Today's Birthdays

Armand-Louis Couperin (1727-1789)
Antoine Reicha (1770-1836)
Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965)
Victor Silvester (1900-1978)
Davide Wilde (1935-2025)
Jesús López-Cobos (1940)
George Harrison (1943-2001)
Lucy Shelton (1944)
Denis O'Neill (1948)
Melinda Wagner (1957)

and

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Karl Friedrich May (1842–1874)
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
John C. Farrar (1896-1974)

And from the New Music Box:

On February 25, 1924, the first issue of the League of Composers Review was published. Under the editorial leadership of Minna Lederman, this publication—which soon thereafter changed its name to Modern Music (in April 1925)—was the leading journalistic voice for contemporary music in America for over 20 years and featured frequent contributions from important composers of the day including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, Lehman Engel, and Marion Bauer. Its final issue appeared in the Fall of 1946.

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1682, Italian composer Alessandro Stradella, age 37, is murdered in Genoa, apparently in retaliation for running off with a Venetian nobleman's mistress.

Today's Birthdays

Antoine Boësset (1587-1643)
Samuel Wesley (1766-1837)
Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858)
Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)
Luigi Denza (1846-1922)
Oskar Böhme (1870-1938)
Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940)
Michel Legrand (1932-2019)
Renato Scotto (1934-2023)
Jiří Bělohlávek (1946)

and

Wilhelm (Carl) Grimm (1786-1859)
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
George Augustus Moore (1852-1933)
Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973)
Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
Jane Hirshfield (1953)
Judith Butler (1956)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1955, Carlisle Floyd's opera "Susannah" received its premiere at Florida State University in Tallahassee. According to Opera America, this is one of the most frequently-produced American operas during the past decade.

Today's Birthdays

John Blow (1649-1708)
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Sir Hugh Roberton (1874-1952)
Albert Sammons (1886-1957)
Dave Apollon (1897-1972)
Elinor Remick Warren (1905-1991)
Martindale Sidwell (1916-1998)
Hall Overton (1920-1972)
Régine Crespin (1927-2007)

and

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) - blogger of the 17th Century
W. E B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
William L. Shirer (1904-1993)
John Camp (John Sanford) (1944)

Tidbit from the New York Times obit: In the early 1930s, William Shirer and his wife shared a house with the guitarist Andres Segovia.

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1940 that Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land."

The melody is to an old Baptist hymn. Guthrie wrote the song in response to the grandiose “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin and sung by Kate Smith. Guthrie didn’t think that the anthem represented his own or many other Americans’ experience with America. So he wrote a folk song as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song that was often accompanied by an orchestra. At first, Guthrie titled his own song “God Blessed America” — past tense. Later, he changed the title to “This Land Is Your Land,” which is the first line of the song.

Today's Birthdays

Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817-1890)
York Bowen (1884-1961)
Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963)
Joseph Kerman (1924-2014)
George Zukerman (1927-2023)
Steven Lubin (1942)
Lowell Liebermann (1961)
Rolando Villazón (1972)

and

George Washington (1732-1799)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Gerald Stern (1925-2022)
Ishmael Reed (1938)
Terry Eagleton (1943)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
Leo Delibes (1836-1891)
Charles Marie Widor (1844-1945)
Kenneth Alford (1881-1945)
Andres Segovia (1893-1987)
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
Elena Duran (1949)
Simon Holt (1948)

and

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Erma Bombeck (1927-1996)
Ha Jin (1956)
Chuck Palahniuk (1962)
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Alexander Lingas to step down as Music Director of Cappella Romana

 

From the press release:

Cappella Romana announces today that the Board of Directors has accepted the request of Founder and Music Director Alexander Lingas to move into a new role as Music Director Emeritus.

