Hi Folks...
Now that my daughter's birthday is coming up in October, I just wonder * being nosy here * whether you folks out there share your birthday month/date (not year, probably) with some great musician! Yes?

Think Vanessa Mae's birthday is in October but somehow my girl can't stand her! Wonder who else (especially violinists) is born in October other than Paganinni?

Being a child, I think it'd be inspiring if I tell her on her birthday all the violinists I know who were born in the same month as her, maybe even on her birthday!!! Not the same year, of course, unless there's an 8 yr old prodigy lurking about...

Tess

my son will be 10 on 13th, the violin one

Hmmm....Viohazard can only boast Sam Cooke, who wrote "You Send Me"....a LOOONG time ago!

13th of Aug or Oct?

I share mine with Sir William Walton, on the 29th March.

Perhaps for that reason I should play the viola more often, since Walton wrote what is probably the most well-known viola concerto.

WOW! Lucky you, Amanda. Rightly so, rightly so. But then you are a violinist, are you not? I know David Oistrakh plays the viola but only occassionally.

Oct born Friday 13th

4 so far, not bad, eh - Vanessa Mae, Paganinni, Violinutter and Viohazard!

Hmmm... there must be a website somewhere where one can check out musicians' birthdays. We have a book on composers but not players, too. Anyone has any idea where?

Turns out I also share 29th March with Richard Rodney Bennett, and the leader of the Mantovani Orchestra, Annunzio Mantovani, in Italy, plus a few TV and film personalities too. Aries are known for not following a simple, straight, or narrow path in life

Go to

Famous Birthdays in History
At the bottom of the page and you can ask it to search for specific dates or years.

My mother shares 27th April with Prokofiev.

Thanks for the link, Amanda!

I share my birthday with, among others:

Elizabeth I (cool, though not especially music-related!)

Esterhazy (one of the only composers on here I've so far recognised...)

And Tatia Jayne Starkey, Ringo's 1st grandchild

I share my birthday with the inventor of celluloid

Honoured and proud to share mine with Nathan Milstein!!!

AMANDA, You are a star!

I share the same birthday as Andras Schiff, Budapest Hungary, pianist (Tchaikovsky-1974), birthdate: 21/12/1953 woo!! Am chuffed!

And Jane Fonda. If you reverse the last two numbers of her year, you get mine!
And Ray Romano and Florence Griffith Joyner and a of couple others.

But also Joseph Stalin the Dictator Nooo!!

He, he... Stalin!

You have my empathy, violin-ann! I share the same birthday with a "serial killer" too, the infamous Charles Manson. But I also share my birthday with the beautiful Princess Grace Kelly and Olympic gold gymnast, Nadia Comaneci. Am honoured to have Dr Sun-yat Sen, founder of modern China on my side, too. That was a great man.

Ahh! Three greats will make up for one rotten apple, I guess
Then Stalin's not so bad

I've got a great shared birthday ... mine is 27th January so I share with Mozart !!
Only 237 years between us

Violinutter shares her birthday with the architect, Christopher Wren. She is thrilled and honoured. Art and science are among her favourite subjects at school!

That's good! Then violinutter will have something to be proud of!

That's not an unusual combination. I studied music, art and physics at A level before deciding music was my first choice as a career, but then did a degree in physics 5 years ago. It could be treated as a sort of back-up, just in case the bottom falls out of the music performing and teaching business at any time in the future.

That is a strange coincidence.

Violinutter, who is 8 but turning 9 in a few months' time, has an unusual sense of self-destiny. She told us that her top favourite subject is art but she does not want to starve, so she prefers her dream to be that of becoming a violinist and composer Then later on she added that if she does not become a musician for whatever reasons, then she'll be an inventor or physicist! She would very much like to study Music, Russian and Physics! She's reading a book on Einstein this week. I dare not voice my doubts for fear of having any negative impact on her ambitions. After all, my own parents opposed my childhood dream and yet I was destined to fulfill it, and fulfill it, I did! But once I had reached there, I realised that it was no big deal, really. How weird (life can be).

I share mine with a lot of composers I've never heard of, Yoko Ono (who's described as vocalist? - pretty accurate, I would say ), Segovia, Randy Crawford and John Travolta.

I share mine with Steve Reich and the man who invented the fridge. Oh, and apparently someone who was on Apollo 16.

Yeah, that's what I thought about art too. I still do the odd bit of artwork, but for the minimal amount of money I've earned from it, I know for sure it wouldn't have even kept me in cardboard boxes at Waterloo Station.



If she studies both music and physics (and there are more and more universities now offering this as a combined subject), she will have two very good career options available. A lot can change in 9 years, but at the moment Imperial College in London offer a 4 year BSc Physics with Advanced Music Performance studies - in collaboration with the RCM.

Oddly Russian is language that fascinates me. I know enough about the pronunciation of Cyrillics to read it and write a few simple sentences - I wrote Maxim Vengerov's 30th birthday greeting in Russian - but not enough to be able to read a book and actually understand it - one day, when I find five minutes spare

Russian is a totally fabulous language, and so beautiful! Darn hard to learn admittedly, but I can thoroughly recommend it as a project when you have some free (hmm!) time... if you ever decide to take the plunge I'd LOVE to help!!

