Today's Birthdays

Henri Weiniawski (1835-1880)
Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Ljuba Welitsch (193-1996)
Ian Wallace (1919)
Josephine Veasey (1930)
Jerry Herman (1931)
Arlo Guthrie (1947)
Graham Johnson (1950)
Béla Fleck (1958)

and

Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Alice Munro (1931)

Today's Birthdays

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Dame Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
David Diamond (1915-2005)
David Zinman (1936)
Paul Chihara (1938)
John Mark Ainsley (1963)

and

Oliver Sacks (1933)

Tuesday Rupp going to Yale

One of Portland's best young singers, mezzo-soprano Tuesday Rupp, will soon travel East to attend the Institute of Sacred Music/Yale Divinity School. This is a two year program that will result in a Master of Arts in Religion with a music concentration. If you would like to hear Rupp one more time before she leaves, she will be singing with The Julians vocal ensemble at Great Hall Restaurant (1406 SW Broadway) at 8 pm on July 16th.

PS: According to the Oregon Bach Festival program, James Taylor, who sang the tenor solos in last night's brilliant performance of Mendelssohn's "Elijah," is an associated professor of voice and adviser to the Program in Voice: Early Music, Oratorio, and Chamber Ensemble for the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale School of Music.

Today's Birthdays

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)
George Antheil (1900-1959)
Billy Eckstine (1914-1993)
Susan Chilcott (1963-2003)
Raffi Cavoukian (1948)
Zhou Long (1953)

and

Philip Johnson (1906-2005)
J. F. Powers (1917-1999)

Stephen Marc Beaudoin new interim director of PHAME Academy

Congratulations are in order for multi-talented Stephen Marc Beaudoin, who is the new interim managing director of PHAME Academy. SMB has a posting about this on his blog here.

Kent Nagano to leave Bayerishe Staatsoper

Musical America cites reports from the German press that Kent Nagano is resigning early from the Bayerishe Staatsoper. Here's the jist from MA:

German press is reporting that Kent Nagano will step down as music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper. His contract expires in 2013. He has been in the job since 2006 and last extended his contract in April of 2009.

According to the South German newspaper Süddeutschen Zeitung, Nagano will leave because of "cultural and political developments in Munich over the last month."

The move has left the media baffled. One report claims that Nagano is leaving because of clashes with Intendant Nikolaus Bachler. Another claims that the conductor doesn’t like the Strauss-Mozart-Wagner repertoire and therefore the Staastsintendant Wolfgang Heubisch had to make a decision to fire him in order to begin his summer "Politpause" (legislative/administrative break) with a clear head, ready for the fall.

All seem to be questioning the Bavarian government's competence in the move, since Nagano has such a strong track record and has been doing well in the job.

Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev accused of child molestation

The Guardian has filed this report: Mikhail Pletnev charged with child molestation in Thailand.

Today's Birthdays

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
Cor de Groot (1914-1993)
Doc Severinson (1927)
Joe Zawinul (1932-2007)
Ringo Starr (1940)
Michaela Petri (1958)

and

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
David McCullough (1933)

Today's Birthdays

Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920)
Hans Eisler (1898-1962)
Dorothy Kirsten (1910-1992)
Ernst Haefliger (1919-2007)
Bill Haley (1925-1981)
Maurice Hasson (1934)
Vladimir Ashkenazy (1937)
Stephen Hartke (1952)


and

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Today's Birthdays

Wanda Landowska (1879-1958)
Jan Kubelík (1880-1940)
Gordon Jacob (1895-1984)
George Rochberg (1918-2005)
János Starker (1924)
Matthias Bamert (1942)
Alexander Lazarev (1945)
Paul Daniel (1958)
Isabelle Poulenard (1961)

and

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Barbara Frischmuth (1941)
Craig Nova (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Louis-Claude Daquin (1694-1772)
Stephen Foster (1826-1864)
Roy Henderson (1899-2000)
Louis Armstrong (1900-1971)
Flor Peeters (1903-1986)
Mitch Miller (1911)
Tibor Varga (1921-2003)
Cathy Berberian (1925-1983)

and

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)

Clarification

Readers of this blog should know that I'm not the author of pdxclassical, the twitter feed. I write for this blog and for Oregon Music News and some print publications, and I own up to my reviews.

