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I share my birthday with Pablo Casals, and my father shared his with Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz. I didn't know that when I took up the violin as a teenager. Perhaps I should have reached a higher standard!
I don't share my birthday with any notable composers or musicians at all, though I am a day after my beloved Vaughan Williams and a day before Zemlinsky!
I don't share my birthday with any notable composers or musicians at all, though I am a day after my beloved Vaughan Williams and a day before Zemlinsky!
Before this thread was started, I had never even heard of August Wilhelmj but while expanding my knowledge on the website of the town of Wiesbaden I discovered a curious fact relating to the manner of his burial http://www.wiesbaden.de/kultur/stadt...t-wilhelmj.php
"Fünf Jahre später starb der Geigerkönig, der sich auch als Herausgeber klassischer und romantischer Violinliteratur einen Namen gemacht hatte, in London. Der Tote wurde bald darauf nach Wiesbaden überführt und auf dem Nordfried in seinem geigenförmigen Sarg beigesetzt."
[Five years later the king of fiddlers, who had made a name for himself in London as a publisher of classical and romantic violin literature, died. Shortly afterwards, the deceased man was transferred to Wiesbaden and interred in his violin-shaped coffin.]
I share my birthday with Pablo Casals, and my father shared his with Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz. I didn't know that when I took up the violin as a teenager. Perhaps I should have reached a higher standard!
I remembered this morning that I can do even better than that - I also share my birthday with the renowned British viola player Lionel Tertis, so that completes a distinguished string quartet!
On a certain occasion, the leader being unable to play the incidental solo in an orchestral work - which work it was is not related - Jacques Thibaud was asked to take his place, and did so with such conspicuous success that he became a regular solo-ist at the Colonne concerts, appearing no less than fifty-four times during the winter of 1898, and completely establishing his fame in Paris.
Thereafter he travelled as solo-ist in Northern America (1903) and in every European musical centre. He visited England several times, playing chamber music at the Popular Concerts and solos on most of our concert-platforms. In his own country he played a good deal in concerted music with his two brothers, one a pianist and the other a violoncello of ability. Later he associated with Cortot the pianist and Casals (the somewhat excessively murmuring man); some fine recordings of their performances have been preserved.
Thibaud was in the foremost rank of twentieth-century violinists, a representative player of the French classic school, producing not a large, but an exceptionally pure and lovely tone, bowing with elegance; and in rapid passages he was accurate as Sarasate. In the playing of cantabile passages he had an instinctive warmth of expression combined with a caressing style peculiar to himself, and was yet by no means wanting in virility. Once experienced the exquisite polish of his technique was a thing never forgotten.
After the French composers he was heard at his best in the concertos and sonatas of Mozart, of which his account was invariably an intense delight. He played for some time on a violin by Carlo Bergonzi, but later came into possession of the fine but doomed Stradivari which was once the property of Baillot.
Travel by aeroplane must always be a gamble must it not, and in 1953 poor Thibaud, by now quite elderly, and on his way to Hong-Kong, expired when the machine within which he was being conveyed veered while under "controlled flight" toward a hill-side outside Nice. The reason or true cause of this calamity has never been discovered.
As a matter of interest, why do you write 'solo-ist'? (1) the italics and (2) the hyphen?
Is it actually the 'correct' way of writing 'soloist' or is it copied from an article in which this idiosyncratic spelling is used?
BTW I share my birthday with Paul McCartney, Ignaz Pleyel, Charles Gounod, George Mallory, Manuel Rosenthal, Eduard Tubin, Delia Smith and Peter Donohoe.
I've never bothered to find out who I share my birthday with.However it was a Good Friday the year I was born. On the BBC the announcer said something like "Today there is no news, we will play some music".
As a matter of interest, why do you write 'solo-ist'? (1) the italics and (2) the hyphen?
Is it actually the 'correct' way of writing 'soloist' or is it copied from an article in which this idiosyncratic spelling is used?
Well it is just a feeling . . . "solo" in the O.E.D. is marked with two vertical lines, indicating that it is still felt to be a foreign (specifically Italian) word, whereas the suffix "-ist" while deriving ultimately from the Greek has in English a much longer history of use in the formation of agent-nouns.
The O.E.D. cites some examples of similar modern formations which verge upon the absurd: "balloonist, billiardist, bimetallist, ’celloist, cocainist, cyclist, fetishist, footballist, hammerist, selfist, truthist, great aukist, physical forcist, red tapist, second adventist, etc." You will understand therefore why I am equally uncomfortable with "cellist"!
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