01-08a: Carter Family 1927-1929 - Corelli 12 Concerti Grossi Op 6 / Sardelli 1999 - Puccini : Tosca / Tebaldi | Tucker | Warren | Mitropoulos 1956 - Bohemian Wind Music : Smetana | Krommer | Triebensee / Deutschen Kammerphilharmonie 2001

Not shown: Jacobus Vaet, Giovanni Battista Gagliano, Michaël de Ronghe & Christian Gottlob Saupe

1567 – Jacobus Vaet (Franco-Flemish composer)
1651 – Giovanni Battista Gagliano (Italian composer)
1696 – Michaël de Ronghe (Flemish composer)
1713 – Arcangelo Corelli (Italian composer & violinist)
1819 – Christian Gottlob Saupe (German composer)
1831 – Franz Krommer [František Kramář] (Czech composer, violinist & organist)
1864 – Victor-Charles-Paul Dourlen (French composer & teacher, winner of 1805 Prix de Rome)
1890 – Giorgio Ronconi (Italian operatic baritone, created roles in seven Donizetti operas)
1891 – Fredrik Pacius (German composer & conductor, active in Finland)
1921 – Luis Villalba Muñoz ["Mauricio"] (Spanish Augustian friar, composer & author)
1926 – Émile Paladilhe (French composer & pianist, winner of 1860 Prix de Rome)
1928 – Dumitru Kiriac-Georgescu (Romanian composer, conductor & teacher)
1937 – Felix Körling (Swedish composer, organist, choirmaster & teacher)
1942 – Catharinus Elling (Norwegian organist, folk music collector, composer & teacher)
1942 – Arvo Hannikainen (Finnish violinist & composer)
1948 – Richard Tauber (Austrian tenor)
1953 – Heinrich Kaspar Schmid (German composer)
1965 – Aloÿs Fornerod (Swiss composer, pupil of Vincent d'Indy)
1970 – Georges Guibourg [Georgius, Theodore Crapulet] (French singer, songwriter, novelist, playwright & actor)
1971 – Adriano Lualdi (Italian composer & conductor)
1975 – Richard Tucker (American tenor)
1979 – Sara Carter (American country, folk & gospel singer & autoharpist, the Carter Family)

I should have had Émile Paladilhe on January the 6th, but here he is anyway. Paladilhe, at 16 (which looks to be how old he was when the above portrait was made), was the youngest composer ever to win the Prix de Rome, and he was for a time the lover of mezzo Célestine Galli-Marié (creator of the title role in Carmen), so it seemed unthinkable to omit him.

Some famous opera singers are on the list too, including two of the greatest tenors of the 20th century. And there's a famous singer from the early history of country music, Sara Carter, whose style influenced a whole slew of artists from Kitty Wells to Loretta Lynn. But the big-wig for the day is Arcangelo Corelli, whose unbelievably tidy corpus of 72 works (48 trio sonatas, 12 sonatas for violin and continuo, and 12 concerti grossi, all falling into 6 opus numbers of 12 works each) had a greater influence on the instrumental music of the late Baroque than that of any other composer. Throw in a few Nordic notables, and it's another full half-day around here! How soon do you think it will be before we're three months behind?

12-19b: Jimmy Rogers : Hard Working Man - Puccini : Il Trittico / Tebaldi / Del Monaco / Merrill / Gardelli 1962

As promised, here's your Renata and your Rogers. I lied about the big-ass opera, though. Does three little-ass operas work for you?

11-29: Beatles Paris 1965 - Monteverdi Arie e Lamenti : Figueras / Koopman 1991 - Puccini Messa di Gloria : Carreras / Prey / Scimone 1994 - Barber | Korngold | Walton Violin Concertos : Ehnes 2008

I was unable to find a photo of Cary Scott Lowenstein.

