Today's the Day

[vinteuil]

Bloomsday!

Also, the Feast Day of St Cethach, the 5th Century disciple of St Patrick who ordained him as Bishop of Oran, now in County Roscommon where there used to be a shrine to him which was a place of pilgrimage for many Catholics until the 18th Century - but which has become so "obscure" that Cethach's WIKI entry seems to believe is in Algeria.

And the Feast Day of St Curig, the 7th Century Welsh Bishop who settled on the mountain of the village of Llanbadarn Fawr, a couple of miles from Aberystwyth - the mountain is called Eisteddfa Gurig ["Curig's Seat"] after him.

Also the Feast Day of St Ismael,

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

and I'm sure Richd: Tarleton will know the magic realm of St Ishmaels -

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

We were often there on holiday as children - for me it acquired the sort of wonder and mystery associated with the domain in le Grand Meaulnes - I often thought that when I attained the viscountcy wch I felt sure I deserved I wd choose to be called Viscount St Ishmaels. Dis aliter visum...

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[Petrushka]

You could also add Willi Boskovsky (1909) to the birthday roster!

[gurnemanz]

Maureen Forrester whose voice I love caught my eye on the Final Day section. I picked three apt late night songs:
Mahler - Um Mitternacht
Wagner - Träume (Wesendonck)
Schubert - An den Mond

[Richard Tarleton]

Also the Feast Day of St Ismael,

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

and I'm sure Richd: Tarleton will know the magic realm of St Ishmaels -

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

We were often there on holiday as children - for me it acquired the sort of wonder and mystery associated with the domain in le Grand Meaulnes - I often thought that when I attained the viscountcy wch I felt sure I deserved I wd choose to be called Viscount St Ishmaels. Dis aliter visum...

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.

Indeed I do - I pass it regularly on the way to Marloes/Martinshaven, and make the detour down there occasionally (yellow-browed warbler in Monk Haven churchyard, that sort of thing)....these days it also boasts an excellent garden centre and café....

I read Le Grand Meaulnes from time to time - Conchis's John Fowles first drew it to my attention, over 40 years ago - haunting book which has the strange quality of leaving me unable to remember much about it afterwards, meaning I have to read it again, the book itself a lost domain, not sure I've ever really understood it - I handed it to Mrs T when she was short of something to read recently, she too was captivated....

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You could also add Willi Boskovsky (1909) to the birthday roster!

Thanks, Pet - duly done. Astonishing that none of my three sources mentioned him!

And many thanks to vinty and RT for the information on St Ismael.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

June 17th

The Feast Day of St Botwulf of Thorney, a 9th Century Abbot who founded the Abbey at Ikanhoe (believed to be the village of Iken in Suffolk) where he was originally buried sometime around the year 680. 300 years later, his remains were removed to the village of Burgh, where they remained for 50 years before being transferred to the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds on the orders of King Cnut - later still, they were removed to Thorney: the first time the saint had ever set foot in the town that now bears his name - "foot" but not "head" as that was separated from the rest of his remains to Ely Abbey - and. later still, various bits of him shared around various religious houses, including Westminster Abbey. Isn't reverence a wonderful thing! Not astonishingly, Botwulf is a patron saint of Travellers - and of Farmers & Farming (well, a lot of earth was dug up on his behalf over the years). Around 71 churches were named after him, though often later Normanised to "Botolph", most famously that in Boston, Lincoln - and "Boston" is itself derived from "Bots town"; so Tea Parties and Symphony Orchestras also owe their name to him. St Botolph's Church in Hardsham, West Sussex is home to some of the church murals in England, dating from the 12th Century - including the oldest-known image of St George. (They survived the Reformation's deformations, ironically because they were covered with whitewash in the 13th Century.)

And it's World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, initiated by the UN in 1995.

