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...

10-17a: 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!