1643 – Claudio Monteverdi (Italian composer, gambist & singer)
1775 – Lorenzo Somis (Italian violinist, composer & painter)
1843 – Marco Santucci (Italian composer & teacher)
1872 – Giovanni Tadolini (Italian composer, conductor & singing teacher)
1921 – Ivan Caryll (Belgian composer of operettas & musicals)
1924 – Giacomo Puccini (Italian composer)
1925 – Karl Flodin (Finnish composer & music critic)
1954 – Dink Johnson (American jazz pianist, clarinetist & drummer)
1957 – Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Austrian composer for concert, screen & stage, one of the founders of film music)
1959 – Fritz Brun (Swiss conductor & composer)
1963 – Ernesto Lecuona (Cuban composer & pianist, "Malagueña")
1970 – Robert Ruthenfranz (German composer & founder of Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik festival)
1971 – Heinz Tiessen (German composer & teacher)
1972 – Carl Stalling (American composer & arranger, Warner Bros. Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies)
1989 – Ann Burton [Johanna Rafalowicz] (Dutch jazz singer)
1992 – Cary Scott Lowenstein (American musical theater dancer, singer & actor)
1994 – Soulima Stravinsky (Swiss-born American pianist, composer & musicologist of Russian & Ukrainian descent, son of Igor)
2001 – George Harrison (English rock singer, songwriter & guitarist, The Beatles)
2001 – Mic Christopher (American-born Irish singer-songwriter & guitarist)
2007 – Tom Terrell (American jazz, rock & hip-hop journalist & promoter)

Well, I did it again. I missed a very important musician, who just died recently. On November 23rd, Catalan soprano Montserrat Figueras passed away after a year-long battle with cancer. Figueras made many superb recordings of Renaissance and early Baroque music, especially that from the Iberian peninsula, along with her husband, Jordi Savall, with whom she formed the early-music groups Hespèrion XX (now Hespèrion XXI), La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and Le Concert des Nations.

Jordi Savall & Montserrat Figueras

She will be greatly missed. We wish comfort to Sr. Savall and their two children, Arianna and Ferran, with whom the couple performed regularly. We hope to hear beautiful music from the three of them for many more years.

And so today we remember Montserrat and Monteverdi, together, and it seems like such a perfect fit... even if it only happened this way because my sources are not so good! And we remember Puccini, too... another great innovator of Italian opera. Korngold and Stalling, two very different innovators from the world of film music. All these, and George Harrison on the same day! It's a lot to take in.

10-16a: Sweelinck: Keyboard Music Koopman 1981 - Bantock The Cyprian Goddess etc. Handley 1995 - Benny Goodman Together Again! 1963 - Puccini Manon Lescaut : Tebaldi / Del Monaco 1954 - Strauss Till Eulenspiegel Gui 1947

1621 – Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (Dutch composer, teacher & organist, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam)
1655 – Joseph Solomon Delmedigo [ישר מקנדיא] (Crete-born Italian rabbi, author, physician, mathematician & music theorist, active in Europe & North Africa)
1750 – Sylvius Leopold Weiss (German composer & lutenist)
1814 – Juan José Landaeta (Venezuelan composer)
1893 – Carlo Pedrotti (Italian conductor & composer)
1920 – Alberto Nepomuceno (Brazilian composer, pianist, organist & conductor)
1946 – Sir Granville Bantock (English composer & conductor)
1949 – Hale Ascher VanderCook (American composer, conductor, cornettist & teacher, founder of VanderCook College of Music)
1959 – Minor Hall (American jazz drummer)
1973 – Gene Krupa (American jazz drummer & composer)
1975 – Vittorio Gui (Italian conductor)
1982 – Mario Del Monaco (Italian dramatic tenor)

October 16th wasn't a very good day for jazz drummers, was it? We just said goodbye to Art Blakely in edition 10-16b, and here in 10-16a we have Minor Hall, a major (heh) New Orleans drummer, who played with Kid Ory, among others, and Gene Krupa, almost surely the greatest drummer of the Big Band/Swing era, who's most famous for his work in the Benny Goodman orchestra, and his highly energetic, almost frenetic style of playing.

We also have Sweelinck, one of the most important keyboard composers active around 1600; Mario Del Monaco, one of the greatest operatic dramatic tenors of the 20th century; a couple of quite notable South American composers; Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, who sounds like a very interesting figure I must get to know better; and Granville Bantock, who provides an interesting comparison with Kaikhosru Sorabji, whom we only just remembered on the 10-15 edition.