Also on this Date: Vlad Dracula makes an assassination attempt on Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who had previously sent two ambassadors to Vlad's court to demand he pay homage to the Sultan (1462 - Vlad had the ambassadors impaled, and launched a brutal attack on the sultan's lands, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians); Henry VII defeats an attempted Cornish rebellion led by Michael An Gof at the Battle of Deptford Bridge (1497); Francis Drake claims American land, which he calls Nova Albion, for the English throne (1579 - it is later renamed California); Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth (1631 - her bereft husband spends the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal); at the Battle of Bunker Hill, British forces capture Charlestown, Massachusetts, but suffer irrepearable casualties in the process (1775); the Republican Party holds its first ever National Convention in Philadelphis (1856); 200,000 people cheer the arrival at New York Docks of the Statue of Liberty (1885 - it is in "prefab" form, and the various bits take the next year to put together, most of which is spent constructing the pedestal); the first reported Polio Outbreak in the United States causes 18 deaths and 132 cases of permanent paralysis (1894); Portuguese aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral complete the first successful flight across the South Atlantic from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro (1922 - it takes them just under three weeks to complete the 5,210 mile journey, using three different aircraft); murderer Eugen Weidmann becomes the last person to be publicly guillotined in France (1939 - unknown to the authorities, the event is filmed by a member of the public, and one of the witnesses is 17-year-old actor-to-be Christopher Lee. Thereafter, beheadings in France are private affairs, and are abolished only in 1977); Lutoslawski's Symphonic Variations are premiered in Cracow by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Grzegorz Fitelberg (also 1939); RMS Lancastria, carrying over 3,000 evacuees back to Britain from Europe [the passenger capacity is 1,000, but this is an emergency] is bombed by the Luftwaffe (1940 - the loss of life is greater than the Titanic and Lusitania combined, and is Britain's worst ever maritime loss; on the same day, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvis fall under Soviet rule); Iceland declares independence from Denmark (1944); a strike by East German Workers turns into a rebellion against the Communist authorities, which the Soviet Union sends tanks and troops to subdue (1953); Stravinsky's Music for the ballet Agon is premiered in Los Angeles, conducted by Robert Craft (1957 - the composer's 75th birthday); China announces its first successful test of a thermonuclear weapon (1967); five White House operatives are arrested whilst illegally attempting to install bugging devices in the offices of the Democratic Party - which are housed in the Watergate Building in Washington DC (1972); Saudi royal Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud becomes the first Muslim to fly in space when he joins the crew of Space Shuttle Discovery's fifth mission (1985); after a car chase televised on national news networks, OJ Simpson is arrested for the murder of his estranged wife and one of her friends (1994); a neo Nazi murders nine black citizens as they take part in a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (2015)

Birthdays Today include: Edward I[-ish: actually IV] (1239); Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691); John Kay (1704); César-François Cassini de Thury (1714); Charles Gounod (1818); William Crookes (1832); Susan LaFlesche Picotte (1865); Igor Stravinsky (1882); MC Escher and Harry Patch (both 1898); Evelyn Irons (1900); Sammy Fain (1902); John Amis (1922); Wally Wood (1927); John Baldessari (1931); Christian Ferras (1933); Ken Loach (1936); Barry Manilow (1943); Gérard Grisey (1946); Venus Williams (1980); ... and it's the Centenary of the births of both Beryl Reid, and Galina Ustvolskaya, the latter marked by Radio 3 by a whole day devoted to [the expression rhymes with "Rugger Ball"] of her Music. (Unless, of course, it's used for one of Suzy's "Slow Moments".)

Final Days for: Joseph Addison (1719); Edward Burne-Jones (1898); Johan Wagenaar (1941); Dorothy Richardson (1957); Peter Mennin (1983); John Boulting (1985); Basil Hume (1999); Cyd Charisse (2008); Rodney King (2012); Patsy Byrne (2014);


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Tuesday, 17th June, 1969 were:

Overture: "gramophone records"
An hour of Music by Stravinsky to celebrate the composer's 87th birthday (Pulcinella Suite; Octet; Concerto in D for Strings [conducted by "Colon Davis" according to the Genome - well, it is a visceral performance]; Scherzo a la Russe.
Composer of the Week: Beethoven (Bagatelles Opp 119 & 126; Variations on Air de la petite Russe Op 107 #3)
Concerto: Malcolm Binns/BBCWSO/John Carewe (work[s] performed not recorded)

followed by seven hours of the flanneled fools.

