I am very sorry to learn of the passing of Robert Manno. Although I never met him personally, he was a follower of my page, and we enjoyed some exchanges in the comments and through private messaging in relation to certain composers and concerts he conducted.

Manno was co-founder of the Windham Chamber Music Festival and was a former assistant conductor and chorister at the Met. Born in Bryn Mawr, PA, he had a lot of local connections and we seem to have inhabited the same worlds, although perhaps at different times, so that there are a number of instances in which we were separated by two degrees – some of his acquaintances also being mine.

According to his biographical information, he enjoyed a brief career as a jazz pianist in Philadelphia. Later, he moved to New York to study the art with John Mehegan and Steve Kuhn. He received classical training from Dolores Ferraro, with whom he studied voice (he was a baritone who sang in the choruses of the Metropolitan and New York City Operas and as a soloist in concerts and recitals), and Romeo Cascarino, with whom he studied composition. He also studied with composers Donald Erb and Mario Davidovsky. He received degrees in voice from the Manhattan School of Music and composition from NYU.

He married Met violinist Magdalena Golczewski. Together they founded the Windham Chamber Music Festival, a long-running concert series in the Northern Catskills. Manno was kind enough to send me some of their CDs. One, in particular, with harpist Jacqueline Kerrod and flutist Eva Ding in music by Debussy, Hanson, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and others, I’ve enjoyed listening to over and over again. His live concert recordings were also included on broadcasts of American Public Media’s “Performance Today.”

When some followers disappear, sometimes they just drop out for a while and then at some point drift back and start liking posts and commenting again. Others I never hear from again. When I think of them, I always wonder about their health, or even their mortality. One of the ways in which social media is so peculiar is that we develop these online acquaintances with people, sometimes to the point it even feels as if we get to know them a little bit, they become familiar, and since so few grow beyond that, when things go silent for a time, we start to wonder about them.

I learned of Manno’s passing in an email I received from Ferraro yesterday. As I say, I didn’t really “know” him, but the news still came as a shock. He died on June 12 at the age of 81. May he rest in peace.

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In concert

Conducting a couple of his song cycles (and Tchaikovsky)

His website

http://www.robertmanno.com/main.shtml