Today's the Day

[edashtav]

I was pleased to see Cherubini's Anacréon Overture in the early morning slot.
It's a wonderful piece that I enjoy at all times of the day.

[greenilex]

Depends on my Cornish friend. Her cottage is pretty small.

[greenilex]

Just did a double-take with Cyrano de Bergerac...but of course he is not just a funny face.

[cloughie]

I was pleased to see Cherubini's Anacréon Overture in the early morning slot.
It's a wonderful piece that I enjoy at all times of the day.

I bet it was the VPO Munchinger!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I bet it was the VPO Munchinger!

[Petrushka]

A nitpicking pedant writes:

Andre Previn was born on April 6 1929, not March.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Sorry - what month is this?



Nothing either "nitpicking" nor "pedantic" about getting facts correct, Pet - not least in such a matter on such a Thread. (Duly corrected.)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

March 7th

The Feast Day of Saints Perpetua, Felicitas, and their companions Revocatus, Saturninus, Secundulus, and Saturus, third century catechumen (unbaptised) Christians, killed as part of the entertainments that were part of the birthday celebrations of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. All were young - Perpetua, just 22 and with a new-born infant, Felicitas a young slave who was pregnant at the time. Perpetua's prison diary - although generally believed nowadays to be much altered from the original, is one of the earliest first-hand texts by a Christain martyr.

Also on this date: the Roman Empire gains its first joint rulers, power being shared by the two adoptive brothers Marcus Aurelius and Lucious Verus (161); Emperor Constantine I decrees that Sundays will henceforth be the day of rest throughoit the Roman Empire (321); James Hutton delivers his speech on Uniformitarianism to determine the age of the Earth from geological evidence rather than Biblical accounts (1785); the Royal Institution is founded in London (1799); Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his invention of the Telephone, the patent office rejecting Elisha Gray's request for a patent, which he had filed on the same day as Bell [see Feb 14] (1876); The Grand Duke, the last collaboration of Gilbert & Sullivan is premiered at the Savoy Theatre in London (1896); Boer volunteers defeat British troops at the Battle of Tweebosch (1902); the Kronstadt Rebellion by Russian sailors against Bolshevik rule begins (1921); German troops march into the Rheinland in contravention of the Versailees Treaty (1936); Alabama police commander John Cloud orders State Troopers to beat back 600 peaceful Civil Rights protesters - the televised images of the brutality encourage support for Civil Rights law reform (1965); Sheikh Mujibur Rahman delivers his "7th March Speech" demanding an independent Bagladesh (1971); Comet Kohoutek is first sighted by Czech astronomer Lubos Kahoutek (1973); the US intervenes in Nicaragua (1984); Iran and the UK break off diplomatic relations following Ayatollah Khomeni's issuing of a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie (1989); photographs from the Hubble Telescope reveal the surface of demoted planet Pluto for the first time (1996); and the House of Commons votes to make the House of Lords completed elected (2007).

Birthdays include: John Wilbye (1574); Rob Roy MacGregor (1671); Ewald Christian von Kleist (1715); Nicéphore Niépce (1765); Alessandro Manzoni (1785); John Herschel (1792); Henry Draper (1837); Piet Mondrian (1872); Maurice Ravel (1875); Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922 - thank you, Google); Richard Vernon (1925); Anthony Armstrong-Jones (1930); Georges Perec (1936); Piers Paul Read (1941); Ranulph Fiennes (1944); Viv Richards (1952); Andrea Levy (1956); Robert harris (1957); Rik Mayall (1958); Ivan Lendl (19600; Brett Easton Ellis (1964); and Rachel Weisz (1970).

Final Days for: Thomas Aquinas (1274); Johann Bayer (1625); Franz Benda (1786); Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Jean-Pierre Blanchard (both 1809); Cuthbert Collingwood (1810); Lucy Parsons (1947); Wyndham Lewis (1957); Alice B Toklas (1967); Kiril Kondrashin (1981); Igor Markevich (1983); and it's been twenty years since Stanley Kubrick died (1999).

And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Tuesday, 7th March 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Satie Veritables préludes flasques (pour un chien); Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals; Ravel Sheherazade Ovt; Franck Symphonic Variation; Ibert Divertissement; Debussy Golliwog's Cakewalk.
Composer of the Week: Musorgsky The Nursery; Boris Godunov Act 2.
Hugh Tinney: Soler 3 Sonatas; Albeniz La Vega; Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #9.
Chilingirian String Quartet: Mozart Dissonance; Shostakovich S4tet #7
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach: Leighton Dance Suite; Dvorak Vln Conc (with Miriam Fried); Beethoven Pastoral Symphony.

[Edgy 2]

Volker Schmidt-Gertenbach,now there’s a conductor you don’t hear much about nowadays.
Conducting Kenneth Leighton,a composer who doesn’t feature much on Radio 3 nowadays (choral evensong excepted)

[cloughie]

What a good Morning Concert knocks spots off any Breakfast we get now!

[greenilex]

Not sure that you would persuade modern butterflies to alight on a bed of French music for that length of time..

[Pulcinella]

And we'd probably have to sanitize the title of the Debussy piece too, to avoid offending anyone!

[Richard Tarleton]

Birthdays include: Rob Rooy MacGregor (1671)

I read the Walter Scott novel (in which Rob Roy in fact makes only fleeting appearances) around 50 years ago - looking again at the synopsis in Wikipedia I'm not sure how I managed it. Set around the time of the 1715 Jacobite rising. I've just read Waverley (set against the '45, and excellent) and reluctantly given up on Redgauntlet (set against an entirely fictitious and abortive Jacobite rising 20 years after that) as being entirely unreadable - I got half way before flinging it across the room and reading the rest of the story on Wikipedia (none the wiser). I think my patience and attention span must be shorter than they were once. They didn't have telly back then.

[greenilex]

I’ll bet there was a fuss over Thomas of Aquinas’ funeral...he was a plump old nerd but he still has bits to say and wrote like an angel. My godfather published quite a good book about him, which I still have.

[Padraig]

I’ll bet there was a fuss over Thomas of Aquinas’ funeral...he was a plump old nerd but he still has bits to say and wrote like an angel. My godfather published quite a good book about him, which I still have.

I suppose it is OK to be ageist and fattist about the saintly scholar now that he's long gone.
March 7 was a Free Day for us pupils at secondary school and we were unscholarly enough to enjoy it.