritage Center, which will showcase harpsichord and period instruments, and the upcoming annual Gala March 28th. From the string section, in a get-to-know-the-orchestra moment, he introduced violinist Alistair Kok, who expressed appreciation for the arts community’s support and the fulfilling experience of working professionally with local and regional musicians.

Spanish Dance No. 1 from La vida Breve, which Flatt earlier called a ‘bonbon’, whirs by, and its derivations of fiery flamenco and ‘zapateado’ (footwork) with the castanets give a glimpse of (b. 1876) Manuel de Falla’s creative philosophy and patriotic aesthetic; he is known to have urged colleagues to reject the notion of ‘universal’ musical formulae (i.e. the ethos of pre-existing German canon).

Next, the orchestra exhibits Pulcinella: what Flatt voiced critics would call “a new postwar objectivism— dispensing with romantic notions of expressing the heart.” It was performed last by the NSO in mid-November 2008. Igor Stravinsky (b.1882) presents the matter of old music, not the manner — “almost a taxidermied animal ”—  through discontinuity, irregularities, and sometimes angularities. Commissioned by impresario Sergei Diaghilev as a ballet (with Picasso designing costumes and sets), the 1920 work reimagines 18th-century music through a distinctly modern lens. To better suit for concert performance, Stravinsky revised it in 1947. Throughout the suite (I-VII) the orchestra embraced its moments of hilarity: rude sounds and clownishness punctuate sprightly string bass solos across many short movements. They unfolded the finale like an actual memory in the glimmer of winter frost, perhaps reaching back to folksongs and dances from Stravinsky’s childhood near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Utterances could be heard in the crowd lamenting the extant era’s continued power of myth.

Beyond intermission, the symphony brings a focused and scientific precision to The Chairman Dances, from the cutting-room floor of one of our most prominent living composers, John Adams’ (b. 1947) opera Nixon in China. The 13-minute concert piece differs in orchestration from the operatic setup. The entire work, as Flatt put it, belongs to the “so-called CNN operas”—works depicting modern historical events. This foxtrot is a surreal fantasy sequence from a presidential banquet, where Madame Mao hangs paper lanterns, changes into a tight cheongsam slit up the hip, and signals the orchestra to play before dancing alone. As Mao descends from his portrait to join her, days past are brought to their minds, and music plays on a gramophone. The NSO brilliantly conjured the wind-up and gradual slowdown of the contraption: the perceived music skips as the stylus gets stuck, and in the suspension of coherent sound, the sizzle with cymbal shimmers, pedal bass drum, and hi-hat snare are mechanical in quality yet awake. The whole percussion batterie—including triangle, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, crotales, bell tree, castanets, sandblocks, woodblocks, and timpani—functioned with excellence. An almost-hidden 9-foot Steinway Grand D tucked behind the harp anchored textures.

In Glazunov’s dramatic (and unpausing) concerto of wreathed themes the orchestra and soloist exchanged ideas smoothly and affectionately. Pine’s playing was spellbinding. For an encore, she offered Maud Powell’s 1919 violin transcription of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, originally arranged by J. Rosamond Johnson. The pioneering American violinist Powell created this adaptation to support Johnson’s New York Music School Settlement for Colored People, featuring it in her final performances. Pine’s revival of this work honors Powell’s legacy.

Musicians met with listeners after the performance in the lobby, where refreshments & sandwiches were served, and Pine greeted and spoke with many. The 37th season continues its standard programming with “Listening for Shakespeare” March 21st-22nd.

Joshua D. Lickteig is an artist and engineer born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His latest books are Half Moon Day Sun (2021) and Ten Control Mills (2015), some poems from which appeared in Don Russell’s plays Dreams of Drowning (2022) and iTopia (2016). He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an ongoing contributor to the Concordia News.

Today's Birthdays

Rudolf Firkušný (1912-1994)
Sir Alexander Gibson (1926-1995)
Michel Sénéchal (1927-2018)
Cristopher Dearnley (1930-2000)
Jerome Lowenthal (1932)
Gene Vincent (1935-1971)
Edith Mathis (1938-2025)
Alberto Lysy (1935-2009)
Christine Cairns (1959)

and

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
Elizabeth Bisland (1861-1929)
Philip Dunne (1908-1992)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993)
Pico Iyer (1957)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1841, was given the first documented American performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 at the New York's Broadway Tabernacle, by the German Society of New York, Uri Corelli Hill conducting.

Review: A Night of Light and Color: Oregon Symphony’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Bruch Violin Concerto, and Anna Clyne’s Color Field

Photo credit: Oregon Symphony

Guest review by Thomas Meinzen

Amid Portland’s winter light festival, it seemed fitting that the Oregon Symphony began their Pictures at an Exhibition program (February 7) with the bright hues Yellow, Red, and Orange in the three-movement Color Field by Anna Clyne.

