Michael Landon

When 2020 began, Michael Lington was eagerly looking forward to many wonderful events - the impending birth of his son Landon, touring again with his fellow saxophone stars Vincent Ingala and Paul Taylor as Sax to the Max, and numerous European solo dates. Then COVID-19 hit, and the resulting lockdown scrambled everything. Prevented from hitting the road, Lington quickly turned his home studio into one of contemporary jazzs premiere virtual performance destinations, with a popular ongoing series of weekly shows on the StageIt platform.

Franz Joseph Haydn’s outpouring of music during his three decades as musical director for the rich and powerful Esterházy princes is breathtaking, encompassing long lists of symphonies, chamber pieces, and operas. Concertos were also well represented, a fact that would surprise many modern listeners since his concertos are by and large ignored today. Both of Haydn’s extant cello concertos arrived at modern concert halls with complicated musicological baggage attached. His splendid Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major lay in oblivion for perhaps two centuries, known through an entry in his catalogue that enabled it to be dated to 1765 at the latest, but given up for lost until its manuscript resurfaced in 1961. His D major Cello Concerto, the work heard in this concert, was accordingly accepted during that span as his only surviving work in the genre, but even it ran into problems.

Between 1959 and 1973, viewers tuned in weekly to NBC for the latest episode of Bonanza. The beloved western, following the exploits of the Cartwright family on their Ponderosa ranch, aired for a remarkable 431 episodes and reached an estimated 400 million watchers in 87 countries. Bonanza inspired, well, a merchandising bonanza, with action figures, comic books, lunchboxes, model sets, dinnerware, and even a chain of steakhouses and a Lake Tahoe theme park.