Today's Birthdays

Caroline Miolan‑Carvalho (1827-1895)
Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950)
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
Nathan Milstein (1904-1992)
Jule Styne (1925-1994)
Jaap Schröder (1925)
Odetta (1930-2008)
Stephen Cleobury (1948)
Donna Summer (1948)
Jennifer Higdon (1962)

and

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Nicholas Sparks (1965)
Junot Díaz (1968)

Today's Birthdays

William Croft (1678-1727)
André Messager (1853-1929)
Alfred Einstein (1880-1952)
Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904-1987)
Paul Bowles (1910-1999)
Sir David Willcocks (1919-2015)
Bo Diddley (1928-2008)
Bruno Canino (1935)
June Anderson (1950)
Stephen Jaffe (1954)
Antonio Pappano (1959)

and

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Sara Lidman (1923-2004)

Today's Birthdays

Pablo Casals (1876-1973)
Lionel Tertis (1876-1975)
Yves Nat (1890-1956)
Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990)
Billy Tipton (1914-1989)

and

William Gaddis (1922-1998)

Today's Birthdays

Christian Cannabich (1731-1798)
Francesco Tamagno (1850-1905)
Roger Sessions (1896-1985)
Earl "Fatha" Hines (1905-1983)
Johnny Otis (1921-2012)
Nigel Kennedy (1956)

and

Charles Portis (1933)

Today's Birthdays

Sir John Goss (1800-1880)
Tito Schipa (1888-1965)
Marlene Dietrich (1904-1992)
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)

and

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011)
Chris Abani (1966)
Sarah Vowell (1969)

Today's Birthdays

Leopold Mannes (1899-1964)
Maurice Gendron (1920-1990)
Thea King (1925-2007)
Earle Brown (1926-2002)
Phil Specter (1940)
Wayland Rogers (1941)
Harry Christophers (1953)
Andre-Michel Schub (1953)

and

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
Henry Miller (1891-1980)
Jean Toomer (1894-1867)
Juan Felipe Herrera (1948)
David Sedaris (1958)

Today's Birthdays

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)
Jean‑Joseph de Mondonville (1711-1772)
Chevalier de Saint‑George (1745-1799)
Cosima Wagner (1837-1930)
Lina Cavalieri (1874-1944)
Giuseppe de Luca (1876-1950)
Gladys Swarthout (1900-1969)
Cab Calloway (1907-1994)
Noël Lee (1924-2013)
Noel Redding (1945-2003)
Jon Kimura Parker (1959)
Ian Bostridge (1964)

and

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)
Clara Barton (1821-1912)
Rod Serling (1924-1975)

Today's Birthdays

Peter Cornelius (1824-1874)
Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944)
Lucrezia Bori (1887-1960)
Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881-1946)
Sir Vivian Dunn (1908-1995)
Teresa Stich-Randall (1927-2007)
Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)
Arnold Östman (1939)
Libby Larsen (1950)
Hans-Jürgen von Bose (1953)

and

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Dana Gioia (1950)

and from The Writer'sAlmanac

Today is Christmas Eve. One of the best modern Christmas Eve stories is a true one, and it happened in 1914, in the trenches of World War I. The “war to end all wars” was raging, but German and British soldiers had been engaging in unofficial ceasefires since mid-December. The British High Command was alarmed, and warned officers that fraternization across enemy lines might result in a decreased desire to fight. On the German side, Christmas trees were trucked in and candles lit, and on that Christmas Eve in 1914, strains of Stille Nacht — “Silent Night” — reached the ears of British soldiers. They joined in, and both sides raised candles and lanterns up above their parapets. When the song was done, a German soldier called out, “Tomorrow is Christmas; if you don’t fight, we won’t.”

The next day dawned without the sound of gunfire. The Germans sent over some beer, and the Brits sent plum pudding. Enemies met in no man’s land, exchanging handshakes and small gifts. Someone kicked in a soccer ball, and a chaotic match ensued. Details about this legendary football match vary, and no one knows for sure exactly where it took place, but everyone agrees that the Germans won by a score of three to two.