Clyne’s work references Mark Rothko’s 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow, in which bright, blurred rectangles appear to float off the page, each distorting how the audience views the color above and below. Likewise, Clyne’s first movement, Yellow, seemed to float into the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, with open chords and quiet, subtly shifting strings. Silvered with high notes of bowed crotales, Yellow conjured the spacious, ethereal feeling of early morning light.

Building in richness and grandeur, the movement introduced a Serbian folk melody in the deep movement of the basses, conjuring images of something great and old emerging from shadow into light. Adopted by the higher strings and winds, this melody lent the piece increasing shape and structure, while still maintaining the meditative impression of a great, open vista. In many ways, the piece captured the qualities of light in a way that was more tender and transcendent than the festival’s displays. Sometimes the description outshines the real thing.

Following Yellow, Red was joltingly fast and furious, with rumbling timpani and bass drums, strings screaming down scales, and declarations of fiery brass. Stampeding advances alternated with moments of calm, crescendo-ing to a bold, sudden conclusion.

Yet it was Orange, the third and final movement, that proved most captivating. The resonance and reverb of percussionist Stephen Kehner’s work on the glockenspiel was the signature of this movement, bookending it with a mystical sense of space and color. An incremental layering of voices began with the oboe and swelled to include nearly every member of the orchestra, bringing the open feeling of Yellow into conversation with the bold intensity of Red. This rounded out an exquisite, contemplative composition.

While the opener left listeners in quiet reverie, the Oregon Symphony truly fulfilled its duty to dazzle with Gil Shaham’s marvelous performance of the Max Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor. The Bruch showcased the delicate touch and remarkable fluidity and energy of the GRAMMY award-winning violinist.

Shaham’s notes emerged tenderly from a backdrop of gently held chords, rising through the orchestra’s sound and flying across virtuosic passages with ease and elegance. As conductor Daniel Danzmayr deftly guided the orchestra from swells of melody to sudden restraint, the clear tones of Shaham’s 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius soared into the hall, a vector of energy which carried the orchestra to new heights. Shaham himself seemed caught up in the concerto’s vigor, stepping forward into cadenzas and even bouncing on the balls of his feet during the triumphant Finale. And the audience was right there with him, rising to a long standing-ovation after the Bruch and again after Shaham’s encore, the Tempo di Borea and Double from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 1 in B minor—a brilliant display of dexterity, precision, and passion.

Photo credit: Oregon Symphony

 And yet, the night’s titular event was still ahead: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (arranged by Ravel). As Danzmayr shared, Mussorgsky wrote Pictures as a piano suite after attending an exhibition of the paintings of Viktor Hartmann in 1874, a fellow Russian artist and friend of Mussorgsky who had died the previous year. Never performed publicly in Mussorgsky’s life, Pictures was first published by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886, and eventually arranged for orchestra by several musical luminaries, most enduringly by Ravel in 1922.

Although it abandons classical forms and was met with skepticism by Mussorgsky’s peers, Pictures at an Exhibition is renowned for good reason. With a bold brass entrance, its grand Promenade theme remains in the ear for days, an asymmetrical meter lending the theme a hook that belies its simplicity. And the whole ten-movement work tugs at the imagination, richly illustrating scenes ranging from the somber and pensive to the playful and strange.

The diverse voices and exposed moments of Pictures also provided a great opportunity for the orchestra to showcase each member’s individual talents and timbre. The haunting alto saxophone solo in The Old Castle was particularly evocative; the tight articulations of muted trumpets in Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle also revealed excellent control. Perhaps most impressive, however, was the performance of tubist JáTtik Clark: after a sensitive euphonium feature in Bydlo, he commanded incredible power in The Hut on Fowl’s Legs and the final expression of the Promenade. I kept looking for additional tubas, but those astounding decibels were all from Clark.

Beyond individual musicianship, however, it was the power of the symphony’s cohesion and collective might that brought down the house in the grand finale, The Great Gate of Kiev, which featured a massive bell from the Netherlands made especially for this concert and engraved for the Oregon Symphony. This final declamatory movement was towering and triumphant, concluding the night and garnering an immediate standing ovation. Under Danzmayr’s leadership, the Oregon Symphony continues to astonish and delight.

