12-20: Pink Floyd : Atom Heart Mother 1970 / 2011 Remaster - Rubinstein : Chopin Concertos 1958 & 1961 / 2005 Remaster - Soler Concertos : Newman / Payne 1974 - Sarah Louvion : Jolivet | Bauzin | Roussel | Ibert 2007

Not shown: Johannes Lupi, Manuel Giró & William Gilchrist

1783 – Padre Antonio Soler (Spanish priest, composer & organist)
1793 – Joseph Legros (French singer & composer)
1819 – Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis (French violinist, conductor, choirmaster, teacher, composer & theatrical director)
1821 – Gian Francesco Fortunati (Italian composer)
1903 – Gavriil Musicescu (Romanian composer, conductor & musicologist)
1909 – Benjamin Ipavec (Slovenian composer & physician)
1915 – Upendrakishore Ray [উপেন্দ্রকিশোর রায়] (Bengali writer, painter, violinist & composer)
1916 – Manuel Giró (Spanish composer)
1916 – William Gilchrist (American composer, organist & teacher)
1942 – Jean Gilbert [Max Winterfield] (German operetta composer & conductor)
1954 – Emīls Melngailis (Latvian composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist & ethnographic photographer)
1962 – Erik Leidzén (Swedish-born American wind band composer, arranger & bandmaster)
1962 – Luís Abraham Delgadillo (Nicaraguan composer & conductor)
1963 – Paul Constantinescu (Romanian composer)
1968 – Max Brod (Czech-born Israeli author, composer & journalist, friend of Franz Kafka & executor of his literary estate)
1973 – Bobby Darin (American pop singer, songwriter & actor)
1974 – André Jolivet (French composer)
1982 – Arthur Rubinstein (Polish-born American pianist)
1989 – Kurt Böhme (German bass)
1999 – Hank Snow (Canadian country singer)
2010 – John Alldis (English choirmaster & conductor)

For those of you who have your heart set on the Soler, Multiupload was unreachable at the time of this posting. But I'm assuming this is a temporary thing. I mean, it couldn't be gone forever... could it?

12-02a: Dinu Lipatti Chopin Waltzes 1950 - Copland Symphony 3 | Billy the Kid : Copland 1958 - Copland Clarinet Concerto : Goodman / Copland 1950 - Ravel Concerto in G | D'Indy Symphony : Henriot-Schweitzer / Munch 1959

David Stockman is not pictured above, because I was not able to find a photo of him. Imagine that, an opera singer without photos!

1774 – Johann Friedrich Agricola (German composer, organist, singer, teacher, and music theorist, pupil of J.S. Bach)
1831 – Max Eberwein (German composer & conductor)
1845 – Simon Mayr (German composer & choirmaster, teacher of Donizetti)
1880 – Josephine Lang (German composer, pianist & teacher)
1888 – Franz Xaver Witt (German priest, church musician & composer)
1904 – Victor Roger (French theatrical composer & music critic)
1915 – Jan Malát (Czech composer & teacher)
1916 – Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti (Italian-born British song composer & teacher)
1923 – Tomás Bretón y Hernandez (Spanish composer & conductor)
1924 – Emmy Achté (Finnish mezzo-soprano)
1925 – Juli Garreta i Arboix (Spanish composer, known especially for his sardanes)
1931 – Vincent d'Indy (French composer, teacher & co-founder of the Schola Cantorum de Paris)
1941 – Ester Osborne (Swedish-born American soprano)
1942 – Wilhelm Grüning (German tenor)
1950 – Dinu Lipatti (Romanian pianist & composer)
1951 – David Stockman (Swedish tenor)
1959 – Antonio Savasta (Italian composer & teacher)
1974 – Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté [Софи Кармен Экхардт-Граматте] (Russian-born Canadian composer, pianist & violinist)
1979 – Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi [Василий Соловьёв-Седой] (Russian composer)
1980 – Roza Eskenazi [Ρόζα Εσκενάζυ] (Turkish-born Greek folk & rebetiko singer of Sephardic ancestry)
1981 – Hershy Kay (American composer & arranger, New York City Ballet, Leonard Bernstein)
1985 – Philip Larkin (English poet, novelist, librarian & jazz critic)
1986 – Desi Arnaz (Cuban-born America actor, singer, bandleader & television producer)
1988 – Tata Giacobetti (Italian popular singer, lyricist & actor, Quartetto Cetra)
1990 – Aaron Copland (American composer, conductor & pianist)