PS: I have received emails asking about this matter.

Today's Birthdays

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004)
Brigitte Fassbaender (1939)

adn

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
Sir Tom Stoppard (1937)
Dave Berry (1947)

McGegan to replace ailing Jeffrey Kahane at Oregon Bach Festival

Conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane has withdrawn from the Oregon Bach Festival because of illness. He was replaced by Robert Levin for last evening's recital with Thomas Quasthoff (review to come on Oregon Music News). For tomorrow night's gala, the Festival will engage Nicholas McGegan He will conduct the Poulenc two piano concerto, Mozart Sinfonia, and the two Quasthoff show tunes. More later on Oregon Music News.

Today's Birthdays

Christoph W. Gluck (1714-1787)
Earl Hawley Robinson (1910-1991)
Frederick Fennell (1914-2004)

and

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803)
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971)

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993)
Hans Werner Henze (1926)
Andrae Crouch (1942)
Philip Brunelle (1943)
Sioned Williams (1953)
Nikolai Demidenko (1955)
Paul Daniel (1958)

and

George Sand (1804-1876)
William Strunk Jr. (1969-1946)
Twyla Tharp (1941)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Anton Benda (1722-1795)
John Duke (1899-1984)
Lena Horne (1917)
James Loughran (1931)
Giles Swayne (1946)
Stephen Barlow (1954)
Esa-Pekka Salonen (1958)

and

John Gay (1685-1732)
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Today's Birthdays

Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958)
Nelson Eddy (1901-1967)
Leroy Anderson (1908-1975)
Frank Loesser (1910-1969)
Bernard Hermann (1911-1975)
Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996)
James Dick (1940)
Joelle Wallach (1946)
"Little Eva" Boyd 1945-2003)
Anne-Sophie Mutter (1963)

and

Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944)
James K. Baxter (1926-1972)
Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1888 that a snippet of George Frideric Handel's oratorio "Israel in Egypt" was recorded on a wax cylinder. It is one of the earliest surviving recordings of music.

In December of 1877, Thomas Edison (books by this author) filed for a patent for his phonograph, a device to record and play back sound. It all started with a little toy he made — when you spoke into a funnel, the vibrations it made on a diaphragm engaged a ratchet wheel and made a little figure of a man saw wood. He wrote later: "I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such record to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice." And he did just that.

In 1888, the Handel Festival was held at the Crystal Palace in London, a royal tradition that was celebrated regularly since 1784. The performance of his oratorio "Israel in Egypt" took place on Friday at 2 p.m., with doors opening at 11 and a cost between 7 and 25 shillings. Almost 24,000 people attended the show.

Thomas Edison had an agent named Colonel George Gouraud who sold phonographs to the European market and lived in South London. For the "Israel in Egypt" concert, Gouraud got permission to put the phonograph in the theater's press gallery. There was an orchestra of about 500, and a choir of at least 3,000 people. The recording is scratchy and the music is indistinct not only because the technology was so new, but also because there were so many voices and the phonograph was too far away. But it is still recognizable as choral music, and it is the earliest live concert that survives.

A year later, the Columbia Phonograph Company started up and sold gramophones for peoples' homes. In 1890, they produced the first record catalog, which was a one-page list of wax cylinders; two years later Emile Berliner offered discs in place of cylinders. Over the next few years, the recording industry took off, and many homes had some sort of phonograph in them.

Today's Birthdays

Napoléon Coste (1805-1883)
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907)
Richard Rodgers (1902-1979)
Arnold Shaw (1909-1989)
Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996)
George Lloyd (1913-1998)
Giselher Klebe (1925)
Philip Fowke (1950)
Thomas Hampson (1955)

and

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
John Wesley (1703-1791)
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
Mark Helprin (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860)
Toti Dal Monte (1893-1975)
Karel Reiner (1910-1979)
George Theophilus Walker (1922)
Ruth Schönthal (1924-2006)
Anno Moffo (1932-2006)
Hugh Wood (1932)
Daniel Asia (1953)
Nancy Gustafson (1956)
Magnus Lindberg (1958)
Robert King (1960)

and

James Smithson (1765-1829)
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
Lucille Clifton (1936)
Alice McDermott (1953)