Thomas Meinzen is a composer, pianist, writer, and ecologist. Thomas studied music composition and orchestration with John David Earnest and Eric Funk. He has worked across the U.S. and Costa Rica as an avian field biologist and currently teaches natural history, ecology, arboriculture, and music through several local nonprofits, in addition to coordinating Portland tree-planting efforts with Friends of Trees. An avid bicyclist, birder, and public transit advocate, you can find his writing at greenbirder.substack.com and music at thomasmeinzen.bandcamp.com.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Melchior Molter (1696-1765)
Adelina Patti (1843-1919)
Jean Coulthard (1908-2000)
Joyce Grenfell (1914-2001)
Cesare Siepi (1923-2010)
Leontyne Price (1927)
Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)
Roberta Flack (1937-2025)
Barbara Kolb (1939-2024)
Yuja Wang (1987)

and

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Åsne Seierstad (1970)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1921, Charles Ives hears Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird" Ballet Suite at an all-Russian program by the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Also on the program were works of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff (with Rachmaninoff as piano soloist). Walter Damrosch conducted.

Review of Tines-Ruckus concert published in Classical Voice North America

My review of this unique concert is available in CVNA here.

Today's Birthdays

Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841)
Franz Xaver Witt (1834-1888)
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Harald Genzmer (1909-2007)
Hildegard Behrens (1937-2009)
Ryland Davies (1943-2023)
Paul Hillier (1949)
Jay Reise (1950)
Marilyn Hill Smith (1952)
Amanda Roocroft (1966)

and

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
James Stephens (1882-1950)
Brendan Behan (1923-1964)
J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee (1940)
Alice Walker (1944)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1893, Verdi's opera, "Falstaff," was first performed in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala. This was Verdi's last opera.

Today's Birthdays

Jacob Praetorius (1586-1651)
André Grétry (1741-1813)
Osian Ellis (1928-2021)
John Williams (1932)
Elly Ameling (1933)
Margaret Brouwer (1940)
Stephen Roberts (1948)
Irvine Arditti (1953)

and

Jules Verne (1828-1905)
Kate Chopin (1850-1904)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Neal Cassady (1926-1968)
John Grisham (1955)

and from the Composers Datebook:

1880 - German opera composer Richard Wagner writes a letter to his American dentist, Dr. Newell Still Jenkins, stating "I do no regard it as impossible that I decide to emigrate forever to America with my latest work ["Parsifal"] and my entire family" if the Americans would subsidize him to the tune of one million dollars.

Today's Birthdays

Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927)
Ossip Gabrilovich (1878-1936)
Eubie Blake (1883-1983)
Claudia Muzio (1889-1936)
Quincy Porter (1897-1966)
Edmond De Luca (1909-2004)
Lord Harewood (1923-2011)
Maruis Constant (1925-2004)
Stuart Burrows (1933-2025)
Wolfgang van Schweintz (1953)
Andy Akiho (1979)

and

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Gay Talese (1932)

Today's Birthdays

Henry Litolff (1818-1891)
Karl Weigl (1881-1949)
Andre Marchal (1894-1980)
Claudio Arrau (1903-1991)
Stephen Albert (1941-1992)
Bob Marley (1945-1981)
Bruce J. Taub (1948)
Matthew Best (1957)
Sean Hickey (1970)

and

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Eric Partridge (1894-1979)
George Herman "Babe" Ruth (1895-1948)
Mary Douglas Leakey (1913-1996)
Deborah Digges (1950-2009)
Michael Pollan (1955)

Today's Birthdays

 Ole Bull (1810-1880)

Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748-1798)
Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943)
Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)
Jussi Björling (1911-1960)
Sir John Pritchard (1921-1989)
Luc Ferrari (1929-2005)
John Poole (1934-2020)
Ivan Tcherepnin (1943-1998)
Josef Protschka (1944)
Phylis Bryn-Julson (1945)

and

Martin Marty (1928-2025)
Henry Louis "Hank" Aaron (1934-2021)
John Guare (1938)
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
Christopher Guest (1948)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1887, Verd's: opera "Otello" premiered in Milan at the Teatro all Scala, with the composer conducting (and cellist Arturo Toscanini in the orchestra).

Review in CVNA of Oregon Symphony concert and last-minute rescue by pianist Ying Li

Pianist Ying Li flew in from New York City at the last minute to rescue Oregon Symphony's concert that featured Grieg's Piano Concerto. You can read all about it in my review, which has been published in Classical Voice North America here.

Today's Birthdays

Eustache du Caurroy (1549-1609)
Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795)
Aristide Cavaillé‑Coll (1811-1899)
Yrjo Kilpinen (1892-1952)
Bernard Rogers (1893-1968)
Erich Leinsdorf (1912-1993)
Jutta Hipp (1925-2003)
Martti Talvela (1935-1989)
François Dumeaux (1978)

and also

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
Gavin Ewart (1916-1995)
Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
Robert Coover (1932-2024)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594)
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Sidney Lanier (1842-1881)
Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986)
Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975)
Blas Galindo Dimas (1910-1993)
Jehan Alain (1911-1940)
Helga Dernesch (1939)

and

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)
Alvar Aalto (1898-1978)
James Michener (1907-1997)
Simone Weil (1909-1943)
Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Paul Auster (1947)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1844, Berlioz's "Roman Carnival" Overture, in Paris was premiered at the Salle Herz, with the composer conducting.