[eighthobstruction]

....bish bash bosh bit of white emulsion solves many a decorating dilemma even in C13....

[eighthobstruction]

....I bet that Mehmed II knew hold to hold a political husting....impaling for loosers....

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

....I bet that Mehmed II knew hold to hold a political husting....impaling for loosers....

Trouble is ... with Tories, you never know if they won't enjoy it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

June 18th

Autistic Pride Day - initiated in 2005 by the Aspies For Freedom movement to raise awareness amongts the Allist community (that's the rest of us, "neurologically typicals") of the positive aspects of the Autistic Spectrum, and to encourage respect for Autistics as a minority status group of people.

Also on this Date: the 300-year Tang Dynasty begins as Governor Li Yuan becomes Emperor Gaozu of Tang (618); the Rus invasion of Constantinople begins (860 - the group of nomadic traders were angered by the Byzantine's building of a fortress in the Russ' home territory - in modern day Russia - restricting their freedom of movement); astonomer monks at Canterbury Abbey observe "the upper horn of the Moon split in two with a flaming torch springing up from the midpoint, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were in anxiety, and ... throbbed like a wounded snake." (1178 - it is believed that they were witnessing the collision of an asteroid into the far side of the Moon, creating what is now called the Giovanni Bruno Crater); the first recorded meeting of the Irish Parliament is held (1264); the Battle of Patay, in which the English invaders, led by Sir John Fastolf, are defeated by Joan of Arc's troops (1429); Mozart's "Paris" Symphony is given its first public performance at a Concert Spirituel (1778 - on this same day, British troops withdraw from Philadelphia); US President Madison declares war on United Kingdom (1812 - he is banking on Napoleon's victory, which is rather unfortunate as ... my, my ... the Battle of Waterloo takes place on this one day (1815); Weber's Der Freischutz is premiered at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin conducted by the Composer (1821); Charles Darwin is moved to publish his theory of Evolution, as he receives a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace, expressing ideas almost identical to his own (1858); Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing is put on "indefinite leave" from Hanover University following right wing objections to his public description of President Hindenburg as "intellectually vacuous" (1926); armed and mounted police attack striking dockers protesting against blackleg workers in Vancouver (1935); following the Petan government's armistice with the Nazis, Churchill gives his "this was their finest hour" speech in the Commons, and de Gaulle gives a radio speech from London to the Free French forces, calling for resistance (1940); the first public demonstration of the Long-Playing record is given at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel by the Columbia Record company (1948); Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maitre is premiered at the 29th ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden, against the wishes of the French selection panel (1955 - Heinrich Strobel, manager of the Baden -Baden Orchestra threatened to withdraw the orchestra's involvement in the Festival if the work were not performed); the US uses B-52 bombers for the first time in the Vietnam War (1965); Edward Heath wins the UK General Election with a majority of 34 seats (1970); a BEA passenger aircraft stalls 3 minutes after taking off and crashes near Staines, killing all 118 people on board (1972); Presidents Carter and Brezhnev sign the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in Vienna (1979); the orchestral recomposing of four of Boulez' 11 Notations is premiered by the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Barenboim (1980); the first operational stealth attack aircraft makes its first flight (1981 - how do they know?); the body of Vatican banker, Roberto Calvi is discovered hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London (1982); 17-year-old Mona Mahmudnizhad and nine other women of the Bahai faith are hanged for treason, "misleading children & youth" and Zionism in the city of Shiraz in Iran (1983); during the Miners' Strike armed mounted police are savagely attacked by striking miners armed with tee-shirts and loud voices, who hurl their heads viciously against police batons at Orgreave Coking Plant in Rotherham, South Yorkshire (1984); members of the Ulster Volunteer Force attack a pub crowded with Catholics watching a World Cup match, killing 6 of them (1994); Christopher Eccleston regenerates into David Tennant (2005); Kazakhstan launches its first communications satellite (2006); ... and, this time last year, an earthquake in Osaka, Japan leaves 4 people dead, and 434 injured, 15 of them seriously.

