February 26 Dateline

Birthdays

1564 - Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. (baptised this day, although actual birth date is uncertain). He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death.  (Christopher Marlowe - Elizabethan Dramatist. Uploaded by Biography. Accessed Februay 26, 2015.)

1802 - Victor Marie Hugo, French writer, poet, dramatist of the Romantic movement. He's famous for the classic novels Les Miserables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. (Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Concert in Full. Uploaded by Potato Gel. Accessed February 26, 2018.)

1829 - Levi Strauss, German-American businessman, clothing designer. He founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. Now known as simply "Levi's", his firm of Levi Strauss & Co. began in 1853 in San Francisco, California.

1879 - Frank Bridge, English composer, violist, conductor, and teacher. He was one of the most accomplished musicians of his day, known especially for his chamber music and songs. After a period in the Joachim Quartet (1906) he played with the English String Quartet until 1915. Although he composed in many genres, he was particularly successful in his smaller forms, such as the Phantasie Quartet for piano and strings (1910), four string quartets, and songs and piano pieces. His early works were Romantic in style. While he never abandoned Romanticism in later years, he moved toward atonality. He was widely respected as a teacher, and his pupils (included Benjamin Britten), with his fame resting largely on his having been Britten's teacher (the success of Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge at the 1937 Salzburg Festival established Britten on the international scene). (Frank Bridge's Pensiero, interpreted by Timothy Ridout (Violin) and Frank Dupree (Piano). Uploaded by France Musique. Accessed February 26, 2020.)

1914 - Robert Alda (born Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), American theatrical and film actor, a singer, and a dancer. He was the father of actors Alan and Antony Alda. Robert Alda was featured in a number of Broadway productions, then he moved to Italy during the early 1960s. He appeared in many European films over the next two decades, occasionally returning to the U.S. for film appearances such as The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

1916 - Jackie Herbert Gleason, American actor, comedian, writer, composer, and conductor known affectionately as "The Great One." Developing a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy, exemplified by his Ralph Kramden character in the TV series The Honeymooners. He developed high ratings The Jackie Gleason Show. Among his notable film roles were Minnesota Fats in 1961's The Hustler (co-starring with Paul Newman), and Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series. Gleason also enjoyed a prominent secondary music career, producing a series of best-selling "mood music" albums. His first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first 10 albums sold over a million copies each. His output spans some 20-plus singles, nearly 60 long-playing record albums, and over 40 CDs.

1950 - Helen Elizabeth Clark, ONZ SSI PC, New Zealand politician who served as the 37th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and was the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2017. She was New Zealand's fifth-longest-serving prime minister, and the second woman to hold that office.

1953 - Michael Bolton (born Michael Bolotin), American singer and songwriter. Bolton originally performed in the hard rock and heavy metal genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, both on his early solo albums and those he recorded as the frontman of the band Blackjack. He became better known for his series of pop rock ballads, recorded after a stylistic change in the late 1980s. His achievements include selling more than 75 million records, recording eight top 10 albums and two number-one singles on the Billboard charts, as well as winning six American Music Awards and two Grammy Awards.

Leftie:
None known

More birthdays and historical events, February 26 - On This Day

Historical Events

1797 - The Bank of England issues the first £1 note.

1922 - Camille Saint-Saens's suite "Carnival of the Animals" is first performed, in Paris.

February 25 Dateline

Birthdays:

1841 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir (or August Renoir), French painter and sculptor,  known as Auguste Renoir, was an artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. (Renoir's Works, 1841-1919. Uploaded by Brendan. Accessed February  25, 2019. Pierre Auguste Renoir: A collection of 1549 paintings (HD). Uploaded by LearnFromMasters. Accessed February 25, 2019.) Here's a favourite quote from Renoir: "Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours andnothing that you would do would have any character."

1873 - Enrico Caruso, Italian operatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Caruso was the first gramophone star to sell more than a million copies with his 1907 recording of 'Vesti la giubba' (as Canio) from the opera 'Pagliacci' by Ruggero Leoncavallo. Here are his recordings from 30th of November 1902, 1st of February 1904 and 17th of March 1907, Caruso singing 'Vesti la giubba', uploaded by Tom Frokjaer. Accessed February 25, 2009.