Today's Birthdays

Louis Marchand (1669-1732)
Leo Fall (1873-1925)
Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962)
Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)
Stan Getz (1927-1991)
Skip Battin (1934-2003)
Martina Arroyo (1937)
Sir Andrew Davis (1944)
Ursula Oppens (1944)
Eliane Aberdam (1964)

And

James Joyce (1882-1941)
James Dickey (1923-1997)
Tom Smothers (1937-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Francesco Stradivari (1671-1743)
Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768)
Johan Joachim Agrell (1701-1765)
Victor Herbert (1859-1924)
Julius Conus (1869-1942)
Clara Butt (1872-1936)
Sándor Veress (1907-1999)
Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993)
Renata Tebaldi (1922-2004)
Ursula Mamlok (1928-2016)
Michael G. Shapiro (1951)

and

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
S. J. Perelman (1904-1979)
Muriel Spark (1918- 2006)
Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

Today's Birthdays

François Devienne (1759-1803)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Caroline Miolan‑Carvalho (1827-1895)
James Huneker (1857-1921)
Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950)
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
Nathan Milstein (1904-1992)
Benjamin Frankel (1906-1973)
Alan Lomax (1915-2002)
Jaap Schröder (1925-2020)
Odetta (1930-2008)
Philip Glass (1937)
Stephen Cleobury (1948)
Donna Summer (1948-2012)
George Benjamin (1960)
Jennifer Higdon (1962)

and

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Zane Grey (1872-1939)
John O'Hara (1905-1970)
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Today's Birtdays

Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773)
Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935)
Walter Damrosch (1862-1950)
Mitch Leigh (1928-2014)
Lynn Harrell (1944-2020)
Silvia Marcovici (1952)
Gerald Finley (1960)

and

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989)
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016)
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777)
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871)
Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852-1935)
Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Havergal Brian (1876-1972)
Blanche Selva (1884-1942)
Luigi Nono (1924-1990)
Myer Fredman (1932-2014)
Malcolm Binns (1936)
Cho-Liang Lin (1960)

and

W. C. Fields (1880-1946
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1826 was the premiere of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, "Death and the Maiden," as a unrehearsed reading at the Vienna home of Karl and Franz Hacker, two amateur musicians. Schubert, who usually played viola on such occasions, could not perform since he was busy copying out the parts and making last-minute corrections.
and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1845 that Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror. It was a huge sensation: Abraham Lincoln memorized it and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a fan letter to Poe. He was paid $9 for “The Raven,” and it was extensively reprinted without his permission, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had written an unsigned article for the Mirror before about copyright law saying, “Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats,” but there was no such law until 1891. His income in 1844 was $424; in 1845, he made $549.

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni (1757-1821)
Ferdinand Herold (1791-1833)
Alexander Mackenzie (1822-1892)
Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982)
Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994)
Michael Head (1900-1976)
Ronnie Scott (1927-1996)
Acker Bilk (1929-2014)
Sir John Tavener (1944-2013)
Richard Danielpour (1956)

and

Colette (1873-1954)
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022)
David Lodge (1935-2025)

Today's Birthdays

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Juan Crisostomo Arriage (1806-1826)
Edouard Lalo (1823-1892)
Jerome Kern (1885-1945)
Jack Brymer (1915-2003)
Skitch Henderson (1918-2005)
Helmut Zacharias (1920-2002)
Fritz Spiegl (1926-2003)
John Ogdon (1937-1989)
Jean-Philippe Collard (1948)
Emanuel Pahud (1970)
James Ehnes (1976)

and

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
Dmitry Mandeleyev (1834-1907)
Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795)
Maria Augusta von Trapp (1905-1987)
Stéphane Grappelli (1908-1997)
Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990)
Warren Benson (1924-2005)
Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987)
Frédéric Lodéon (1952)
Mikel Rouse (1957)
Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977)
Gustavo Dudamel (1981)

and

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905)
Seán MacBride (1904-1988)
Jules Feiffer (1929-2025)
Christopher Hampton (1946)
Ellen DeGeneres (1958)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1790, Mozart's opera, "Così fan tutte," was premiered in Vienna at the Burgtheater.

Today's Birthdays

Jan Blockx (1851-1912)
Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954)
Julia Smith (1905-1989)
Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)
Alfred Reed (1921-2005)
Etta James (1938-2012)
Russell Peck (1945-2009)

and

Robert Burns (1759-1796)
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Today's Birthdays

Farinelli (Carlo Maria Broschi) (1705-1782)
Frederick II the Great (1712-1786)
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822)
Evelyn Barbirolli (1911-2008)
Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008)
Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915-1940)
Gottfried von Einem (1918-1996)
Leon Kirchner (1919-2009)
Neil Diamond (1941)
Yuri Bashmet (1953)
Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

and

William Congreve (1670-1729)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Desmond Morris (1928)

Danzmayr concert with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra cancelled because of bad weather

The harsh winter storm has put the kibosh on David Danzmayr's appearance wtih the Atlanta Symphony tonight. Brrr! Hopefully, he can catch a flight back to Portland to lead the Oregon Symphony later this week.