Birthdays today include: Ottaviano Petrucci (1366); Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511); Johann Stamitz (1717); Ignaz Pleyel (1757); William Lassell (1799); Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1845); George Mallory (1886); Eduard Steuermann (1892); Llewellyn Rees (1901); Jeanette MacDonald (1903); Manuel Rosenthal (1904); Eduard Tubin (1905); Sammy Cahn (1913); Red Adair (1915); Ian Carmichael (1920); Claude Helffer (1922); Paul Eddington (1927); Geoffrey Hill (1932); Delia Smith (1941); John Bellany, Hans Vonk, & Paul McCartney (all 1942); Paul Lansky (1944); Philip Jackson & Eva marton (both 1948); Carol Kane & Isabella Rosselini (both 1952); Peter Donahoe (1953); John Scott (1956); Barbara Broccoli (1960); Alison Moyet (1961); Katie Derham (1970); ... and Jörg Faeber will be 90 today.

Final Days for: Rogier van der Weyden (1464); Michel Richard Delalande (1726); William Cobbett (1835); Samuel Butler (1902); Roald Amundsen (1928); Maxim Gorky (1936); Terence Fisher (1980); Djuna Barnes, John Cheever, & Curd Jürgens (all 1982); Paul Colin (1985); Craig Rodwell (1993); Bernard Manning (2007); Horace Silver (2014).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Monday, 18th June, forty years before 2019 in 1979 were:

Overture: BBCSO/Rickenbacher (Britten 4 Sea Interludes; Debussy La Mer; Schubert/Webern German Dances; Schubert/Newbould Symphony "#7" in E
This Week's Composer: Milhaud (Le Carnaval d'Aix; Trois poemes juifs; Trois poemes de Jean Cocteau; Le Train Bleu.
Talking About Music wirh Antony Hopkins
Nona Liddell & Daphne Ibbott: Bridge Sonata; Britten Suite
Bournemouth Sinfonietta conducted by George Hurst: Mozart Symph #33; Falla Harpsichord Concerto (with Joaquin Achcarro); Wilfred Josephs Symphony #7; Beethoven Symph #1 (with an Interval Talk by Sebastian Forbes on "listening to a First Performance").

[vinteuil]

[B]


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Monday, 18th June, 2019 were:

Overture: BBCSO/Rickenbacher (Britten 4 Sea Interludes; Debussy La Mer; Schubert/Webern German Dances; Schubert/Newbould Symphony "#7" in E
This Week's Composer: Milhaud (Le Carnaval d'Aix; Trois poemes juifs; Trois poemes de Jean Cocteau; Le Train Bleu.
Talking About Music wirh Antony Hopkins
Nona Liddell & Daphne Ibbott: Bridge Sonata; Britten Suite
Bournemouth Sinfonietta conducted by George Hurst: Mozart Symph #33; Falla Harpsichord Concerto (with Joaquin Achcarro); Wilfred Josephs Symphony #7; Beethoven Symph #1 (with an Interval Talk by Sebastian Forbes on "listening to a First Performance").

... ummm?


.

[Richard Tarleton]

[ ... my, my ... the Battle of Waterloo takes place on this one day (1815);

A subject of endless fascination, and controversy. That decluttering woman, Marie Kondo, recommended having no more than 30 books - I have that many on the Napoleonic Wars, a good few of them about Waterloo.....