At 8:30 a.m. on December 26, after one last Christmas greeting, hostilities resumed. But the story is still told, in a thousand different versions from up and down the Western Front, more than a century later.

On Christmas Eve in 1906, the first radio program was broadcast. Canadian-born Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden sent his signals from the 420-foot radio tower of the National Electric Signaling Company, at Brant Rock on the Massachusetts seacoast. Fessenden opened the program by playing “O Holy Night” on the violin. Later he recited verses from the Gospel of St. Luke, then broadcast a gramophone version of Handel’s “Largo.” His signal was received up to five miles away.

Today's Birthdays

Joseph Boismortier (1689-1755)
Ross Lee Finney (1906-1997
Claudio Scimone (1934)
Ross Edwards (1943)
Edita Gruberová (1946)
Elise Kermani (1960)
Han-Na Chang (1982)

and

Harriet Monroe (1860-1936)
Norman Maclean (1902–1990)
Robert Bly (1926)
Carol Ann Duffy (1955)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-1787)
Giovanni Bottesini (1821-1889)
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Franz Schmidt (1874-1939)
Edgard Varèse(1883-1965)
Joseph Deems Taylor (1885-1966)
Alan Bush (1900-1995)
Andre Kostelanetz (1901-1980)
David Leisner (1953)
Jean Rigby (1954)
Zhou Tian (1981)

and

Jean Racine (1639-1699)
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)
Donald Harrington (1935-2009)

New comprehensive app for music lovers

From the press release:

 To celebrate the launch of its music history app for smartphones and iOS devices that’s taking the classical music world by storm, Informusic (http://www.informusic.org/) announces that it is pricing the app at just 99 cents through January 1, 2017.

Created by Drew Schweppe  and refined along with a select team of leading musicologists, performers, professors, and historians, Informusic is the all-in-one music history and composer resource that means that music students and classical music fans alike will now be able to access a wealth of detailed musical history facts and information with just the swipe of a finger. Now – even better – they can do so for just 99 cents (USD)! It’s the unbeatable holiday gift for classical musicians, teachers, students, and fans worldwide.

Informusic offers a huge array of detailed information on Western Art Music’s greatest composers and compositions, from the Medieval era, through the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras – and with more expansions yet to come. At the swipe of a screen, users can browse Informusic for such useful and fascinating information as composer biographies, quick facts, and complete works, along with program notes, sheet music, audio samples, and suggested further scholarship.

Informusic also features interactive timelines that enable users to scroll through the chronology of a composer’s life and greatest achievements, helping to contextualize musical events with other disciplines like art, literature, politics, and beyond. Users can also curate their searches with ease to filter by year, event type, or specific keywords. The app is constantly updated with ever-expanding content and composers as well.

The Perfect Holiday Gift for Music Fans & Music Students:

“With our special holiday pricing to celebrate Informusic’s launch, this means that anyone with a smartphone or iOS device can explore centuries of classical music history for less than a dollar, making it a fantastic gift or stocking-stuffer,” comments Informusic founder and director Drew Schweppe. “Informusic is an incredible resource for students and teachers, as it offers all of the tools a music student requires for their music history courses in a single app. But it also goes further – it’s a great gift for classical music fans, too. For instance, if you hear a particular piece by Beethoven at the symphony or on the radio, Informusic provides you with an incredible amount of instantly accessible information surrounding the piece, its composer, its influences and impacts, and more.”

Schweppe was inspired to create Informusic as a result of his intensive studies in music, while pursuing his Master’s degrees in Music and Music Industry Leadership from City University of London and Northeastern University (he also holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition degree from Ithaca College). As he became increasingly interested in music history, he quickly realized the advantages a comprehensive music history app for iOS devices might offer to performers, students and fans of classical music, and his quest to create Informusic began – a goal that would take more than five years of exhaustive research and development to achieve.

Purchase Info and Technical Requirements:

Informusic is compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and requires iOS 8.0 or later. To celebrate its launch this holiday season, it’s currently available for a limited time through the New Year for just $.99 at the Apple iTunes Store, at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/informusic/id1015896668?mt=8.

While Informusic currently features only Western Art Music, expansions for other genres such as Jazz are also in the works now.