Today's Birthdays

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)
Rutland Boughton (1878-1960)
Django Reinhardt (1910-1953)
Milton Adolphus (1913-1988)
Eli Goren (1923-2000)
Chita Rivera (1933-2024) Cécile Ousset (1936)
Teresa Zylis-Gara (1936-2021)
John Luther Adams (1953)
Mason Bates (1977)

and

Stendhal (1783-1842)
Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1894, Czech composer Antonin Dvorák presents a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Concert Hall in New York, using an all-black choir, comprised chiefly of members of the St. Philip's Colored Choir. On the program was the premiere performance of Dvorák's own arrangement of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home," which featured vocal soloists Sissierette Jones and Harry T. Burleigh.

Oregon Symphony concert with Kwak and Stenz in Oregon Arts Watch

 My review of a rewarding Oregon Symphony concert from last weekend has been published in OAW here.

Today's Birthdays

Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727-1799)
Charles Tournemire (1870-1939)
Hans Erich Apostel (1901-1972)
Robin Milford (1903-1959)
Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981)
Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013)
William Warfield (1920-2002)
Leslie Bassett (1923-2016)
James Louis ("J.J.") Johnson (1924-2001)
Aurèle Nicolet (1926-2016)
Uto Ughi (1944)
Myung-whun Chung (1953)

and

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Howard Moss (1922-1987)
Joseph Wambaugh (1937-2025)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day, in 1907, the Metropolitan Opera production of Richard Strauss' opera "Salome," with soprano Olive Fremstad in the title role, creates a scandal. The opera is dropped after a single performance, and not staged at the Met again until the 1930s.

Review: Young Artists highlight Vancouver Symphony concert

It is very impressive to see accomplished, professionals solo with an orchestra, but when the featured artists are super-talented teenagers and even younger, it is pretty astounding. Such was the case at the Vancouver Symphony’s concert on January 18th at Skyview Concert Hall, when the three gold medalists from the orchestra’s Young Adult Competition took the stage. Violinist Hana Gottesman, saxophonist Jacob Peizner, and pianist Wilson Liu dazzled the audience with their artistry in performing difficult concertos with the orchestra under music director Salvador Brotons – all of which made a strong case for the arts in the education of our nation’s youth.

First in the program lineup was Gottesman, a 17-year-old violinist from Bellevue, Washington, who started violin lessons when she was just six. She played Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane”, which opens with a long and treacherous cadenza, impeccably. She gave some notes a real zing, and collaborated deftly with the orchestra to convey the gypsy-inspired themes of the piece.

Next came Peizner, age 17, who is a senior at Oregon Episcopal School. He delivered a sparkling rendition of Jacques Ibert’s “Concertino da camera for alto saxophone and eleven instruments.” During the first part of the piece, he negotiated a seemingly endless series of runs with elan. He expressed the beginning of the second part with great sensitivity and conquered the cadenza to bring the piece to a joyful conclusion.

After intermission, Liu wowed concertgoers with a stellar performance of the first movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20. Although he is only eleven years old, Liu showed an artistic level way, way above his age, expressing the piece with perfectly calibrated dynamics and technical precision. He handled delicate passages with the utmost care, but he could also spring into a passionate section with unbridled gusto. He demonstrated an innate musicality that was flat-out jaw dropping, and the audience rewarded him with an enthusiastic standing ovation.

For the purely orchestral portion of the concert, Brotons led his forces in a rousing interpretation of Richard Strauss’s “Til Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” Jeong Yoon Lee, who usually is the VSO’s principal second violinist, took over the concertmaster position and excelled with her solos. Principal hornist Daniel Partridge announced the prankster’s theme with panache, and Ricky Smith expertly handled all of the tricky passages for the E-flat clarinet, as if to channel the trickster directly.

Since the piece relates to several escapades, it would have been nice to have had some projected text to accompany the music. That would help American audiences, who don’t know the stories, understand the music more.

Brotons gave a very humorous introduction to the Suite from the from Richard Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier.” The horns sounded glorious as they launched the first volleys. Principal oboist Alan Juza contributed substantially with his playing. The performance – highlighted by its wistful waltz tune – had just the right sentiment to evoke scenes from the opera.

The concert began on a much different note – with the orchestra eliciting space travel in “Mothership” by Mason Bates. This piece blends electronic and acoustical sounds in a very effective way. A heavy, pulsating beat establishes a rhythmic drive that permeates much of the time, but there is a section – given over to the cellos – that was briefly soothing. The orchestra then gathers its forces to create a sound of a spaceship taking off and whirling into the sky.