[Richard Tarleton]

As Andrew Roberts puts it, "Not only did Welington and Blücher deserve to win the battle of Waterloo: Napoleon very much deserved to lose it". He and his commanders made many unforced errors, breaking all his own rules (starting with "don't divide your forces", sending Grouchy off to chase Blücher, who reached the battle field long before Grouchy; failing to capitalise on the fall of La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse in the centre of Wellington's line, a moment which could have turned the battle.... Napoleon, who was not at his best that day, behaved more like the Austrian generals he defeated in the early days, before they learnt from him.

The opening attack on Hougoumont on Wellington's right was only ever intended as a diversion to weaken Wellington's centre: not only did Wellington not fall for that, Reille and Jerome poured 14,000 troops into a vain attempt to capture the farmhouse which lasted all day, using up precious resources. Colonel Sir James MacDonell who commanded the Coldstream Guards detatchment in Hougoumont was named "the bravest man in the British Army" by Wellington.

Inter-regimental controversy in the British Army persists to this day, over exactly how and why the Middle Guard broke and fled at the end: credit was given in Wellington's despatch after the battle to Maitland and the Guards puring a withering fire into their front, whereas the credit probably lay with Sir John Colborne and the 52nd who, on Colborne's initiative, executed a 90' turn to pour fire into their flank.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

June 19th

Juneteenth, marking the date in 1865 when Federal Troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to enforce Lincoln's Emancipation Declaration, freeing all slaves in the Southern States after the American Civil War. The Date is marked as a holiday in 45 of the 50 States (North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Montana, and Hawaii are the exceptions).

Also on this Date: the original Nicean Creed is adopted at the First Council of Nicea (325); at the Battle of Methven in Perthshire, Norman English general Aymer de Valance [Duke of Pembroke, and, alas, not the Duke of Bedfordshire] defeats the army of Robert the Bruce, who is forced into hiding, sharing lodgings with a spider (1306); Edward II's favourite, Piers Gaveston is beheaded on the orders of the Duke of Warwick for breaking the terms of his exile (1312); Merga Bien is arrested on charges of witchcraft (1603 - the most prominent of the Fulda Witch Hunts in Germany in which around 250 women were burnt alive; the psychotic Prince responsible for the hysteria - contemporaneous with James VI/I's own obsession - gets around Merga's pregnancy [which should have at least resulted in a stay of execution] by getting her to confess that the baby is the result of intercourse with Satan); Rossini's opera Il viaggio a Reims is premiered at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris (1825); the Metropolitan Police Force is established, following the Royal Assent to Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act (1829); the first officially recorded Baseball match is played in Hoboken, New Jersey between the New Yorkers and the Knickerbockers [the former easily defeating the latter 23-1] (1846 - umpiring is Alexander Cartwright, who had formulated the rules for this game); Maximillian I of Mexico is executed by firing squad by the Mexican Republican government (1867); Elgar's Enigma Variations is premiered at St James' Hall in London, conducted by Hans Richter (1899); the South African Natives Land Act comes into force, prohibiting whites from buying land from natives and vice versa (1913 - the Act ensures that most South Africans had no right to own land); Szymanowski's opera King Roger is premiered at the Grand Theatre, Warsaw, with the Composer's sister Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska playing Roxanna (1926); Vice Admiral Jules Le Bigot, having first destroyed submarines under construction at the arsenal, surrenders the city of Cherbourg to the 7th Panzer Division under the command of Rommel (1940); Ethel & Julius Rosenberg are electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison for conspiracy to commit espionage (1953); Kuwait declares Independence from the UK (1961); Paul McCartney tells a TV reporter that he has taken LSD (1967); Jim Davies' cartoon strip cat Garfield first appears (1978); members of the Central American Workers' Revolutionary Party, disguised as Salvadorean soldiers, open fire in the Zona Rosa restaurant area of San Salvador, killing 12 people (1985); Basque Separatists explode a car bomb in a crowded shopping precinct in Barcelona (1987 - 21 people are killed, and 45 injured, because police and precinct managers believe the phone warnings are fakes); Ivan Polozkov forms the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, an offshoot of the official Party, opposed to the policies of Mikahil Gorbachev (1990); the last occupying Soviet troops leave Hungary (1991); 87 people are killed and 218 injured when a truck bomb is exploded outside the Shia al-Khilani Mosque in Baghdad (2007); "the most serious street riot in China since 1949" occurs in the city of Shishou after the mysterious death of a 24-year-old hotel chef (2009 - the police had declared the death a suicide, but it is believed that they are covering up a murder by drug trafficers who pay the police considerable bribes; two days after the riot, police recover the chef's body - and those of three other people; this in addition to five earlier murders at the hotel, only two of which had been solved - on the same day, the Pakistan Army begins Operation Rah-e-Najit ["the Path to Salvation"] against the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan); Ecuadorian Foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño announces that Julian Assange was residing in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, having applied for political assylum (2012); and, exactly a year ago, the US Patent Office issues a patent for "Coherent ladar using intra-pixel quadrature detection" - the 10millionth patent it has issued (Forumistas will not need telling that this is

