Today's the Day

[Richard Tarleton]

Erm...thanks for reminding me/us - well researched!

[Padraig]

=. All went well on the night, happily. Her schtick was singing in bare feet - she certainly looked terrific in her Mary Quant mini dresses.

A coincidence that Puppet (1967) and Foolin' Time (1962) - mentioned last week - were both composed by Phil Coulter (perhaps a less, ahem, unpleasant thought to hold.

[Richard Tarleton]

A coincidence that Puppet (1967) and Foolin' Time (1962) - mentioned last week - were both composed by Phil Coulter (perhaps a less, ahem, unpleasant thought to hold.

A Derry man, Padraig, hadn't realised that

[Padraig]

A Derry man, Padraig, hadn't realised that

Yes he is, Richard. And in addition to his fame as a composer and arranger he also has the distinction of featuring in a Heaney poem - The Real Names It is a poem celebrating the dramatic performances at St Columb's that Heaney remembers. This is a short extract:

Then say chameleon. And the boy-men reappear
Who’s whoing themselves like changelings.
So will it be
Ariel or the real name, the already
Featly sweetly tuneful Philip Coulter?
Or his brother Joe as Banquo, dressed in white,
Wise Joe, good Banquo, fairest of the prefects?
Aura and justice, soul in bliss or torment,
Ghost on cue at the banquet, entering
And entering memory like mitigation—
The table on stage a long, formica-topped
Table for fourteen, on loan from the refectory
Where we, in fourteens, moon-calves, know-nothings
Stood by our chairs and waited for the grace.

I wasn't in The Tempest, but I had a part in Macbeth and many a time performed among the fourteen know-nothings in the ref.

[Richard Tarleton]

Lovely! Thank you Padraig.

Last of those Mournes programmes earlier - disappointing on the whole (too much of people acting up to the camera) but interesting to see how much has changed - red kites, polecats, fallow deer......

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 9th

The Feast Day of the Romano-British Saint Madrun ("Materiana"), the granddaughter of Vortigern, who lived at the time that the foreign English started causing trouble on these islands. A patron of Cornwall (Minster and Tintagel in particular) and Gwent (Trawsfynydd) where there are churches dedicated to her. Some Protetsant churches also celebrate the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged on this date at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in 1945, just two weeks before US forces liberated it. Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law, the Jurist Hans von Dohnanyi (son of composer Ernst, and father of conductor Christophe) was also hung around this date at Sachsenhausen Camp.

Also on this date: Henry V becomes King of England (1413 - reputedly a few hours after testing the crown for size); Philip III of Spain orders the expulsion from his country of all Moriscos [descendants of Muslims who converted to Christianity] (1609); René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claims the Mississippi basin for France, and names the area Louisiana after his King (1682); Juan de León Fandiño, Commander of the Spanish privateer La Isabela stops and boards HMS Rebecca on suspicion of smuggling, ties its Captain, Robert Jenkins, to a mast and slices off his left ear - sparking the nine-year-long "War of Jenkins' Ear", part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1731); Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the first surviving recording of a human voice - probably his own, singing Au Clair de la Lune - on a "phonautograph" (1860 - the machine can record sound, but cannot play the recording); Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain is premiered in Madrid (1916); the six-week long Battle of Arras begins (1917 - the "result" is a stalemate, with nearly 300,000 deaths from both sides); the original version of Varese's Ameriques is premiered in Philadelphia, conducted by Stokowski (1926); the first Japanese plane to fly from Japan across Europe arrives at Croydon Airport - it is (rather unfortunately in retrospect) called The Kamikaze (1937); forbidden to sing at Washington's Constitution Hall, Marian Anderson gives an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of 75,000 (1939); Germany invades both Norway and Denmark (1940 - Norwegian Fascist Party leader, Vidkun Quisling tries to use the event to seize power, and uses a radio broadcast to declare himself Head of Government, but the Nazis disregard his declaration and continue their invasion); Colombian Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala is assassinated, sparking a ten-hour-long riot, and a ten-year-long period of political violence in the country (1948); the Suez Canal is declared clear of damage and wreckage caused during the Suez crisis of the previous year (1957); NASA announces the names of the seven astronauts to man the Gemini project - one of them [Alan Shepard] is also involved in the Apollo project, and gets to walk on the Moon (1959); Winston Churchill becomes the first person to be granted Honorary American Citizenship (1963); Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda al-Sadr, both prominent Shi'ia opponents to Saddam Hussein, are tortured to death by Saddam's Baathist supporters (1980); the Soviet Army violently disperses a crowd of protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, causing 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries (1989 - exactly two years to the day later, Georgia declares its independence form the Soviet Union); John Major wins the UK General Election, gaining the greatest number of votes in British History - and losing 40 seats from the preious election (1992); the Battle of Kosare, in the Kosovo War, begins (1999); Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles are married (2005); and, last year, Tammy Duckworth becomes the first member of the US Congress to give birth whilst in office.