About Informusic:

Informusic is the essential classical music history app for iOS that was created and founded by Drew Schweppe. Informusic provides a wealth of music history information that was specially created by experts in musicology, history, and performance. Its advisory board of PhD musicologists chaired by Dr. Mark A. Radice (Professor, Music Theory, History, and Composition at Ithaca College) ensures the app’s quality and accuracy as an invaluable learning tool for all. Learn more about Informusic at http://www.informusic.org/.

Today's Birthdays

Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900)
André Turp (1925-1991)
Frank Zappa (1940-1993)
Roger Lasher Nortman (1941)
Michael Tilson Thomas (1944)
András Schiff (1953)
Kim Cascone (1955)
Thomas Randle (1958)
Jonathan Cole (1970)

and

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Maud Gonne (1866-1953)
Edward Hoagland (1932)

Today's Birthdays

Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996)
Gordon Getty (1933)
John Harbison (1938)
Roger Woodward (1942)
Mitsuko Uchida (1948)

and

Elizabeth Benedict (1954)
Sandra Cisneros (1954)
Nalo Hopkinson (1960)

Today's Birthdays

Louis‑Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749)
Fritz Reiner (1885-1963)
Edith Piaf (1915-1963)
Dalton Baldwin (1931)
Phil Ochs (1940-1976)
William Christie (1944)
Marianne Faithfull (1946)
Olaf Bär (1957)
Steven Esserlis (1958)
Rebecca Saunders (1967)

and

Italo Svevo (1861-1928)
Constance Garnett (1861-1946)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It’s the birthday of French chanteuse Édith Piaf (1915). Piaf was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in Belleville, on the outskirts of Paris. Her mother was a café singer and a drug addict, and her father was a street performer who specialized in acrobatics and contortionism. Neither of them particularly cared for Piaf, so she mostly grew up with her grandmother, who ran a brothel. Piaf was looked after by prostitutes and later claimed that she was blind from the ages of three to seven because of keratitis, or malnutrition, though this was never proved.

Her father reclaimed her when she was nine and Piaf began singing with him on street corners until he abandoned her again. She lived in shoddy hotel rooms in the red-light district of Paris and sang in a seedy café called Lulu’s, making friends with pimps, hookers, lowlifes, and gamblers, until she was discovered by an older man named Louis Leplée.

Leplée ran a nightclub off the Champs-Élysées. He renamed Piaf La Môme Piaf, “The Little Sparrow,” dressed her entirely in black, and set her loose on the stage. Piaf was a hit, and recorded two albums in one year, becoming one of the most popular performers in France during World War II.

Édith Piaf died on the French Riviera at the age of 47. More than 40,000 people came to her funeral procession. Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina named a small planet after Piaf; it’s called 3772 Piaf. Her songs have been covered by Madonna, Grace Jones, and even Donna Summer.

Édith Piaf’s last words were, “Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.”

Today's Birthdays

Charles Wesley (1707-1788)
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Edward MacDowell (1860-1908)
Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952)
Rita Streich (1920-1987)
William Boughton (1948)
David Liptak (1949)
Christopher Theofanidis (1967)

and

Saki - H. H. Munro (1870-1916)
Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Christopher Fry (1907-2005)
Abe Burrows (1910-1985)

Today's Birthdays

Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Arthur Fiedler (1894-1979)
Ray Noble (1903-1975)
William Wordsworth (1908-1988)
Art Neville (1937)

and

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)
William Safire (1929-2009)
John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the day that The Nutcracker ballet was performed for the first time in St. Petersburg, Russia (1892). Czar Alexander III, in the audience, loved the ballet, but the critics hated it. Tchaikovsky wrote that the opera that came before The Nutcracker "was evidently very well liked, the ballet not. ... The papers, as always, reviled me cruelly." Tchaikovsky died of cholera less than a year later, before The Nutcracker became an international success.

