Today's the Day

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April 23rd

Shakespeare's birthday (possibly) and final day (certainly) - no greater cause for national and international celebration. (Hence World Book Day today - and, indeed, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day ; intended to encourage writers to post "professional quality" works for free on the Internet.)
And St George's Day. Scotland has one of the apostles, Ireland and Wales have local saints ... the English celebrate a saint who largely didn't exist in the sense that he certainly didn't slay any mythical beasts - nor had even heard of a place called England. I blame the Normans - we used to have a native-born national Saint (Edward the Confessor), and we have quite a few to chose from (Alban, Bede, my favourites) but the Normans returning home from the Crusades decided in favour of George. It is, apparently, a good day for picking dandelions to make wine (but only if it's a sunny day) and customarily (until 1917, at any rate) the people of Gloucester would present the monarch with a pie cooked with lampreys caught in the River Severn (not exactly tactful, given Henry I's experiences) on this day. Lots of village parades in older times, in which effigies of the Saint, and of the Dragon his name became embroiled with from the 13th Century - but very little emphasis on the real George, an early 4th Century soldier in the Roman Army from modern-day Turkey, who became a Christian at the time of the Emperor Diocletian's persecution of the faith. George was subjected to "every imaginable torture" but refused to recant, and was eventually beheaded on this date in 303. He's also the Patron Saint of Ethiopia and Georgia.

Also on this Date: Edward III introduces the Order of the Garter (1348); the Bavarian Beer Purity Law is introduced in Ingolstadt (1516); Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor is [possibly] premiered in front of Elizabeth I at a feast for the Order of the Garter (1597); Boston Latin School, the oldest in the United States, opens (1635); the Coronation of Charles II in Westminster Abbey (1661 - a memorable day for Samuel Pepys who records in his Diary But so great a noise, that I could make but little of the Musique; and endeed, it was lost to everybody. But I had so great a list to pisse, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies and went round the abby to Westminster-hall, all the way within rayles, and 10000 people, with the ground coverd with blue cloth - and Scaffolds all the way. Into the hall I got - where it was very fine with hangings and scaffolds, one upon another, full of brave ladies. And my wife in one little one on the right hand); the Coronation of Queen Anne also takes place on this date (1702); Mozart's Il Re Pastore is premiered at the Theatre in the Palace of the Archbishop in Salzburg (1775); the main Building of the University of Notre Dame is destroyed by fire (1870); Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience is premiered at the Opera Comique in London (1881 - six months later it moves to the newly-opened Savoy Theatre, the first Theatre completely lit by electricity); the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre is opened (1932 - six years after the previous building had been destroyed by fire); Bartok's [Second] Violin Concerto is premiered by Zoltán Székely with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Mengelberg (1939); a bombing raid on Exeter begins the "Baedeker Blitz"; a series of bombing raids targetting cultural [rather than industrial] centres in England, in retaliation for successful British aerial bombing of Lubeck and Rostock the previous month (1942); Messiaen gives the premiere of his Livre d'Orgue to inaugurate the new organ at the Villa Berg in Stuttgart (1952); George Stevens' film of Shane with Alan Ladd and Jack Palance is released (1953); students at Columbia University protesting against the Vietnam War seize control of the Administrative buildings and shut the University down (1968); more than 3000 Hindus are murdered as they attempt to emigrate to India by Pakistani troops and Bangladesh civilians opposed to independence in the Jathibhanga district of Bangladesh (1971); Harold Pinter's No Man's Land is premiered at Old Vic Theatre in London (1975); Blair Peach, a 33-year-old teacher is struck on the head by a member of the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group as he demonstrates outside a National Front Election meeting - he dies the next day (1979 - an investigation by the Police Complaints Bureau concludes that one of six officers struck the blow, and the remaining five have obstructed the investigation); Coca-Cola releases New Coke, to a "new, improved recipe", announcing that the old recipe will be withdrawn (1985 - public outcry is unanimously against the new recipe, and it is itself withdrawn within three months); and the first ever video appears on YouTube (2005).