Birthdays today include: Philippe Néricault Destouches (1680); Georg Matthias Monn (1717); Thomas Johann Seebeck (1770); Theobald Boehm (1794); Isambard Kingdom Brunel (186); Charles Baudelaire (1821); Eadweard Muybridge (1830); Paolo Tosti (1846); Sol Hurok (1888); Victor Gollancz (1893); Paul Robeson (1898); William Fulbright (1905); Antal Dorati (1906); Robert Helpmann (1909); Tom Lehrer (1928); Armin Jordan and Carl Perkins (both 1932); Aulis Sallinen (1935); Jerzy Maksymiuk (1936); Valerie Singleton (1937); Steve Gadd (1945); Tony Cragg (1949); Andrzej Krzanowski (1951); Nigel Shadbolt (1956); Seve Ballesteros (1957); Nigel Slater (1958); and Kristen Stewart (1990).

Final Days for: Edward IV (1483); Francois Rabelais (1553); Francis Bacon (1626); Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1882); Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1933); Frank Lloyd Wright (1959); Clough Williams-Ellis (1978); Robin Orr (2006); Kenneth McKellar (2010); and Sidney Lumet (2011).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Wednesday, 9th April, 1969 were:

Overture Gramophone records
Your Midweek Choice A record request programme
This Week's Composer: Sibelius (Symphony #1 [complete - the VPO/Maazel recording])
Orchestral Concert Gramophone records
Organ Recital by Alan Harverson
Music Making with the Beaux Arts Trio, and Jean Francaix (piano) with Eric Tappy (Tenor) and with Maurice Gendron.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBL7V3zGMUA

[johncorrigan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziJoep1cDlY

:daff2:

[greenilex]

Wonderful Robeson. I have always wanted to be able to hit those low notes, and tho’ my voice has got much lower these days I shall never make it. I blame the old bugbear gender...

[cloughie]

Wonderful Robeson. I have always wanted to be able to hit those low notes, and tho’ my voice has got much lower these days I shall never make it. I blame the old bugbear gender...

Lovely rich tones - I can’t get them either - then I’m baritenor, so those top tenor notes are beyond me also, but I have a good deal of enjoyment delivering down the middle!

[Richard Tarleton]

Clough Williams-Ellis (1978);

We've stayed at Clough Williams-Ellis's fantastical Italianate village Portmeirion on the edge of Snowdonia often enough to count as regulars

- last year the family gathered there for our mother's wake as she'd expressed a wish for her ashes to be scattered on the shore of the Menai Strait, close to her birthplace. It's an amazing place - you can stay in a village room or apartment, or in the hotel at the bottom of the hill which has a stunning view over the estuary. The village was the setting for the 1966-7 cult TV series The Prisoner, which still seems to have devotees worldwide (I only ever managed about half an episode, but one can see how it became a cult).

[LMcD]

Kenneth McKellar, who, I seem to recall, had a way with Handel arias, died 9 years ago today.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Kenneth McKellar, who, I seem to recall, had a way with Handel arias, died 9 years ago today.

- duly added

[Pabmusic]

Kenneth McKellar, who, I seem to recall, had a way with Handel arias, died 9 years ago today.

Indeed. A graduate of the Royal College of Music.

[Pabmusic]

Kenneth MacKellar sings his own arrangement of She Moved Through The Fair. Very interesting piece as it's an 'artificial' folk song (or so I call them). The tune is certainly traditional, but it was published in Herbert Hughes's Irish Country Songs in 1909, with words by the poet Padraic Colum. Hughes did this a lot, most famously with W. B Yeats's Down By The Sally Gardens (in the same collection - also I Know Where I'm Going). This has a noble tradition, most famously with Robert Burns and Thomas Moore, who wrote new words to old tunes.

Herbert Hughes was a pupil of Charles Wood at the RCM, and a friend both of RVW and George Butterworth. His son - Spike - was a jazz bassist who wrote The Art of Coarse Cricket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vECzfZxLu10