Today's Birthdays

Umberto Giordano (1867-1948)
Alfred Baldwin Sloane (1872-1925)
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)
Karl Böhm (1894-1981)
Paul Henry Lang (1901-1991)
Richard Tucker (1913-1975)
John Shirley-Quirk (1931-2014)
Imogen Cooper (1949)

and

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
John Betjeman (1906-1984)
Rita Dove (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Eric Coates (1886-1957)
Lester Young (1909-1959)
Maria Curcio (1918-2009)
Barry Conyngham (1944)
Ann Murray (1949)
Sian Edwards (1959)

and

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
C. S. Forester (1899-1966)
Ira Levin (1929-2007)
William Least Heat-Moon (1939)

Today's Birthdays

Willem de Fesch (1687-1761)
Luis Delgadillio (1887-1961)
Arthur Loesser (1894-1969)
Humphrey Searle (1915-1981)
Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)
Nicholas Braithwaite (1939)
Sally Beamish (1956)
Branford Marsalis (1960)

and

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)
Lee de Forest (1873-1961)
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941)

Today's Birthdays

Robert Stolz (1880-1975)
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972)
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Wayne Shorter (1933-2023)
José Van Dam (1940)
Keith Tippett (1947)
Elvis Costello (1954)

and

Brian Moore (1921-1999)
Charles Wright (1935)
Martin Amis (1949-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Alessandro Marcello (1669-1747)
Théodore Dubois (1837-1924)
Bernhard Heiden (1910-2000)
Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000)
Stephen Paulus (1949-2014)
Carlo Curley (1952-2012)

and

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Susan Sheehan (1937)
Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013)
John Green (1977)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1456 that the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible was bound and completed in Mainz, Germany. The Gutenberg Bible was the first complete book printed with movable type. The press produced 180 copies of the Bible. Books had been printed on presses before, in China and Korea, with wood and bronze type; but Gutenberg used metal type, and made a press that could print many versions of the same text quickly. His contributions to printing were huge: he created an oil-based printing ink, he figured out how to cast individual pieces of type in metal so that they could be reused, and he designed a functioning printing press. But others before him had come up with similar ideas. Probably the most important thing that Gutenberg did was to develop the entire process of printing — he streamlined a system for assembling the type into a full book and then folding the pages into folios, which were then bound into an entire volume — and to do it all quickly. The techniques that Gutenberg refined were used for hundreds of years, and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible marked a turning point in the availability of knowledge to regular people.

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1968, Czech conductor and composer Rafael Kubelik launches an appeal to world musicians to boycott performances in the five nations which invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20-21 until their military forces evacuate the country. The appeal was joined by Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Otto Klemperer, Bernard Haitink, Claudio Arrau, and others.

Today's Birthdays

Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925)
Ernst Krenek (1900-1991)
William Primrose (1903-1982)
Constant Lambert (1905-1951)
Carl Dolmetsch (1911-1977)
Mark Russell (1932-2023)
Antônio Meneses (1957-2024)
Brad Mehldau (1970)

and

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1934, the Berkshire Symphonic Festival in was founded in Stockbridge, Mass., by American composer and conductor Henry Hadley, with the participation of the New York Philharmonic. The Festival later became associated with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky. PS from James: in 1936 this festival moved to Lenox, Mass. where it was renamed the Tangelwood Festival.

Today's Birthdays

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Maud Powell (1867-1920)
John Lee Hooker (1917-2001)
Ivry Gitlis (1922-2020)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)
Peter Hoffmann (1944-2010)
Tori Amos (1963)

and

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)
Annie Proulx (1935)

Today's Birthdays

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
Count (William) Basie (1904-1984)
Tommy Reilly (1919-2000)
Willhelm Killmayer (1927-2017)
Gregg Smith (1931-2016)
Dame Janet Baker (1933)

and

X. J. Kennedy (1929-2026)
Robert Stone (1937-2015)
Ellen Hinsey (1960)

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)

2026 Vancouver Arts and Music Festival - Part 1

Photo by Paul Quackenbush

Now in its fourth year, the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival has become a much-anticipated summer event, drawing thousands to the city’s downtown - as it did again on August 7 - for a weekend of fun. Anchoring the festival is the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which takes over a large portion of Esher Short Park by harnessing a very large portable stage to the bandshell for live concerts every evening. A very large sound system amplifies the orchestra so that all of the concertgoers, who are spread out over the lawn, can enjoy the music.