A frequency modulated (coherent) laser detection and ranging system includes a read-out integrated circuit formed with a two-dimensional array of detector elements each including a photosensitive region receiving both return light reflected from a target and light from a local oscillator, and local processing circuitry sampling the output of the photosensitive region four times during each sample period clock cycle to obtain quadrature components. A data bus coupled to one or more outputs of each of the detector elements receives the quadrature components from each of the detector elements for each sample period and serializes the received quadrature components. A processor coupled to the data bus receives the serialized quadrature components and determines an amplitude and a phase for at least one interfering frequency corresponding to interference between the return light and the local oscillator light using the quadrature components.

- a far cry from the very first US Patent, which was a formula for making Potash for use in fertilizer, issued in 1790).

Birthdays Today include: James VI/I (1566); Blaise Pascal (1623); Carl Zeller (1842); Alfredo Catalani (1854); Theodore Payne (1872); Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884); Wallis Simpson (1896); Lester Flatt (1914); Julius Schwartz (19115); Pauline Kael (1919); Louis Jourdan (1921); Aung San Suu Kyi (1945); Salman Rushdie (1947); Nick Drake (1948); Philippe Manoury (1952); Kathleen Turner (1954); Sadie Frost (1965); Jörg Widmann (1973); Aiden Turner (1983); ... and Boris Johnson is 55 today [don't all cheer at once].

Final Days for: Bernhard Walther (1504); Alessandro Marcello (1747); Joseph Banks (1820); Sergei Taneyev (1915); JM Barrie (1937); Grace Abbott (1939); Maurice Jaubert (1940); Lee Krasner & Wladimir Vogel (both 1984); William Golding (1993); Slim Whitman (2013); ... and, this time last year, Koko, the Gorilla that had learnt to communicate using a large number of hand signs.


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Monday, 19th June, 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Mendelssohn Rondo brillant; Poulenc Horn Sonata; MacCunn Land of the Mountain & the Midge Ovt; Purcell Blow Up the Trumpet [mentioning which has probably set off all sorts of alarms at MI5!]; Michael Haydn Trumpet Concerto; Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances.
Composer of the Week: Cherubini (Excerpts from Medeé sung in French, and the whole of Act 2 sung in Italian)
Reach for the Moon: Holborne Music for Brass #s 42, 58, 65, 37, 60 & 63; Bacewicz Pno5tet#2; Paul Patterson String Quartet, Op 58; Meantime, for brass ensemble; Amy Beach Ballad, Op 6; Crawford-Seeger Piano Study; Miriam Gideon Canzona; Marta Ptaszynska Dance, The Evening Star, & The Eternal Silence; Talma Alleluia in form of Toccata; Honegger 'cello Sonata; Debussy 'cello Sonata; Locke Music for His Majesty's Sackbutts and Cornetts; Marta Ptaszynska Moon Flowers.

[Petrushka]

40 years today since I saw Herbert von Karajan and the BPO perform Bruckner 8 in the Royal Festival Hall, London. You don't forget days like that!