Lucy Rowan Mann, whose steerage of the Walter W. Naumburg Basis and its influential awards helped propel a raft of main classical music careers for 50 years, died on Jan. 16 at her residence in Manhattan. She was 100.
The trigger was Covid-19, her daughter, Lisa Mann Marotta, stated.
Ms. Mann was the manager director of the inspiration, which she ran along with her husband, Robert Mann, who was its president and the founding first violinist of the famend Juilliard String Quartet. She dealt with administration and fund-raising, whereas Mr. Mann, who died in 2018 at 97, centered on the musical features of the competitors and on the judging.
However Ms. Mann, who began on the Naumburg Basis in 1972 and continued till this 12 months, did greater than workplace work. She scheduled performances for the younger Naumburg winners, did publicity for them and even organized journey. The couple had been a well-oiled machine; Carol Wincenc, who in 1978 received the inaugural Naumburg Competitors for flute, stated in an interview that the Manns exhibited “teamwork of the best order.”
Naumburg winners who’ve gone on to outstanding careers embrace, along with Ms. Wincenc, the violin soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg; Frank Huang, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic; the pianists Andre-Michel Schub, Stephen Hough and Anton Nel; the clarinetist Charles Neidich; and the cellist Colin Carr. Singers who’ve received embrace Julia Bullock, Daybreak Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.
Music competitions are sometimes key items in constructing a profession, providing prize cash, live performance dates and public validation, however they are often rife with stress and are sometimes criticized for valuing technical brilliance over persona.
However, as Mr. Mann wrote in The New York Instances in 1985, “a contest is as musical, humane and culturally significant because it desires to be.” Ms. Mann’s administration and look after the opponents lent that humanity, colleagues and musicians stated.
The Naumburg Basis, established in 1925, began administering annual awards in 1926. Robert Mann himself received a Naumburg Award for violin in 1941.
The awards classes rotate amongst devices annually. Initially, they included pianists, cellists and violinists, however the competitors has expanded to incorporate vocalists, chamber ensembles and flutists, and it additionally options different devices on a rotating foundation. The 2022 Naumburg Competitors will likely be for saxophonists.
First-prize winners obtain $25,000 and two New York recitals and have a piece commissioned for them.
Ms. Mann made it a part of her mission to push for better consciousness of Twentieth-century American composers. In her workplace on the Manhattan Faculty of Music, the place the Naumburg Basis is predicated, she was identified to stage birthday celebrations for up to date composers, bribing college students with sweet to encourage them to attend and study extra about musical historical past.
Lucille Ida Zeitlin was born on June 20, 1921, in Brooklyn. She and her two siblings had been raised by their mom, Rose Kuschner. Their father, Irving Allen Zeitlin, was a nightclub supervisor. “My father was a scoundrel and a womanizer,” Ms. Mann instructed The Instances in 2013. “He was by no means round.”
She attended public highschool in Brooklyn and went on to Brooklyn School to check performing, however dropped out and moved to Washington. There, she studied drama below Walter Kerr, who was educating on the Catholic College of America and later turn out to be a theater critic for The Instances. Throughout World Struggle II, Ms. Mann labored in secretarial roles on the Struggle Division and elsewhere.
Her marriage to Mark Rowan, who served within the Military and later turned an English professor, resulted in divorce after eight years.
She returned to New York and in 1947 and have become the supervisor for concert events on the Juilliard Faculty. She met Mr. Mann whereas additionally managing the Juilliard String Quartet. They married in 1949.
Along with their work on the Naumburg Basis, the Manns carried out collectively within the Lyric Trio: Ms. Mann narrated people tales from Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen over music performed by Mr. Mann and the pianist Leonid Hambro. Eric Salzman, reviewing a Lyric Trio live performance at Carnegie Corridor for The Instances in 1962, referred to as their efficiency “witty, pointed and pleasant.”
Their son, Nicholas Mann, who can be a violinist, often carried out with them as a part of the Mann family-centered Baca Ensemble, for which Robert Mann composed. In a 1986 Instances evaluate of a efficiency by the group at Carnegie Corridor, Allen Hughes wrote, “Miss Rowan is a persuasive reader, Mr. Mann’s scores are critical and well-wrought, and phrases and music coexisted amiably in these performances.”
Ms. Mann was additionally an artist: She started portray as a passion however turned extra critical about it later in life, culminating in retrospectives of her vivid summary works on the Tenri Cultural Institute in Manhattan in 2017 and 2019.
Along with her two youngsters, she is survived by 5 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Supply: NY Times