Birthdays Today include (besides, possibly, the Bard's): Robert Fayrfax (1464); Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857); Max Planck and Ethel Smyth (both 1858); Michel Fokine (1880); Albert Coates (1882); Ngaio Marsh (1895 - speaking of A Surfeit of Lampreys); Lee Miller (1907); Simone Simon (1910); Shirley Temple (1928); Roy Orbison (1937); Victoria Glendinning (1938); Ed Stewart (1941); Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (1947); Michael Moore (1954); Barry Douglas (1960); John Hannah (1962); Gianandrea Noseda (1964); ... and George Steiner is 90 today

Final Days for (ditto): Aethelred the Unready (1016); Boris Godunov (1605); Henry Vaughan (1695); William Wordsworth (1850); Rupert Brooke (1915); Buster Crabbe (1983); Otto Preminger (1986); Paulette Goddard (1990); Satyajit Ray (1992); Robert Farnon and John Mills (both 2005); Boris Yeltsin (2007); Peter Porter (2010); John Sullivan (2011);


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Sunday, 23rd April, 1989 were:

Tudor Church Music 4th in a series of 16 programmes (Wylkynson Salve regina; Sheppard Verbum caro & Reges Tharsis)
Smetana Quartet 5th of 6 programmes (Schubert Scherzo from the Trout 5tet; Brahms Adagio from Clar 5tet; Mozart S5tet K515)
Your Concert Choice: Shostakovich October; Mozart Piano Concerto No 17 in F (K 453); Vaughan Williams Ten Blake Songs; Schubert String Quartet in G minor (D 173); George Lloyd Symphony No 9
Music Weekly: features on Dichterliebe, Herbert Howells, a Letter from Russia, and a conversation with Jane Manning.
BBCWSO conducted by Tadaaki Otaka (Beethoven Coriolan Ovt; Strauss Tod & Verk; Brahms Pno Conc #1 [with Peter Donohoe] - plus an Interval Reading)

[cloughie]

"Dvorak conducts the world premiere of his Seventh Symphony in St James Hall, London (1885 - five weeks after he had completed the score);."

A Yorkshire Paper excitedly reported that Antonin preferred to be addressed as 'Mr' to ' Herr' and told that the composer had heard a London Choral Society performing a cantata by Frederick Cowen. When a nearby train whistle added to the din, Mr. Dvorak leaned towards his neighbour and said in a stage whisper, "What fearful orchestration".

He liked trains!

Shakespeare’s birthday - he went into the pub and tried to order a celebratory drink - the landlord said ‘You, Bard’.

[greenilex]

Big Wobbly Bard Day - should last all year.

[vinteuil]

[B].. a bombing raid on Exeter begins the "Beideker Blitz"; a series of bombing raids targetting cultural [rather than industrial] centres in England, in retaliation for successful British aerial bombing of Lubeck and Rostock the previous month (1942);

Baedeker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker_Blitz

Not to be confused with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bix_Beiderbecke

.

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Baedeker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker_Blitz

Not to be confused with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bix_Beiderbecke

.

Oops.

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Baeder way, this is the first ever video posted on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

... I think it's safe to say that things could only get better.

[vinteuil]

And St George's Day. Scotland has one of the apostles, Ireland and Wales have local saints ... the English celebrate a saint who largely didn't exist in the sense that he certainly didn't slay any mythical beasts - nor had even heard of a place called England. I blame the Normans - we used to have a native-born national Saint (Edward the Confessor), and we have quite a few to chose from (Alban, Bede, my favourites) but the Normans returning home from the Crusades decided in favour of George. It is, apparently, a good day for picking dandelions to make wine (but only if it's a sunny day) and customarily (until 1917, at any rate) the people of Gloucester would present the monarch with a pie cooked with lampreys caught in the River Severn (not exactly tactful, given Henry I's experiences) on this day. Lots of village parades in older times, in which effigies of the Saint, and of the Dragon his name became embroiled with from the 13th Century - but very little emphasis on the real George, an early 4th Century soldier in the Roman Army from modern-day Turkey, who became a Christian at the time of the Emperor Diocletian's persecution of the faith. George was subjected to "every imaginable torture" but refused to recant, and was eventually beheaded on this date in 303. He's also the Patron Saint of Ethiopia and Georgia.

... tho' as we are still in the week of Easter, which trumps any saint's day, actually the feast day for St George is this year translated to next week : so - for Catholics it will be 30 April, for Anglicans 29 April.

In addition to England, Ethiopia, and Georgia - he is also patron saint of Portugal, Brazil, Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, boy scouts and syphilitics.


.

[subcontrabass]

I blame the Normans - we used to have a native-born national Saint (Edward the Confessor),

Edward the Confessor was a late second national saint for England. Saint Edmund the Martyr got in first.

[subcontrabass]

Georgia -

Georgia celebrates by the Julian Calendar, and has four feast days per year for St George.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

boy scouts and syphilitics.

Now that's a rare badge!