1890 - Dame Julia Myra Hess, English pianist (featured below), best known for her performances of the works of  Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. Her influence was enormous. Her protégés included Clive Lythgoe and Richard and John Contiguglia. She also taught Stephen Kovacevich (then known as Stephen Bishop). She also has a link to jazz, having given lessons in the 1920s to Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck, mother of Dave Brubeck.  Arnold Bax's 1915 piano piece In a Vodka Shop is dedicated to her. (Dame Myra Hess plays Bach's famous Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. YouTube, uploaded by Beckmesser2. Accessed February 25, 2011.)

1901 - Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx, American actor, comedian, theatrical agent, and engineer. He was the youngest and last survivor of the five Marx Brothers. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an engineer and theatrical agent.

1917 - Anthony Burgess, FRSL (John Anthony Burgess Wilson), English writer and composer. He composed over 250 musical works; considered himself as much a composer as an author, although he enjoyed considerably more success in writing. Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel. In 1971, it was adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. He produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He wrote librettos and screenplays, including the 1977 TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. He worked as a literary critic for publications, including The Observer and The Guardian, and wrote studies of classic writers, notably James Joyce. A versatile linguist, Burgess lectured in phonetics, and translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus Rex, and the opera Carmen, among others.

1937 - Sir Tom Courtenay, English actor. Since the mid-1960s, he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre, although he received Academy Award nominations for Doctor Zhivago and the film adaptation of The Dresser, which he had performed in the West End and on Broadway. He was created a Knight Bachelor in February 2001 for his services to cinema and theatre. Aside from his role in Doctor Zhivago, my personal favourite is his title character in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a joint Norwegian-British film, based on the novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released in 1970. The Norwegian title is En dag i Ivan Denisovitsj' liv. In this film, Courtenay is a prisoner in the Soviet gulag system of the 1950s who endures a long prison sentence. It tells of one routine day in his life.

1938 - Diane Carol Baker, American actress, producer and educator who has appeared in motion pictures and on television since 1959.  She is known for the films: The Diary of Anne Frank, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Prize, Marnie, and Mirage. She appeared in many more. After Mirage, she appeared frequently on television and began producing films, including the drama film Never Never Land (1980) and the miniseries A Woman of Substance (1984), in which she played Laura. She then re-emerged on the big screen. Baker spent more than a decade teaching acting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She was formerly the executive director of the School of Motion Pictures-Television and the School of Acting. 

1943 - George Harrison, MBE, English musician, singer-songwriter, rock singer, music and film producer, and member of The Beatles. He achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles group. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison embraced Indian culture and helped broaden the scope of popular music through his incorporation of Indian instrumentation and Hindu-aligned spirituality in the Beatles' work.

Leftie:
Tenor Enrico Caruso

More birthdays and historical events, February 25 - On This Day

 

 

 

Feature:

Dame Myra Hess (25 February 1890 – 25 November 1965), and her famous arrangement of Bach's Chorale "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

Her favourite anecdote relating to Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" concerned a British soldier who whistled it on a train during the war. "Are you interested in Bach?" The soldier was asked by a journalist. "No," he answered. "But you are whistling a Bach composition," the newsman insisted. "That's no Bach," he replied indignantly. "That's Myra Hess." (From Marian McKenna's "Myra Hess -- A Portrait"). Below, video uploaded by pianopera.  Accessed February 25, 2018.





Deaths:

 
1723 - Sir Christopher Wren, Considered greatest architect of his time.  Along with more than fifty other churches and secular buildings, he designed London's St Paul's Cathedral, Monument to the Great Fire of 1666, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and library at Trinity, Cambridge.

1983 - Tennessee Williams, Playwright

Historical Events:

1570 - Pope Pius V excommunicates English Queen Elizabeth I from the Catholic Church and absolves from having to pledge allegiance to her.

1836 - Samuel Colt receives a patent for a pistol that uses a revolving cylinder containing powder and bullets in 6 individual tubes.