None of you guys went for these Chopin waltzes the last time (when were were remembering Chopin), so here they are again. It's Dinu Lipatti! You know, the brilliant Romanian pianist who died of Hodgkin's Disease at only 33. His Chopin, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Enescu... really, anything he recorded... is to be treasured. The vinyl rip isn't the best in the world, but it's definitely above-par for whence it came, the European Archive, which is renowned for its sloppy work. I took the trouble to fully tag the files for you, and included the artwork in the folder, so that makes it an improvement.

Actually, it's mostly vinyl transfers today... and it's a lot of Copland, conducted by Copland! Both in his well-known "Americana" idiom (Billy the Kid, the jazzy clarinet concerto with Benny Goodman as soloist, and "Fanfare for the Common Man," which figures into his Third Symphony), and in his more modernist vein (the piano quartet - although, of course, he isn't conducting that).

And here you'll also find the most popular work composed by Vincent d'Indy - his Symphony on a French Mountain Air, also sometimes called the Symphonie cévenole, since it was in the Cévennes mountains that the composer heard the folk song on which the symphony is based. You know, I've often thought that the music of Vincent d'Indy and Irving Fine would make a wonderful pairing for a concert programme. If I could only come up with some clever name for the programme...

10-27a: Ginette Neveu : Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Chausson, Suk et al 1938-1948 - Johann Gottlieb Graun Concertos / Haselböck 2005

1771 – Johann Gottlieb Graun (German composer & violinist)
1781 – Herman-François Delange (Belgian violinist & composer)
1796 – Anton Stamitz [Antonín Stamic] (German-Czech composer & violinist, brother of Carl [Karel])
1822 – Christian Frederich Gottlieb Schwencke (German composer, pianist, organist, music editor & church musician)
1833 – Ferdinand Fränzl (German violinist, composer, conductor & opera director)
1848 – Alexander Egorovich Varlamov [Александр Егорович Варламов] (Russian composer)
1864 – Andreas Randel (Swedish composer & violinist)
1925 – Wilhelm Gericke (Austrian conductor & composer, active in Vienna & Boston, Mass.)
1933 – Julius Klengel (German cellist & composer)
1940 – Fini Valdemar Henriques (Danish composer & violinist)
1943 – Béla Reinitz (Hungarian composer & music critic)
1949 – Ginette Neveu (French violinist)
1949 – Jean-Paul Neveu (French pianist)

Well, it looks like it's Le Jour du Violon here at Yestermonth. I can't recall having seen so many prominent fiddlers on the list (this is only half of it, of course - yes, it's another two-fer today), and there's a cellist to boot. And so that violinist we think of the most on October 27th–28th is in very good company, if that expression can be used for something as heartbreaking as the loss of a great and promising young artist.

Ginette Neveu might well be remembered as one of the supreme players of the violin in the past century, had her life not been cut so cruelly short, at the age of 30, when her plane went down in the Azores in 1949, as she embarked on a tour of the Americas. And as if that were not terrible enough, the tragedy went double for the Neveu family, since Ginette's accompanist Jean-Paul, who was also her brother, was on board the aircraft as well.

And perhaps we can find some symbolic significance in the location of the air disaster, in that very part of the ocean where the legendary continent of Atlantis has traditionally been said to have lain (if one takes Plato's account of it literally). For with the stuff of legends, we naturally touch on questions of what was, and what might have been, and what still could be today, had so-and-so occurred or not occurred. A little food for thought, especially for any of you Americans out there who didn't get quite enough to eat during yesterday's Thanksgiving pig-out feast...

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!