For both composers were British and had a spiritual and aesthetic affinity with the East, but Sorabji also had ethnic roots there, while Bantock did not. For him, the legends of those exotic lands, which he toured briefly as a young man while conducting a musical comedy troupe, simply held a special fascination that stuck with him his entire life, and which permeates many of his works, most famously his epic choral work Omar Khayyám, based on the Rubaiyat of that 11th-century Persian poet.

Okay, so there's your write-up. Happy? Oh, I also moved the Follow & Subscribe gadgets to a more convenient place on the page. I think I may monetize the blog soon, so expect to see the place plastered with Donate buttons. I spend a lot of time working on this place, you know.

09-16: T. Rex Chicago 1972 - Tosca Callas Bergonzi 1964 - Victor Jara Pongo... 1969 - Rose Royce Car Wash 1976 - Arias for Farinelli : Genaux / Jacobs 2008

1696 – Lambert Pietkin (Belgian composer & organist, Liège Cathedral)
1782 – Farinelli (Italian castrato)
1896 – Antônio Carlos Gomes (Brazilian composer, 1st from Americas to be widely played in Europe)
1945 – John McCormack (Irish tenor)
1965 – Ahn Eak-tai (Korean composer & conductor)
1973 – Víctor Jara (Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter, guitarist & political activist)
1977 – Marc Bolan (English rock & folk singer-songwriter, guitarist & poet, T. Rex)
1977 – Maria Callas (Greek-American operatic soprano sfogato)
1993 – František Jílek (Czech conductor)
2005 – Harry Freedman [Henryk Frydmann] (Polish-born Canadian composer, English hornist & teacher)
2008 – Norman Whitfield (American R&B songwriter & producer, Motown Records)
2009 – Ernst Märzendorfer (Austrian conductor)
2009 – Mary Travers (American folk singer, Peter, Paul and Mary)


Wikipedia:

[Víctor] Jara was deeply influenced by the folklore of Chile and other Latin American countries; he was particularly influenced by artists like Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and the poet Pablo Neruda. Jara began his foray into folklore in the mid-1950s when he began singing with the group Cuncumen. He moved more decisively into music in the 1960s getting the opportunity to sing at Santiago's La Peña de Los Parra, owned by Ángel Parra. Through them Jara became greatly involved in the Nueva Canción movement of Latin American folk music. He published his first recording in 1966 and, by 1970, had left his theater work in favor of a career in music. His songs were drawn from a combination of traditional folk music and left-wing political activism. From this period, some of his most renowned songs are Plegaria a un Labrador ("Prayer to a Worker") and Te Recuerdo Amanda ("I Remember You Amanda"). He supported the Unidad Popular ("Popular Unity") coalition candidate Salvador Allende for the presidency of Chile, taking part in campaigning, volunteer political work, and playing free concerts.

Allende's campaign was successful and, in 1970, he was elected president of Chile. However, the Chilean right wing, who opposed Allende's socialist politics, staged a coup with the help of the Chilean military on September 11, 1973, in the course of which Allende was killed (See Death of Salvador Allende). At the moment of the coup, Jara was on the way to the Technical University (today Universidad de Santiago), where he was a teacher. That night he slept at the university along with other teachers and students, and sang to raise morale.

On the morning of September 12, Jara was taken, along with thousands of others, as a prisoner to the Chile Stadium (renamed the Estadio Víctor Jara in September 2003). In the hours and days that followed, many of those detained in the stadium were tortured and killed there by the military forces. Jara was repeatedly beaten and tortured; the bones in his hands were broken as were his ribs. Fellow political prisoners have testified that his captors mockingly suggested that he play guitar for them as he lay on the ground with broken hands. Defiantly, he sang part of "Venceremos" (We Will Win), a song supporting the Popular Unity coalition. After further beatings, he was machine-gunned on September 16, his body dumped on a road on the outskirts of Santiago and then taken to a city morgue where they found 44 bullet shots on his body.

File under the "That could never happen here" category.

La Commedia è finita!

If you've reached this post, it could be because I ran out of room for all the labels I needed for the last post! And it really is those operas that get you. Get one with a really big cast... and by "big" I mean... I mean really BIG... you know..? you know what I mean, really, really... BIG? We're talking BIG here... and that could be your whole 200-per-post character limit right there! Anyway, this other post is the one you want to read if you're interested in the labels for this post.  :B