A bit of background: the VSO – through the foresight of its President/CEO and Principal Clarinetist, Igor Shakhman – received $600,00 from the Murdock Charitable Trust and other foundations to launch the festival in the summer of 2023. The funds helped to create a huge event that shows off the metro area’s arts, crafts, culinary, and cultural talents. Now the city of Vancouver and companies that are based there have jumped on the bandwagon to make sure that the VAMF continues into the future.

In her welcoming remarks to the overflow crowd at the opening this year’s festival, Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle jokingly took credit for the improved air quality. During the week leading up to the festival, the city had been blanketed with a smokey haze that came from wildfires, which had spread throughout Pacific Northwest.

The cleaner air helped to bring out another large audience, which was in a good mood and ready for an evening of music with the hometown band under its Music Director Salvador Brotons. The program focused on pieces that were made famous by "Fantasia," the iconic 1940 Disney movie that highlighted the antics of Mickey Mouse with popular pieces from the classical music repertoire.

The concert began with J. S. Bach’s “Toccata and Fuge in D minor” in an arrangement for orchestra by Leopold Stokowski, who led the Philadelphia Orchestra (1912-1938). The orchestra captured the spirit of the piece, but the woodwinds sounded a little weak at times, including a contrabassoon that sounded almost guttural. the outdoor venue and ambient noise from planes, motorcycles, trains, firetrucks and food trucks. Still, Brotons, got his forces to create a sweeping fortissimo to make a grand finale.

The orchestra evoked Mickey Mouse’s mischief with an energetic performance of Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Again, there was a bit of sonic competition from the surrounding area and a plane overhead might have contributed to the sound of the trumpet getting buried at the climactic moment near the end of the piece.

The “Polovetsian Dances” from Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” swirled with elan, seesawing between the elegant and lovely dances for the maidens – familiar to many listeners because of the “Stranger in Paradise” tune from the musical “Kismet”– and the rough and boisterous dances for the boys and men. It would be great to hear this piece done with singers to get the full effect some day in the future.

After intermission, the orchestra returned to its Fantasia-inspired theme by playing Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” and gave it a lively account so that even the quietest passages could be heard. That piece contrasted well with the delicate “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera “La Gioconda.” The tune was instantly recognizable to listeners of a certain age who can recall Allen Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!,” which put a smile on a lot of faces.

The brass sections really got to strut their stuff and delivered all of the goods with a rousing rendition of John Williams “Star Wars Suite.” It revved up the audience and sent everyone home in a good mood. Some did stay a bit longer so that they could watch a “Fantasia” on a large screen in another part of the park. That was a nice way to wrap things up.

Today's Birthdays

Sir George Grove (1820-1900)
John Ireland (1879-1962)
Luis Mariano (1914-1970)
George Shearing (1919-2011)
Louis Frémaux (1921-2017)
Don Ho (1930-2007)
Sheila Armstrong (1942)
Kathleen Battle (1948)
Gregory Vajda (1973)

and

Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850)
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690)
Heinrich Biber (1644-1704)
Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929)
Porter Wagoner (1927-2007)
Buck Owens (1929-2006)
Huguette Tourangeau (1940)
David Munrow (1942-1976)
Pat Metheny (1954)
Stuart MacRae (1976)

and

Robert Southey (1773-1843)
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963)
Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959)
Donald Justice (1925-2004)
William Goldman (1931-2018)
Anthony Swofford (1970)

Today's Birthdays

J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)
Ginette Neveu (1919-1949)
Raymond Leppard (1927-2019)
Alun Hoddinott (1929-2008)
Tamás Vásáry (1933)

and

Louise Brogan (1897-1970)
Alex Haley (1921-1992)
Mavis Gallant (1922-2014)
Andre Dubus (1936-1999)