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April 24th

The Eve of St Mark - one of those "divination" days, when young women are supposed to take measures to see who is going to be their husband; sometimes quite blandly ("you will see your lover in a dream"), sometimes not at all pleasantly ("the wraith of your future lover will be summoned to your side") - but alwys involving elaborate rituals, such as the washing of the woman's chemise (I had to look that up - if you'll excuse the expression - I thought it was a sort of leather duster), hanging it up and waiting for a vision of the chap to come and turn it over. Probably the only time any of the girls ever saw a chap helping with the laundry - and probably something of a surprise in store for those chaps who enjoy the hobby of collecting underwear from washing lines.
Not just confined to women - a record from Lincolnshire in 1891 says "A youth or girl walks around the church at dead of night, looking into each window in succession, in expectation of seeing, in the last window, the face of his or her partner in life" (again, a mutual shock if the verger happened to be looking out to see what all these kids were doing traipsing around the church).
In Yorkshire, there was no time for any of this sloppy nonsense - late-night vigils on St Mark's Eve weren't for seeing your fancy (wo)man, but to discover who was going to die in the village in the coming year. A procession of ghostly images of villagers would enter the church, and those that didn't come back out needn't bother buying a Five-Year Diary. (But did the procession include the images of the villagers watching outside the church - and possibly catching their deaths of cold? Yes, indeed - and such "Porch Watchings" became compulsive for those who needed to ensure that they didn't see their own images, and were, therefore, safe for another year.

Quite what any of this has to do with the writer of the shortest Gospel isn't clear ....

Also on this Date: 16-year-old Mary Queen of Scots marries the French Dauphin at Notre Dame (1558); the United States Library of Congress is founded (1800); Haydn's The Seasons is premiered in Vienna (1801); Bruch conducts the premiere of his g minor Violin Concerto with soloist Otto von Konnigsglow (1866); the Russo-Turkish War begins (1877); Annie Oakley joins Buffulo Bill's Wild West Show (1885); Berg's Piano Sonata, played by Etta Werndorff, and his String Quartet Op3 are premiered in the same concert at the Vienna Musikverein, along with Webern's Four Pieces for Violin & Piano Op8 (1911); James Franck and Gustave Hertz present a paper to the German Society of Physicists demonstrating the quantum nature of atoms (1914); the Ottoman authorities round up over 230 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople and deport them to Ankara, where many of them will be murderd (1915); the Easter Uprising by Irish Nationalists against British rule begins in Dublin (1916 - it is Easter Monday); a wireless telegraphy link between Britain and Egypt is opened (1918 - the first section of the Imperial Wireless Chain, an international communication system); the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, to demand public right to walk in areas of countryside hitherto denied them (1932); the Nazis shut down the Watchtower Offices in Magdeburg - the beginning of a persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses that will eventually see 10000 of their number imprisoned, including 2000 sent to Concentration Camps, of whom 1200 will die in captivity (1933); the Special Boat Service mounts the Raid on Santorini(1944); Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Sixth Symphony is premiered in Munich by the BRSO conducted by Eugen Jochum (1953 - on the same day that Mr Winston Churchill becomes Sir Winston Churchill ); the first large-scale meeting of African and Asian states, the Bandung Conference, comes to an end after six days of discussion aiming at co-operation and to condemn colonialism (1955); Swedish warship Vasa, which had sunk on its maiden voyage in 1628, is raised from the bed of the sea (1961); cosmonaut Vladimir Komorov is killed when the parachute on Soyuz 1 fails to open (1967 - Komorov had been warning the Soviet authorities that the spaceship was unsafe, but such was the need for them to catch up with the Americans in the space race that they override his warnings, and tell him that if he doesn't fly the mission, they will get his friend Yuru Gagarin to do so); Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is premiered in the Town Hall, New York (1976); the Hubble Space Telescope is launched from Space Shuttle Discovery (1990 - the same day that the Scottish island of Gruinard is declared free of Anthrax, 48 years after British experiments with chemical weapons; AND the same day that Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa is premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin); an IRA truck bomb detonates in the Bishopgate area of London, killing a journalist, injuring 44 others, and destroying property (1993); The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act is passed in the United States (1996); 1134 people are killed, and around 2500 others injured when an eight-storey commercial building housing a garment factory collapses in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2013 - cracks had appeared in the building, and the shops and banks on the lower floors closed immediately; the factory owners instead ordered their workers to report for work the next day); and, this time last year, President Trump brushes a bit of dandruff off President Macron's lapel "to make him look perfect" - meanwhile, in London, Gillian Wearing's statue of Millicent Fawcett is unveiled in Parliament Square.

