01-08b: Def Leppard Seattle 1983 - Michael Tippett Choral Works / St John's College Cambridge 2005 - Rachmaninov Piano Sonatas 1 & 2 / Weissenberg 1989 - Brahms Double Concerto / Francescatti | Fournier | Walter 1959

1986 – Pierre Fournier (French cellist)
1989 – Johnny Jordaan [Johannes van Musscher] (Dutch folk singer)
1991 – Steve Clark (English guitarist, songwriter & singer, Def Leppard)
1993 – Theo Bruins (Dutch pianist & composer)
1996 – Howard Taubman (American music & theater critic, New York Times)
1997 – George Handy (American jazz arranger, composer & pianist, pupil of Aaron Copland)
1997 – Carole Carr (English pop singer & actress, Down Among the Z Men)
1998 – Sir Michael Tippett (English composer & conductor)
2003 – Ron Goodwin (English film composer, arranger & conductor, Force 10 from Navarone)
2008 – Clyde Otis (American jazz & R&B songwriter, producer & A&R executive, Mercury Records)
2012 – Alexis Weissenberg (Bulgarian-born French pianist)

12-27: Delaney & Bonnie w/ Eric Clapton Fillmore West 1970 - Big Star #1 Record 1972 - Rach 3 / Cherkassky 1957 - Amy Beach Gaelic Symphony & Piano Concerto / Feinman | Schermerhorn 2003 - Lars-Erik Larsson : Förklädd Gud & Symphony 3 / Frykberg 1994

Not shown: Pietro Pontio & Walter Courvoisier

1595 – Pietro Pontio (Italian music theorist & composer)
1858 – Alexandre Pierre François Boëly (French composer)
1880 – Alessandro Nini (Italian composer)
1916 – Nikolay Solovyov [Николай Соловьёв] (Russian music critic, composer & teacher)
1919 – Achilles Alferaki [Αχιλλέας Αλφεράκης, Ахиллес Алфераки] (Russian composer, statesman & artist of Greek ancestry)
1931 – Peter Christian Lutkin (American organist, composer & teacher, namesake of Pi Kappa Lambda music honor society)
1931 – Walter Courvoisier (Swiss composer & teacher)
1944 – Amy [Mrs. H.H.A.] Beach (American composer & pianist)
1978 – Bob Luman (American country & rockabilly singer, songwriter & guitarist)
1978 – Chris Bell (American rock singer, songwriter & guitarist, Big Star)
1981 – Hoagy Carmichael (American popular songwriter, pianist, singer & actor)
1983 – Walter Scott (American rock singer, Bob Kuban and the In-Men)
1986 – Lars-Erik Larsson (Swedish composer & conductor)
1992 – Stephen Albert (American composer, pianist, trumpeter & hornist, winner of 1985 Pulitzer Prize)
1995 – Shura Cherkassky [Шура Черкасский] (Ukrainian-born American, later British, pianist)
2003 – Vestal Goodman (American gospel singer, "Queen of Southern Gospel")
2004 – Hank Garland (American country & jazz guitarist)
2008 – Delaney Bramlett (American blues, country & rock singer, songwriter, guitarist & producer)

Just barely enough room for all our labels today! Those Rachmaninoffs and Schermerhorns do take up a lot of space. Luckily I don't know the names of Delaney & Bonnie's other "friends" that appear on what's offered here, which is not the famous live album they made with Eric Clapton - that album was recorded on tour in England in 1969 - but rather a boot recorded in San Francisco the following year. No idea about the audio quality either, so freeloader beware...

Damn... Chris Bell. Talented guy... too bad, he really deserved to make it.

Well, I'd really love to tell you more about Amy Beach, and Hoagy Carmichael, and Shura Cherkassky, and Lars-Erik Larsson, and Vestal Goodman, but I'm just too busy with other things at the moment. Check out those links above, and keep reading...

10-17a: Chopin Bonanza! Cortot | Lipatti | Rachmaninoff | Richter - Janácek / Haas / Szymanowski Quartets arr. Tognetti 2002 - Hummel Mandolin & Trumpet Concertos : Stephens / Agnes / Shelley 2001

1825 – Peter Winter (German opera composer & violinist)
1837 – Johann Nepomuk Hummel (Austrian composer & pianist)
1849 – Frédéric Chopin (Polish composer & pianist)
1890 – Prosper Sainton (French violinist))
1910 – Julia Ward Howe (American abolitionist, author & poet, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic")
1944 – Pavel Haas (Czech composer, pupil of Janáček, perished at Auschwitz)
1972 – Billy Williams (American R&B & pop singer)
1979 – Karel Reiner (Czech composer & pianist, the only classical composer to survive Theresienstadt)
1981 – David Guion (American composer & arranger, inspired by soundscape of the American West)

Another uncanny coincidence, in that Karel Reiner should have died on the 35th anniversary of the day the promising composer Pavel Haas was murdered at Auschwitz. Both of them had been been housed at Theresienstadt, a somewhat less hellish concentration camp, which the Nazis had established in a Polish Jewish ghetto, in part to make a propaganda film demonstrating that their musically gifted "detainees" were being treated well and allowed to flourish musically (in fact, the orchestra in the film were surrounded by flowerpots to hide the fact their shoes had been taken away). Reiner was the only classical composer at Theresienstadt to survive the war. But the story of Haas's untimely demise was later related by another survivor, conductor Karel Ančerl, who claimed he was standing next to Haas at Auschwitz the day they both arrived (many of the Theresienstadt prisoners having been transported there as soon as the filming was finished), and that originally it was he, Ančerl, who had been among those chosen for the gas chambers, but that Haas had a bad cough which caused the commanding officer to change his mind and send him instead. Ančerl went on to have a brilliant career with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. We can only guess at what great things Haas would have accomplished had he lived a full life, as Reiner and Ančerl did.

Well, Chopin is one of those composers it's hard to have too much of in your record collection. His works are open to so many interpretive possibilities, making it difficult to decide on just one version of the Ballades, or the Mazurkas, or the Scherzi, or what have you. Plus, all his works are so gorgeous, so emotionally satisfying, and so amazingly well-crafted - all things that make Chopin perhaps the piano composer par excellence. The only others who might come close are Schumann, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, but even they seem to fall short of the almost universal appeal of Poland's greatest composer. And Chopin's life was a good six years shorter than Pavel Haas's was. Tuberculosis, you know. So, he was also coughing shortly before the end. How many more of those perfect little masterpieces he might have had inside him. Keep reading about him!