Today's Birthdays

Jacopo Peri (1561-1633)
Mario Bernardi (1930-2013)
Dame Anne Evans (1941)
Maxim Vengerov (1974)

and

Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950)
Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)
Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974)
Heather McHugh (1948)

Today's Birthdays

William Henry Fry (1881-1864)
Georges Enescu (1881-1955)
Allan Monk (1942)
Gerard Schwarz (1947)
Rebecca Evans (1963)

and

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
Frank McCourt (1930-2009)
Joe Frank (Langemann) (1938-2018)

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825)
Benjamin Godard (1849-1895)
Basil Cameron (1884-1975)
Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973)
Dame Moura Lympany (1916-2005)
Goff Richards (1944-2011)
Tan Dun (1957)

and

Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809)
Margaret Murie (1902 -2003)
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008)

and from The Writer's Almanac

Italian-born Viennese composer Antonio Salieri was born in Legnago, in the Republic of Venice (1750). Although he was quite popular in the 18th century, he probably wouldn't be well known today were it not for the movie Amadeus (1984). The movie was based on Peter Shaffer's play by the same name (1979), which was in turn based on a short play by Aleksandr Pushkin, which was called Mozart and Salieri (1830). These stories all present Salieri as a mediocre and uninspired composer who was jealous of Mozart's musical genius; Salieri tried to discredit Mozart at every turn, and some versions of the story even accuse him of poisoning his rival.

But Salieri was a talented and successful composer, writing the scores for several popular operas. He had a happy home life with his wife and eight children. And because he had received free voice and composition lessons from a generous mentor as a young man, he also gave most of his students the benefit of free instruction. Some of his pupils included Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Franz Schubert. He was the Kapellmeister — the person in charge of music — for the Austrian emperor for 36 years. He and Mozart were competitors, but their rivalry was usually a friendly one; Salieri visited Mozart when he was dying, and was one of the few people to attend his funeral.

After the turn of the 19th century, Salieri's music began to fall out of fashion. "I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner completely contrary to that of my own times," he wrote. "Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity." He stopped composing operas and began to produce more and more religious pieces. He suffered from dementia late in his life and died in 1825. He had composed his own requiem 20 years earlier, and it was performed for the first time at his funeral.

Today's Birthdays

Henri Tomasi (1901-1971)
Abram Chasins (1903-1987)
George Melly (1926-2007)
T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Anderson (1928)
Edward Cowie (1943)
Jean-Bernard Pommier (1944)
Heiner Goebbels (1952)
Artur Pizarro (1968)

and

Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878-1957)
Mae West (1893-1980)
Evan S. Connell (1924-2013)
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018)
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Jonathan Franzen (1959)

and from the Writer's Almanac:

On this date in 1982, the first compact discs for commercial release were manufactured in Germany. CDs were originally designed to store and play back sound recordings, but later were modified to store data. The first test disc, which was pressed near Hannover, Germany, contained a recording of Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic. The first CD commercially produced at the new factory and sold on this date was ABBA's 1981 album The Visitors; the first new album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, which hit the stores in Japan — alongside the new Sony CD player — on October 1. The event is known as the "Big Bang of digital audio."

Today's Birthdays

Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861)
Gabriel Pierné (1863-1937)
Jacinto Guerrero (1895-1951)
Ralph Downes (1904-1993)
Bill Evans (1929-1980)
Franz Welser-Möst (1960)

and

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749)
Tina Modotti (1896-1942)
William Maxwell (1908-2000)
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Today's Birthdays

Hutschenruyter (1859-1943)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Albert Spalding (1888-1953)
Jaques Ibert (1890-1952)
Leon Theremin (1896-1993)
Lukas Foss (1922-2009)
Aldo Ciccolini (1925-2015)
Oscar Peterson (1925-2007)
Rita Hunter (1933-2001)
Anne Marie Owens (1955)
James O'Donnell (1961)

and

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
Edna Ferber (1885-1968)
T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
Julia Child (1912-2004)
Benedict Kiely (1919-2007)
Denise Chávez (1948)
Stieg Larsson (1954)

and

The Woodstock music festival began on this day in 1969.

2026 Vancouver Arts and Crafts Festival - Part II

Pinchas Zuckerman and Gerard Schwarz - Photo by Paul Quackenbush

Legendary violinist Pinchas Zuckerman headlined the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s concert on the second night of the festival (August 8), delivering an outstanding performance of Max Bruch’s “Violin Concert No. 1 in g minor.” But Zuckerman did under a bit of duress, because the flight that was scheduled to bring him to the Pacific Northwest on the day before was canceled. So, he caught a planee that brought him to Vancouver on the afternoon of the performance. Consequently, the orchestra, under guest conductor Gerard Schwarz, who was the music director of the Seattle Symphony for many years, went on stage that evening without the benefit of a rehearsal.

No matter! Zuckerman, playing from memory, sailed through the concerto as if he had played it a million times. Well, in Zuckerman’s case, he has played the Bruch countless times and knows it like the back of his hand. Yet, he has a way to make it sound fresh and appealing so that the lyrical passages came across smooth as silk, the many runs had vigor and sounded clear and crisp. He made his instrument sing, and it the result was just as spectacular as anyone could image.

Guided by Schwarz, the orchestra supported Zuckerman superbly. With Zuckerman in the spotlight, the concerto resonated with the audience, which followed along with rapt attention and, after the finale, responded to the performance with a standing ovation that was loud and long.

Zuckerman played an encore, the “Berceuse Sfaradite” by Paul Ben-Haim. He perfectly expressed its lullaby-like style, ending it wistfully with a very high note that faded into the summer night air. That resulted in another sustained standing ovation.

For the second half of the concert, Schwarz led the orchestra in a fine performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The weather was a bit windier than the previous night and that might have contributed to a couple of exposed notes to go awry in the orchestra. But on the whole, the musical forces, urged on by Schwarz, played with verve. Because there were no program notes, supertitles for the movements (10 in all) would have been helpful. Of course, concertgoers could consult their phones to get the lowdown on the music if they had wished, since there’s plenty of information available on the internet.

With the orchestra going full tilt to convey the majestic Great Gate of Kiev in the final movement, the concert ended on a high note, resulting in a standing ovation, So everyone home went home in high spirits.

VAMF continued the next evening with Gerard Schwarz conducting and his son Julian Schwarz playing Arthur Foote’s “Cello Concerto” and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with pianist Shelly Berg.

Today's Birthdays

Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-1876)
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988)
Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1955)
Jan Koetsier (1911-2006)
Ferruccio Tagliavini (1913-1995)
Georges Prêtre (1924-2017)
Yuri Kholopov (1932-2003)
Sarah Brightman (1960)
Cecilia Gasdia (1960)
Beata Moon (1969)

and

Ernest Thayer (1863-1940)
John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Russell Baker (1925-2019)
Danielle Steel (1947)
Gary Larson (1950)