Birthdays Today include: John Graunt (1620); Giovanni Battista Martini (1706); the Hoffstettter twins Roman [who wrote "Haydn's Serenade"] and Johann Urban Alois [who nicked most of the christian names] (1742); Edmund Cartwright (1743); Anthony Trolloppe (1815); Stafford Cripps and Lyubov Popova (both 1889); Elizabeth Goudge (1900); Willem de Kooning (1904); Robert Penn Warren (1905); Violet Archer (1913); Bridget Riley (1931); Shirley MacLaine (1934); Joe Henderson (1937); John Williams (1941); Barbra Streisand (1942); Tony Visconti (1944); Jean Paul Gaultier (1952); Martijn Padding (1956); Augusta Read Thomas (1964); Roxanna Panufnik (1968); Gaby Logan (1973); and Simon Steen-Andersen (1976).

Final Days for: Daniel Defoe (1731); Bernard ["file under 'v'"] van Dieren (1936); LM Montgomery (1942); Willa Cather (1947); Manuel Ponce (1948); Max von Laue (1960); Milt Franklyn (1962); Gerhard Domagk (1964); Bud Abbott (1974); Alejo Carpentier (1980); Mel Powell (1998); Estée Lauder (2004); Erik Bergman(2006); and Tristram Cary (2008).


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Thursday, 24th April were:

Overture: RLPO/Groves
Morning Concert: BPO/Karajan
This Week's Composers: Musorgsky & Janacek (the latter's On an Overgrown Path (Book 1), and Sonata: 1.X.1905
Showcase: recent orchestral records - the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra "conducted by the composer" (?!)
Music Making: Piano Duets (played by Richard Rodney Bennett & Susan Bradshaw); works for 'cello & Piano; and others involving the BBC Chorus

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April 25th

There are very few "traditional" celebrations for St Mark's Day itself - perhaps everyone was using the day to catch up on the sleep they'd lost the previous night (or perhaps to take a sudden interest in measuring the room sizes in Great Uncle Herbert's cottage).
There is, however, a couple of "traditions" in Northumberland - a record from 1645 describes the Alnwick cutom of "leaping the well", in which the men about to be granted the freemen of the borough had to scramble through the Freeman's Well: a 20-yard long shallow (and dirty) pond. It was supposed to go all the way back to the time of King John, who - or so the story goes - had been ditched into the mire by his horse, and commanded all the freemen of the town to undergo the same humiliation as punishment for failing to maintain the roads in a decent state of repair. Meanwhile, 20 miles south in Morpeth, the not-quite-great and mostly-good ride in procession around the boundaries of the town. Records of the custom go back to 1892, and, apparently, continues to this day. The Broadband isn't very reliable up there.

Also on this Date: the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War comes to an end (404BCE); German Cartographer publishes his Universalis Cosmographia, a map of the world which uses the word "America" to describe the New World territories for the first time (1507); the Convention Parliament meets for the first time (1660 - they decide to restore the monarchy); Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is first published (1717); French Highwayman, Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, becomes the first person to be executed at/by the Guillotine (1792 - on the same day, the mayor of Strasbourg requests a rousing song to "rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland that is under threat" from his friend Rouget de Lisle; the result is The War Song of the Army of the Rhine, but is quickly known as La Marseillaise, once it is taken up by the citizens of Marseille. The Mayor of Strasbourg follows in Pelletier's footsteps the following year - de Lisle has a longer life, but dies in poverty 42 years later); a US military reconaissance group is ambushed by Mexican forces, leading to a bttle between the towo sides, which results in a victory for the Mexicans, and to the start if the American-Mexican War (1846); work starts on the construction of the Suez Canal (1859); Siegmund Freud opens his first private consultancy practice in Vienna (1886); the United States declares War on Spain, back-dating it to 21st April, when they had initiated hostilities (1898); the Battle of Gallipoli begins (1915 - the great numbers of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps leads to the first ANZAC Day commemorations the following year); Schreker's Die Gezeichneten is premiered at the Frankfurt Opera, conducted by Ludwig Rottenberg (1918); at the San Remo Conference, the victorious Allied Powers passed madates for the administration of former Ottoman Empire territories (1920); Puccini's Turandot is premiered at La Scala Milan, conducted by Toscanini (1926 - the conclusion to the opera supplied by Alfano is omitted on this occasion); the United Negro College Fund is established to raise funds to pay for scholarships for black students (1944); American and Soviet troops meet at the River Elbe - a pincer movement that cuts off any hope of retreat for the German troops (1945 - on the exact same day, the Nazi occupation of Italy ends; Benito Mussolini is captured whilst attempting to escape; the nazi troops withdraw from Finnish territory --- and the Foundation negotiations of the United Nations begin in San Francisco); Crick and Watson publish their Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid in the journal Nature (1953); Calvin Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson demonstrate their new invention, the Silicon Solar Cell, at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1954); United States Navy Submarine Triton completes the first undersea circumnavigation of the world (1960); Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby receive a patent for their invention of the Integrated Circuit [or "microchip"] (1961); Bernd Alois Zimmermann's ballet Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu is premiered in Dusseldorf (1968 - the score had been premiered four months earlier); Maurizio Kagel's Staatstheater is premiered in Hamburg (1971); a Left-Wing military coup overthrows the right-wing authoritarian regime in Portugal and replaces it with a democratic assembly (1974 - on the same day, it is revealed that Gunther Guillaume, a personal assistant to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, has been spying for the East German secret service. A year to the day later, the first democratic elections are held in Portugal, resulting in a victory for the Socialist Party); an attempt to rescue American hostages in the Embassy in Tehran fails disastrously (1980) Israel withdraws its troops from the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Camp David Agreement (1982); Violeta Chamorro becomes the first female president of Nicaragua (1990); and Bulgaria and Romania sign accession papers to join the European Union (2005)