Judging from the smiles that I saw, it seemed that the orchestra really enjoyed cutting loose on the piece. The audience applauded the piece with vigor, and I think that I noticed Brotons smiling. Since Brotons is a composer, himself, I will have to find out if he has tried to write an orchestral piece that uses electronics. You never know…

Today's Birthdays

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)
Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977)
Webster Booth (1902-1984)
Placido Domingo (1941)
Richie Havens (1941-2013)
Edwin Starr (1942-2003)
Suzanne Mentzer (1957)
Frank Ticheli (1958)

and

Louis Menand (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Hermann Schein (1586-1630)
Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
Julius Conus (1869-1942)
Józef Hofmann (1876-1957)
Huddie William Ledbetter (Lead Belly) (1889-1949)
Walter Piston (1894-1976)
Eva Jessye (1895-1992)
Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010)
David Tudor (1926-1996)
Antonio de Almeida (1928-1997)
Iván Fischer (1951)

and

George Burns (1896-1996)
Alexandra Danilova (1903-1997)
Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
Edward Hirsch (1950)
Tami Hoag (1959)

Today's Birthdays

Louis‑Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749)
George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898)
Fritz Reiner (1888-1963)
Paul Dessau (1894-1979)
Edith Piaf (1915-1963)
Dalton Baldwin (1931-2019)
Phil Ochs (1940-1976)
William Christie (1944)
Marianne Faithfull (1946)
Olaf Bär (1957)
Steven Esserlis (1958)
Rebecca Saunders (1967)

and

Italo Svevo (1861-1928)
Constance Garnett (1861-1946)

Today's Birthdays

César Cui (1835-1918)
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)
John Laurence Seymour (1893-1986)
Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-1996)
Anthony Galla-Rini (1904-2006)
John O'Conor (1947)
Anthony Pople (1955-2003)
Christoph Prégardien (1956)

and

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869)
Rubén Darío (1867-1916)
A. A. Milne (1882-1956)
Oliver Hardy (1892-1957)

FYI: Roget's "Thesaurus" has never been out of print since it was first published in 1852.

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1958, "What Does Music Mean?", broadcast, the first of a series of televised New York Philharmonic "Young People's Concerts" on CBS-TV hosted by Leonard Bernstein. The series continued until 1972, with 53 different programs hosted by Bernstein.

Today's Birthdays

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
John Stanley (1712-1786)
Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728-1788)
François‑Joseph Gossec (1734-1829)
Henk Badings (1907-1987)
Oscar Morawetz (1917-2007)
Annie Delorie (1925-2009)
Donald Erb (1927-2008)
Jean Barraqué (1928-1973)
Sydney Hodkinson (1934-2021)
Dame Gillian Weir (1941)
Anne Queffélec (1948)
Augustin Dumay (1949)
Nancy Argenta (1957)
Gérard Pesson (1958)

and

Anne Brontë (1820-1849)
William Stafford (1914-1993)
Luis López Nieves (1950)
Sebastian Junger (1962)

Classical Voice North America - looking back on 2025

I wrote a short but sweet missive that looks back on the articles and authors who contributed to Classical Voice North America and have helped to boost it as a national magazine for classical music. The article provides a lot of links to all sorts of concerts and events that we covered. You can read all about it right here.

Today's Birthdays

Niccoló Piccinni (1728-1800)
Henri Büsser (1872-1973)
Daisy Kennedy (1893-1981)
Ernesto Halffter (1905-1989)
Ethel Merman (1908-1984)
Roger Wagner (1914-1992)
Ernesto Bonino (1922-2008)
Pilar Lorengar (1928-1996)
Marilyn Horne (1934)
Richard Wernick (1934-2015)
Gavin Bryars (1943)
Brian Ferneyhough (1943)
Katia Ricciarelli (1946)

and

Robert Service (1874-1958)
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)
William Kennedy (1928)
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1969)
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Mary Karr (1955)
Lin-Manuel Miranda (1980)

Preview: Vancouver Symphony to present Young Artists Showcase

One of the most awesome concerts of the Vancouver Symphony’s season will take place this upcoming weekend (January 17 and 18) when three of the nation’s top young talents will perform with the orchestra. This is the 31st Young Artist Showcase, featuring the winners of VSO’s annual competition, which was held in October at First Presbyterian Church. An esteemed panel of judges (Zuill Bailey, Dr. Julia Hwakyu Lee, Philippe Quint, Dr. Ken Selden, and Dr. Igor Shakhman) determined the winners in the piano, brass/woodwind, and strings categories. The gold medalists were pianist Wilson Liu, violinist Hana Gottesman, and , alto saxophonist Jacob Peizner. Each of them received $5,000 and the opportunity to perform with the VSO.