Today's Birthdays

François Adrien Boieldieu (1775-1834)
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)
Turk Murphy (1915-1987)
Steve Allen (1921-2000)
Dame Thea King (1925-2007)
Alice Parker (1925)
Kenneth Gilbert (1931)
Philip Langridge (1939-2010)
Trevor Pinnock (1946)
Isabelle van Keulen (1966)

and

Jane Austin (1775-1817)
George Santayana (1863-1952)
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
Noël Coward (1899-1973)
V. S. Pritchett (1900- 1997)

Today's Birthdays

Michel‑Richard Delalande (1657-1726)
Lotte Schöne (1891-1981)
Stan Kenton (1911-1979)
Ida Haendel (1924)
Eddie Palmieri (1936)
Nigel Robson (1948)
Jan Latham-Koenig (1953)

and

Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (1859-1917)
Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959)
Freeman Dyson (1923)
Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000)
Edna O'Brien (1930)

Felder magical as Irving Berlin in one-man show

A grand piano, a Christmas tree, a fireplace, two big windows and snow falling outside… it made me want to reach for an eggnog, but I was at The Armory and settling into my seat when Hershey Felder walked out on the stage to begin his one-man show about the life and music of Irving Berlin, the great American songwriter. For the next hour and forty-five minutes, Felder held the SRO audience at Portland Center Stage spellbound as he retold Berlin’s remarkable life story, singing and playing the piano with such panache that you practically thought you were watching Berlin himself.

Starting with Berlin’s humble beginnings as a refugee from Russia where his family’s home was burnt to the ground because of rampant anti-Semitism, Felder embarked on a tour of Berlin’s life that was truly astonishing. Berlin rose out of the poverty-stricken tenements in New York City, parlaying his street-corner busking into a singing waiter job that helped him to sell his first song, “Marie From Sunny Italy.” That led to his first smash hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and the rest was history. But actually it wasn’t, because Berlin, like everyone, had his ups and downs. Of course, he had more ups than downs, but still the downs that Felder recounted were major, such as the death of his first wife, Dorothy. She contracted typhoid fever during their honeymoon in Havana and died five months later. Berlin took her death very hard. His melancholy ballad, “When I Lost You” was dedicated to her, and he did not marry again for twelve years. That was when he fell in love with the heiress Ellin Mackay, whose father disowned her after she married Berlin. They had four children, but their only son died on Christmas Day in 1928.

The show included Berlin’s hits during the First World War, the Second World War, his work in musicals and films. Felder performed several of them, including “My Wife’s Gone to the Country,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “What’ll I Do?,” “Blue Skies,” “Supper Time,” and “There’s No Business Like Showbusiness,” and made sure to include the audience in “God Bless America” and “White Christmas.” He showed an impeccable ear and talent for mimicry when he spoke or sang in the style of others such as Ethel Merman, but his parrot voice for the last verse of “My Wife’s Gone to the Country” was the most surprising and funniest of all.

Felder related fun facts about Berlin, such as how he wrote all of his pieces in the key of F sharp and relied on his staff to transcribe them to other keys. He loved to work at night and into the early morning, thriving under pressure to find just the right words and create a new song. But his genius was not the center-point of the show, rather it was the wonderful embrace of humanity that embodied Berlin. He took care of his family, his friends, and others (for example, since 1940, all royalty payments from “God Bless America” have been directed to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America.” He was not arrogant or disdainful of others, and he supported civil rights, giving Ethel Waters star billing in 1933 for his musical revue “As Thousands Cheer.” She became to first black woman to star in a white show on Broadway.

In his final years, Berlin became a recluse. He had been such a part of the nation’s life and breath that it was difficult for him to fathom the popularity of rock and roll. Felder had an excellent quip that summed it up: “I lived beyond my expiration date.” Well, Felder’s superb performances as Irving Berlin at The Armory are due to expire at the end of the month. Be sure to see this amazing show. It is life-enhancing.

---

PS: Felder directed “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” which will return to Portland Center Stage in June. For more information on that show, click here.

Today's Birthdays

Maria Agata Szymanowska (1789-1831)
Georges Thill (1897-1984)
Spike Jones (1911-1965)
Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003)
Dame Ruth Railton (1915-2001)
Ron Nelson (1929)
Christopher Parkening (1947)
Thomas Albert (1948)
John Rawnsley (1949)

and

Shirley Jackson (1919-1965)
Amy Hempel (1951)