Birthdays Today include: Oliver Cromwell (1599); James Ferguson (1710); Felix Klein (1849); CB Fry (1872); Walter de la Mare (1873); Guglielmo Marconi (1874); Wolfgang Pauli (1900); Ella Fitzgerald (1917); Astrid Varney (1918); Karel Appel (1921); Cy Twombly (1928); James Fenton (1931); Meadowlark Lemon (1932); Jerry Lieber (1933); Al Pacino (1940); Tony Chritie (1943); Len Goodman (1944); Bjorn Ulveus (1945); Johan Cruyff (1947); Melvin Burgess (1954); Robert Peston (1960); Luke Bedford (1978) ... and Rene Zellweger is 50 today.

Final Days for: Leon Battista Alberti (1472); Torquato Tasso (1595); William Cowper (1800); Anna Sewell (1878); John Knowles Paine (1906); George Sanders (1972); Carol Reed (1976); Ginger Rogers (1995); Saul Bass (1996); Niels Viggo Bentzon (2000); Thom Gunn (2004); Humphrey Lyttelton (2008 - crikey! It doesn't seem like eight years!); Bea Arthur (2009); Alan Sillitoe (2010); and Poly Styrene (2011).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Wednesday, 25th April, 1979 were:

Your Midweek Choice: Hummel, Rondo Brillante; Druzecky, Partita in Eb; Weber, Horn Concertino; Minkus/Irving DonQuixote pas de deux; Waldteufel The Grenadiers; Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo capriccioso; Scharwenka Piano Concerto #2 in c minor.
This Week's Composer: Dvorak [the early years]: King and Charcoal Burner aria; 'cello Concerto #1 in A [orch Burghauser].
An Organ Recital by Norman Finlay (Music by Blow, Croft, Roseingrave, and Handel)
Les Sept (Music by Auric, Durey, Honeggar, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre ... and Satie)
Midday Concert: BBCSSO/Rickenbacher (Haydn Le Matin; Ravel Concerto in G [ with Nikita Magaloff]; Brahms/Schoenberg Piano Quartet in g minor.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 26th

It's World Intellectual Property Day today, - begun in 2000 to raise awareness of how patents, copyrights, and trademarks impact upon daily life". But I don't know if I'm supposed to be saying this.

The Feast Day of St Stephen of Perm - nothing to do with hairdressers, he was a 14th Century painter (many of whose works survive) credited with introducing Christianity to the Permian peoples of the Russian Ural districts - and of giving them an alphabet, so that they could write.