To find out more about these extremely talented young musicians, I contacted each one by phone, starting with Wilson Liu. Although Liu is only eleven years old, he is already a veteran winner of competitions, including the 2025 International Young Artist Concerto Competition At age seven, Liu entered The Juilliard School Pre-College Division where he won the Bachauer Prize with full scholarship and Concerto Competition. He studies with Hung-Kuan Chen and Tema Blackstone.

When he was four and a half years old, Liu started playing on a small electric piano and moved to an upright a year later. Although Wilson’s parents are not musical, he was encouraged by them.

“I don’t sing well, so I stayed with the piano, and that’s been a good choice,” said Liu. “I love the vast range of possibilities that I can get from the keyboard. If you experiment with color, every different way that you play a note comes out differently.”

During the weekdays Liu practices two to three hours, but over the weekend he dedicates more time. He will play the first movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 with the VSO.

“One of the things that I find fascinating about this concerto,” said Liu, “is that it is one of the two concertos that he wrote in a minor key. The first one was in C minor, and this one is in D minor. So it has a sense of darkness that is a bit unusual for Mozart’s concertos. I always wonder if the people who heard it for the first time were scared by the music. It also has a four-note motif – a quick upward motion – that is so cool that Beethoven, Schubert and other composers stole the idea and used it in their music. For example, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 111 uses the same thing.”

Gold medalist Hana Gottesman is a 17-year-old violinist from Bellevue, Washington, who has won top prizes at Royal Maas International, UK International, Coeur d’Alene National Young Artist, MTNA National, and Seattle Young Artist Music Festival competitions. She has appeared as a soloist with the Northwest Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Northwest, and SEEN Orchestra of Chicago.

Gottesman started when she was about six. She grew up in a musical household.

“My mom plays the piano and my dad is a violist,” said Gottesman. “I love classical music and the violin in particular. That has kept me focused.”

Gottesman, who attends schools in Bellevue, has studied violin with Jan Coleman and currently works with Simon James. With the Vancouver Symphony, she will play Ravel’s “Tzigane.”

“’Tzigane’ opens with an improvisational feeling – like gypsy fiddling – which relates to the title, which means gypsy,” said Gottesman. “It’s a piece that constantly shifts in mood and character, and that is fun to share with the audience. It opens with a long, challenging cadenza. The first page is all on the G string. I like to give the high G a lot of vibrato so that it sounds intense. I really enjoy the incredible variety of colors that this piece offers.”

“When the orchestra comes in,” said Gottesman, “and the main theme of the piece is finally exposed, it is fun to listen to how that that is repeated through the rest of the piece – with all of the variations. The music evolves into something else at the end.”

Jacob Peizner, age 17, is a senior at Oregon Episcopal School and a student of Phil Baldino and Kenneth Radnofsky. Peizner was one of ten saxophonists internationally selected for the 2024 Boston University’s Tanglewood Saxophone Workshop and was co-principal saxophone for the 2025 Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestra and Wind-Ensemble. He is the principal saxophonist in the Portland Youth Philharmonic and has soloed with the PYP Camerata ensemble.

Peizner started playing saxophone when he was a sixth grader.

“I chose it because I like jazz and saxophone is cool, said Peizner. “I grew up in a musical family. My mom plays flute, and my grandmother plays piano. I play clarinet and piano, also.”

With the VSO, he will play Jacques Ibert’s “Concertino da camera for alto saxophone and eleven instruments.”

“It was composed for Sigurd Raschèr, one of the pioneers of classical saxophone,” said Peizner. “He could play four octaves on the saxophone, which was very rare. Ibert’s composition has some really high notes that are very challenging to play. I am going to take them, using what we call ‘extended technique.’ It’s a very tricky piece. There’s a lot of fast passages with tricky keys. The piece is literally a ‘little chamber concerto.’ I like to keep that in mind. It shouldn’t be played heavily or taken to seriously. It has jazzy elements.”

In addition to the soloes by the gold medalists, the VSO, under Music Director Salvador Brotons, will play Mason Bates' "Mothership," and the Suite from the from Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” as well as his symphonic poem “Till Eulenspeigel’s Merry Pranks.”

Today's Birthdays

Ivor Novello (1893-1951)
Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991)
Malcolm Frager (1935-1991)
Don "Captain Beefheart" Van Vliet (1941-2010)
Aaron Jay Kernis (1960)

and

Molière (1622-1673)
Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872)
Andreas William Heinesen (1900-1991)
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Frank Conroy (1936-2005)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1941 Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" was premiered at Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner of war camp in Görlitz (Silesia), with the composer at the piano and fellow-prisoners Jean Le Boulaure (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet), and Etienne Pasquier (cello).