 

Dr. Lingas will conduct the final concerts of Cappella Romana’s current season on March 6 and 7, 2026, featuring Maximilian Steinberg’s extraordinary Passion Week. Following these concerts, the Board will name Dr. Lingas as Music Director Emeritus. He has decided to step down as Music Director in order to concentrate on his academic work in the fields of Eastern Orthodox liturgy and music. Cappella Romana will look forward to inviting Dr. Lingas to take the podium as a guest director in the years to come following the appointment of a new Music Director.

 

Alexander Lingas writes, “I gathered a group of friends under the name ‘Cappella Romana’ to offer a benefit concert in 1991 representing, in embryonic form, a vision of combining passion with scholarship to explore the musical traditions of the Christian East and West. I am deeply grateful to all the artists, staff, board members, volunteers, generous benefactors, and audiences who joined me in cultivating that vision over the last 35 years. It has yielded a bountiful harvest: a world-class ensemble with an international reputation for its broadcasts, commissions and premieres of new works, educational outreach, live performances, recordings, research initiatives, and publications, both pastoral and scholarly.”

 

He continues, “Having discussed with Cappella Romana’s Board the idea of succession over the past few years, I decided that the time had now come for me to relinquish my current role in order to give priority to scholarship and theological education. I will continue to serve the liturgical and musical traditions of the Christian Roman oikouméne through my affiliations with the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge (UK) and the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York.”

 

The Board has appointed John Michael Boyer, currently Associate Music Director of Cappella Romana, as Interim Music Director for the 2026-27 season, the concerts of which will be announced in March. Guided by Cappella Romana’s strategic plan, over the next year the organization will conduct an international search for a new Music Director.

 

Commenting on this change, John Paterakis, President of the Board of Directors, said: “I am so grateful for the work done by Alexander, not only in creating Cappella Romana, but in growing us into the premier artistic organization for the establishment of Byzantine and Orthodox music in the greater canon of global music. From the very beginning Cappella Romana was far more than a modest regional organization and made a national and international impact almost immediately. That impact has now expanded considerably with our recording label Cappella Records and Cappella Romana Publishing. Alexander and I have been friends for many decades, and I have always admired his steady scholarship in this field. He is clearly the leading scholar on Byzantine music in the English-speaking world, and we support his decision to focus now on his important written contributions to the field.”

Cappella Romana will hold two receptions around the March concerts of Steinberg’s Passion Week, celebrating Dr. LIngas and his many achievements while also marking Cappella Romana’s 35th anniversary:

 

Seattle: A pre-concert reception will take place on Friday, March 6, 2026 at 6:30pm prior to the concert at 7:30pm at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church.

 

Portland: A post-concert reception will take place on Saturday, March 7, 2026 at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral. The concert at St. Mary’s Cathedral in NW Portland begins at 2:00pm and all audience members are welcome to join the reception after the concert, across town at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (3131 NE Glisan Street), the site of Cappella Romana’s founding in 1991.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Peter Salomon (1749-1815)
Charles‑Auguste de Bériot (1802-187)
Mary Garden (1874-1967)
Vasyl Oleksandrovych Barvinsky (1888-1963
Robert McBride (1911-2007)
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-1997)
Christoph Eschenbach (1940)
Barry Wordsworth (1948)
Cindy McTee (1953)
Riccardo Chailly (1953)
Chris Thile (1981)

and

Russel Crouse (1893-1966)
Louis Kahn (1901-1974)
Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
Robert Altman (1925-2006)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Today's Birthdays

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Louis Aubert (1877-1968)
Arthur Shepherd (1880-1958)
Grace Williams (1906-1977)
Stan Kenton (1912-1979
Timothy Moore (1922-2003)
George Guest (1924-2002)
György Kurtág (1926)
Michael Kennedy (1926-2014)
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988)
Smokey Robinson (1940)
Penelope Walmsley-Clark (1949)
Darryl Kubian (1966)

and

André Breton (1896-1966)
Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Amy Tan (1952)
Siri Hustvedt (1955)
Jonathan Lethem (1964)