01-13b: Lost Sounds : Black Wave 2001 - Teddy Pendergrass 1977 - Ruby Starr & Grey Ghost 1975 - Mccoy Tyner & Michael Brecker : Infinity 1995 - Fairuz : Ma'akoum (Avec Vous) Live 1999

1993 – Camargo Guarnieri (Brazilian composer & conductor)
1994 – Frederick William Sternfeld (American musicologist & author)
1995 – Ruby Starr (American rock singer, Black Oak Arkansas, Grey Ghost, Grey-Star)
2001 – Michael Cuccione (Canadian actor, singer, dancer, author & cancer research activist)
2005 – Nell Rankin (American mezzo-soprano)
2007 – Michael Brecker (American jazz saxophonist, EWI player & composer)
2008 – Sergej Larin [Sergejus Larinas, Сергей Ларин] (Lithuanian tenor)
2009 – Mansour Rahbani [منصور الرحباني] (Lebanese composer, musician, poet  & producer)
2010 – Teddy Pendergrass (American R&B, soul & gospel singer, songwriter, pianist, guitarist & drummer)
2010 – Jay Reatard (American punk & alt-rock singer, songwriter, guitarist & keyboardist)The Reatards, Lost Sounds)

It's been a few days since I last posted, and you should expect posts to be less frequent from now on. That's because the doctors have just declared me cured and released me from the Funny Farm. That means I'm able to do things other than sitting around and blogging, which honestly isn't so much fun now that readership is significantly down, what with the most recent Great Purging killing many of the older links. Pretty soon I hope to be gainfully employed, which means posts will be even less frequent. But rest assured that when posts do show up they'll be the same low quality you've come to expect from YiDM. Many thanks to the 17 of you out there who are continuing to read and, of course, post your wordy and witty comments!

For today, it's some legendary personages from soul, rock, jazz, and world music, including one-half each of two different famous pairs of musical brothers. The Rahbani Brothers - Ziad and Mansour - were writers of popular songs and operettas whose work is most associated with that of the lovely and prolific singer Fairuz. The Brecker Brothers - saxophonist Michael and trumpeter Randy - have figured prominently in the recent decades of jazz history. Michael is considered in some quarters to have been the most influential tenor sax player since John Coltrane. His life was cut short by myelodysplastic syndrome, an early form of leukemia which also claimed the life of fellow jazzer Paul Motian. Other famous MDS patients have included Susan Sontag, Roald Dahl, and Carl Sagan.

MDS and Hodgkin's lymphoma are both diseases whose sufferers often require bone marrow transplants. Michael Cuccione passed away just after his 16th birthday, due to respiratory problems caused in part by the radiation treatments he'd received for Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was just 9 years old. In 1997, he founded the Michael Cuccione Foundation For Cancer Research, which raises funds for childhood cancer research and awareness. Give generously!

01-12b: Traffic Vienna 1973 - Bee Gees Bern 1968 - Alice Coltrane : Universal Consciousness 1971 | Lord Of Lords 1972 - Luiz Bonfa : Solo in Rio 1959

1983 – Reebop Kwaku Baah (Ghanaian rock & jazz percussionist, Can, Traffic, et al.)
1988 – Marcel Poot (Belgian composer, organist & teacher)
1990 – Paul Pisk (Austrian-born American composer & musicologist, student of G. Adler, F. Schreker & A. Schoenberg)
2001 – Luiz Bonfá (Brazilian jazz & bossa nova guitarist & composer, Black Orpheus)
2001 – Kyra Vayne (Russian-born British soprano)
2003 – Maurice Gibb (British-born Australian singer, songwriter, keyboardist, bass guitarist, guitarist & producer,  Bee Gees)
2004 – Randy VanWarmer (American rock, pop & country songwriter, singer & guitarist)
2007 – Alice Coltrane (American jazz harpist, pianist, organist & composer, spouse of John)

01-12a: Szymanowski Violin Concertos : Zehetmair / Rattle 1996 - Wagner Parsifal : Windgassen / Knappertsbusch Bayreuth 1951 - Stravinsky Chamber Works - Carissimi Oratorios / Roland Wilson 2003

Not shown: John Eccles, Michael Gottard Fischer, Koos van de Griend & Hervey Alan

1674 – Giacomo Carissimi (Italian composer & priest)
1735 – John Eccles (English composer)
1765 – Johann Melchior Molter (German composer & violinist)
1829 – Michael Gottard Fischer (German organist & composer)
1893 – Karl Hill (German baritone, creator of Alberich in the Ring cycle & Klingsor in Parsifal)
1921 – Gervase Elwes (English tenor)
1933 – Václav Suk [Вячеслав Сук] (Czech violinist, conductor & composer, active in Poland, Ukraine & Russia)
1934 – Paul Kochanski [Paweł Kochański] (Russian-born Polish violinist, composer & arranger, active also in the U.K. & U.S.)
1950 – Koos van de Griend (Dutch composer)
1953 – Simeón Roncal (Bolivian composer)
1958 – Arthur Shepherd (American composer & conductor)
1962 – Richard de Guide (Belgian composer)
1982 – Hervey Alan (English bass-baritone, creator of Mr. Redburn in Britten's Billy Budd)

The presence of the Szymanowski disc is thanks to his close friend Paweł Kochański, who performed the composer's works for violin and piano with him many times, collaborated with him on the violin parts of both his concertos, and was the dedicatee of those works and several others Szymanowski wrote for him.