Today's Birthdays

Ludwig von Köchel (1800-1877)
Jean de Reszke (1850-1925)
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Louis Quilico (1925-2000)
Zuzana Ruzickova (1927-2017)
Siegmund Nimsgern (1940)
Mariss Jansons (1943-2019)
Kees Bakels (1945)
Nicholas McGegan (1950)
Ben Heppner (1956)
Andrew Manze (1965)

and

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
Emily Hahn (1905-1997)
John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)
Maureen Dowd (1952)

Review of Christine Goerke singing Wagner with the Oregon Symphony

 My review of last Saturday's concert of Wagner hits with Christine Goerke and the Oregon Symphony has been posted on Classical Voice North America here.

Today's Birthdays

Christoph Graupner (1683-1760)
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749)
Vassili Kalinnikov (1866-1901)
Richard Addinsell (1904-1977)
Daniil Shafran (1923-1997)
Renato Bruson (1936)
Paavo Heininen (1938-2022)
William Duckworth (1943-2012)
Richard Blackford (1954)
Wayne Marshall (1961)
Juan Diego Flórez (1973)

and

Horatio Alger (1832-1899)
Lorrie Moore (1957)

Today's Birthdays

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)
Jacques Duphly (1715-1789)
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948)
Pierre Bernac (1899-1979)
William Pleeth (1916-1999)
Leo Smit (1921-1999)
Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Salvatore Martirano (1927-1995)
Anne Howells (1941)
Viktoria Postnikova (1944)
Lori Laitman (1955)

and

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Jack London (1876-1916)
Haruki Murakami (1949)

Today's Birthdays

Christian Sinding (1856-1941)
Reihold Glière (1875-1956)
Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)
Mark DeVoto (1940)
York Höller (1944)
Drew Minter (1955)
Alex Shapiro (1962)

and

William James (1842-1910)
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
Alan Paton (1903-1988)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1925, Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City by the New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch, with Nadia Boulanger the soloist.

Today's Birthdays

Jean Martinon (1910-1976)
Sidney Griller (1911-1993)
Dean Dixon (1915-1976)
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)
Max Roach (1924-2007)
Sherrill Milnes (1935)
Rod Stewart (1945)
James Morris (1947)
Mischa Maisky (1948)
Rockwell Blake (1951)
Charles Norman Mason (1955)
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (1961)

and

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Philip Levine (1928-2015)
Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002)

Today's Birthdays

John Knowles Paine (1839-1906)
Rudolf Bing (1902-1997)
Herva Nelli (1909-1994)
Henriette Puig‑Roget (1910-1992)
Pierre Pierlot (1921-2007)
Joan Baez (1941)
Scott Walker (1944)
Jimmy Page (1944)
Waltraud Meier (1956)
Hillevi Martinpelto (1958)
Nicholas Daniel (1962)

and

Karel Čapek (1890-1938
Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935)
Richard Halliburton (1901-1939)
Brian Friel (1929-2015)
Michiko Kakutani (1955)

Today's Birthdays

Jean Gilles (1668-1705)
Lowell Mason (1792-1872)
Sigismond Thalberg (1812-1871)
Hans von Bülow (1830-1894)
Jaromir Weinberger (1896-1967)
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988)
Giorgio Tozzi (1923-2011)
Robert Starer (1924-2001)
Benjamin Lees (1924-2010)
Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
Zdeněk Mácal (1936-2023)
Robert Moran (1937)
Evgeny Nesterenko (1938-2021)
Elijah Moshinsky (1946)
Paul Dresher (1951)
Vladimir Feltsman (1952)

and

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)
Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972)
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1923, the first broadcast in England of an opera direct from a concert hall took place, Mozart's "The Magic Flute" via the BBC from London.

Today's Birthdays

Clara Haskil (1895-1960)
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
John Brownlee (1900-1969)
Nicanor Zabaleta (1907-1993)
Günter Wand (1912-2002)
Ulysses Kay (1917-1995)
John Lanigan (1921-1996)
Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000)
Tommy Johnson (1935-2006)
Iona Brown (1941-2004)
Richard Armstrong (1943)
Janine Jansen (1978)

and

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)
Nicholson Baker (1957)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1955, Marian Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Ulrica in Verdi's "Un Ballo in Mascera" (A Masked Ball). She was the first African-American singer to perform as an opera soloist on the Met stage. Subsequent distinguished African-American singers who performed as members of the Met company included Robert McFerrin, Sr. (Bobby McFerrin Jr.’s father), Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Kahtleen Battle and Jessye Norman.

Article about chamber music in Hong Kong published in The Strad

I was in Hong Kong a few weeks ago for some concerts by the Musicus Society. I learned a lot about the group and how it started fifteen years ago after interviewing Artistic Director and cellist, Trey Lee and President Chui-Inn Lee. I think that you'll enjoy reading my article which has been published in The Strad here.