Also on this Date: as they attend Mass, Lorenzo and Guiliano de Medici are attacked by members of rival family the de Pazzi, with the approval of the Pope, in an attempt to overthrow the Medici control of Florence. Guiliano is killed, but Lorenzo escapes with his life, and is able to reassert his power and destroy his enemies (1477); William Shakespeare is baptised (1564); 16-year-old Sybil Ludington rides overnight through New England to warn American forces of an approaching British attack (1777); Napoleon grants an amnesty to most of the French emigrés who had left during the Revolution, allowing them to return safely (1802); Confederate General Joseph E Johnston surrenders to Unionist General William T Sherman, effectively ending the American Civil War (1865 - on the exact same day, cavalry troops corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth); General Paul von Hindenburg becomes the first elected President of the Weimar Republic (1925); Hermann Göring consolidates the various security police forces to create the Geheime Staatspolizei ["state secret police" - "GeStaPo" for short] (1933); the Spanish village of Guernica is bombed by the Luftwaffe (1937); anti-fascist demonstrators are attacked by police defending the pro-Nazi Swedish Socialist Unity party in Uppsala (1943); Vaughan Williams' The Pilgrim's Progress is premiered at Covent Garden conducted by Leonard Hancock (1951); Ranger 4 becomes the first American spacecraft to reach the Moon - alas, an onboard computer failure means that it crashes into - rather than landing on - the surface (1962); Tanzania is formed with the merger of Tanganyika and Zanzibar (1964); Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony is premiered in Carnegie Hall by the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, assisted by David Katz and José Serebrier (1965); an earthquake in Uzbekistan capital Tashkant destroys most of the bulidings, results in the deaths of up to 200 people, and leaves 300,000 homeless (1966 - the incident leads to the creation of the Soviet Institute of Seismology, in order to be able to predict when such events were likely to happen); the World Intellectual Copyright Convention comes into force (1970); surgeon Michael R Harrison performs the world's first Open Foetal Surgery operation (1981); a catastrophic power surge in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant results in several explosions which pump radioactive materials into the atmosphere (1986); a violent tornedo, causing the greatest loss of life on record [an estimated 1300 deaths], devastates Dhakar in Bangladesh (1989 - on the same day, a front-page editorial in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily denounces the protesting students in Tianenmen Square as "a destabilizing anti-party revolt that should be resolutely opposed at all levels of society", enraging the students and widening the gulf between them and the Party); following UN Resolution 1559, Syria is forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, after nearly thirty years' occupation (2005); and, this time last year, Bill Cosby was found guilty of 3 counts of aggravated sexual assault.

Birthdays Today include: Marcus Aurelius (121); Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538); Adam Falckenhagen (1697); David Hume (1711); Eugene Delacroix (1798); Eric Campbell (1879); Anita Loos and Ludwig Wittgenstein (both 1889); John Grierson (1898); Charles Francis Richter (1900); Jean Vigo (1905); Leopold Spinner (1906); Tomoyuki Tanaka (1910); Bernard Malamud and Wilfrid Mellers (both 1914); Jimmy Giuffre (1921); Jack Douglas (1927); Duane Eddy (1938); Howard Davies (1945); Susannah Harker (1965); Melania Trump (1970); Klaus Lang (1971).

Final Days for: Jean Fernel (1558); Gypsy Rose Lee (1970); Irene Ryan (1973); Sid James (1976); Cicely Courtneidge (1980); Celia Johnson (1982); Count Basie (1984); Dechko Uzunov (1986); Lucille Ball (1989); Maria Schell (2005); and [as recent television programmes have reminded us] it is 20 years since Jill Dando was murdered.

And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Wednesday, 26th April, 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Dvorak Prague Waltzes; Chopin Krakowiak; Brahms Hungarian Dance #1; Smetana Prague Carnival; Mozart Piano Concerto No 13 in C (K 415); Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen Suite.
Composer of the Week: Howells (Paradise Rondel (first broadcast); Clarinet Sonata; Procession; Fantasia).
Two Bohemians: Krommer Octet-partita in F, Op 57; Benda Harpsichord Concerto in F minor.
Pupil & Master: Geoffrey Bush Rhapsody; Ireland Sextet
Your Midweek Choice: Rheinberger Organ Concerto in G minor; Mayerl Marigold, Shallow Waters, and Printer's Devil; Adam Giselle (Act 2); Haydn Guitar Quartet in E, Op 2 #2; Saeverud Symphony No 9.

[LMcD]

Celia Johnson ('Brief Encounter') died on this day in Nettlebed, California. The opening of the 'Rach 2' used to bring her to mind, but I'm afraid that Victoria Wood's brilliant spoof has now taken over!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Celia Johnson ('Brief Encounter') died on this day in Nettlebed, California. The opening of the 'Rach 2' used to bring her to mind, but I'm afraid that Victor Wood's brilliant spoof has now taken over!

- in 1982: duly added to the list.


("Victoria Wood", surely? )