The link above will take you to a scholarly article detailing Kochański's various collaborative efforts with composers. These efforts also produced works such as Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, and violin sonatas by Arnold Bax and Ernest Bloch. Works dedicated to Kochański also include the violin/piano version of Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, which consists of material from Pulcinella, Stravinsky's 1920 ballet based on music (at the time thought to have been written) by Giovanni Pergolesi.

When Kochański was helping Szymanowski with his Second Concerto, he was already sick with the cancer that would cut his life short at the age of 47. Still, he forged ahead and gave the premiere of the work. Szymanowski's score, published after his friend's death, contained a moving dedication to him. The pall-bearers at Kochański's funeral, held at the Juilliard School, included Arturo Toscanini, Frank and Walter Damrosch, Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Serge Koussevitzky, Efrem Zimbalist, Sr., and Leopold Stokowski.

No less affecting was the passing of the great concert and recital tenor Gervase Elwes, who perished hours after a horrific accident at a railway station in Boston when he leaned over too far as he attempted to return to the conductor an overcoat which had fallen off a train. His death was mourned all over Britain, and concerts in his memory took place across the nation. Edward Elgar wrote "my personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing - or I must call it so - compared to the general artistic loss - a gap impossible to fill - in the musical world."

01-11b: Mahler 7 / Tennstedt 1980 - T Rex Chicago 1972 | Vienna 1973 - Fabrizio De Andre : La buona novella 1970 - Jefferson Airplane Amsterdam 1968

1995 – Josef Gingold [Джозеф Гингольд] (Belarusian-born American violinist, pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe, teacher of  Jaime Laredo & Joshua Bell)
1998 – Klaus Tennstedt (German conductor, violinist & pianist)
1999 – Fabrizio De André (Italian folk & rock singer, songwriter, guitarist & anarchist)
2003 – Mickey Finn (English rock & folk drummer, singer & bass guitarist, T.Rex)
2005 – Spencer Dryden (American rock & jazz drummer, Jefferson Airplane, New Riders of the Purple Sage)
2005 – Jimmy Griffin (American rock & folk singer, guitarist, keyboardist, percussionist & songwriter, Bread)
2005 – Miriam Hyde (Australian composer, pianist, poet & teacher)
2007 – Puchi Balseiro (Puerto Rican pop & bolero composer, guitarist, singer & television host, producer & script writer)
2010 – Mick Green (English guitarist, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Van Morrison)

We already had that T.Rex Chicago show a while back, but that link is now, like most of the band, dead. So here it is again, with a new link, plus another T.Rex show to boot! Get it? Boot?

Well, anyway... just in case you're wondering, Fabrizio De André was Italy's answer to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen... might not mean as much to you if you don't understand Italian, but definitely worth a listen anyway...

01-11a: Kalinnikov : Symphonies 1 & 2 / Kuchar 1994 - Cimarosa : Requiem in G minor / Varoli 2000 - Max Lorenz in Recital 1927-1930 - Oscar Straus : The Chocolate Soldier / Stevens | Eddy 1941

Not shown: Rose Sutro

1791 – William Williams Pantycelyn (Welsh Calvinist hymnist, poet & author)
1801 – Domenico Cimarosa (Italian composer)
1901 – Vasily Kalinnikov [Василий Калинников] (Russian composer, bassoonist, timpanist & violinist)
1947 – Eva Tanguay (Canadian singer & entertainer, "the girl who made vaudeville famous")
1952 – Aureliano Pertile (Italian lyric-dramatic tenor)
1954 – Oscar Straus (Austrian composer, The Chocolate Soldier)
1957 – Rose Sutro (American duo-pianist with her sister Ottilie)
1958 – Alec Rowley (English composer, pianist, organist & author)
1961 – Elena Gerhardt (German mezzo-soprano, most associated with Lieder repertoire)
1975 – Max Lorenz (German heldentenor, associated with Wagner roles)
1987 – Albert Ferber (Swiss pianist & teacher, active in England)

Max Lorenz was very blessed to have that voice. Living in Germany at the height of the Nazi regime, and considering that his wife was Jewish, and that his marriage to her was intended to hide the not-so-well-kept secret that he was gay, one would think they'd have been whisked away to a concentration camp without much fuss. But in fact Lorenz was so prized as the leading Wagnerian Heldentenor of his day, his family was under the protection of Hermann Göring himself, who gave strict instructions to the S.S. that they were not to be bothered. I guess when it came to their hatred of minorities, their love of Wagner was one of the few things that could make the Nazis look the other way.