Tess, your girl sounds like a very bright child... If I was a betting person I'd lay money on her doing something exciting with her life!

Conincidentally, a brochure on evening classes came through the door today. There's a 'Russian for Improvers' course, but unfortunately no 'Russian for Beginners'

Awww. If I didn't live such a long way away I'd offer lessons to get you to the "Improvers" stage!! Are you guys still living near the uni?... the language centre used to be a great resource for students...

We are lucky, sarah. There are two grammar schools where we live. One of them (the further one which is about 45/50 minutes away) is a top ten in UK grammar school and they have been highly commended by OFSTED for excellence in teaching especially music. They also teach Russian!

The one within walking distance from our home, however, is very academic!

I share my birthday with Rachmaninov!

You ARE lucky!

When is it by the way? You don't have to tell me the year, of course!

Cool!


Sounds interesting!

Sarah,

The secrets are coming out of the woodwork now!! When and how long did you study Russian for?

*grin*

For four years at Durham uni (graduated '01 - got a 2-1)

It was great! I'd recommend Russian to anyone, though it ain't easy! Still not sure why I ended up choosing it: I started out joint honours with French but dropped that at the end of my 1st year.

Wow, we were there at the same time! (for your final year and our first year.)



(OK, my grammar is probably terrible; blame Babelfish )

Edit: corrected smilie grammar; thanks Sarah!

wow, cool! you guys were at Trevs right? cool...

that gif is great!

мы любим русский (язык) would be more grammatically correct, because Russian (the Russian language) is inanimate, therefore would be in the accusative not the genitive... otherwise you just said "we love the Russian man" literally... *grins* язык ("yezik") means language or tongue and would usually be used in Russian, though I'm not sure it HAS to be... babelfish is in my experience not very good at Russian, try this one instead which is far better http://translation2.paralink.com/ and generally gets the grammar close... close enough to fiddle with

and here ends the (Russian) lesson...

молодец! умниц! hehehe...

heh, I just put those into babelfish and paralink with and without the exclamation marks to see how they'd translate them back into English, and some of the results made me giggle a lot!

Yes, which college were you at?


Babelfish generally isn't very good at anything, unless you have a degree in the language you want translating to but then it kind-of defeats the object There's a website somewhere which feeds a sentence into babelfish, translating it back and forth between two languages - it can be quite hilarious watching how corrupted the original sentence gets. Once I typed some cooking instructions in and microwave somehow got translated into 'nuclear oven'

Thanks, I've updated the smilie so I no longer profess to love a Russian man

Yes, I did that for a friend with lyrics from The Sound Of Music (she's a huge fan...) and some of the results were just HYSTERICAL. Trying going from English to French to German and back to English... very good...

I was at St John's

highlights of The Sound Of Music according to Babelfish (I saved the emails I sent her:

"The hills are living with the noise of the music, with
qu'elles songs during thousand years sang.
The hills fill my heart with noise of the music. My
heart wants to sing each song to qu'il hears." (the sound of music)

"Put everyone up highly it from mountain research" (climb every mountain!!!)

"Nothing comes from nothing that nothing would know
never
Maria: So much any part in my youth...
Captain: ... or childhood
Maria: I must make something...
All two: ... something bons." ("I must have done something good")

"The high on a hill hoo from hee from d'ee
configuration d'odl d'ee configuration d'odl of the
configuration from goatherd isolated was strongly the
voice of the people d'odl-oo only d'ee d'ee
configuration d'odl of the configuration of goatherd
in a city, which was whole at distance, which was
heard to expand hoo of hee from d'ee configuration
d'odl of the configuration d'odl d'ee strong, and
clearly of the oatherd'skehle heard to expand by
l'odl-oo d'ee von Konfiguration d'odl d'ee" (the lonely goatherd.... what the...?)

"you is sixteen, which go on baby seventeen" (you are 16 going on 17.... this is so funny! "go on baby 17, yeah man!")

"I remember simply my preferred things
and then to feel from so bad I don't!" (My Favourite Things)

And one for the Kodaly fans out there:

"Damhirschkuh for it, a common deer, a female common deer.
Jet, a decrease of the sun d'or.
I a name I m'appelle.
To run far a length, long way.
A needle, which pulls the thread, sews it a note,
around to follow sews,
dte, a beverage with the jam and bread!
That will again make l'OH-OH-OH for us to bring!"

edit: (I forgot!)

I'm kinda relieved about that... hehe. (not half as much as AnotherPianist probably is, though...)

OK, I've got a link to the babelfish mangeling site if anyone's interested: it's here.


It makes me think of a strange Ali G/Austin Powers cross-over; not sure how that would work though!

The forum rules are translated quite humerously. My favourites are:



Part John Prescott, part Yoda....


She is

Are you sure you don't love Maxim?

Tess

PS. Does anyone know when is Maxim's (Amanda does, I recall) and Vadim Repin's birthdays? Violinutter and I would love to know. Thanks.

I share my birthday (not the year fortunately) with Pachelbell and Engelbert Humperdinck!

And Composers Giacomo Torelli, Johann Gottlieb Sollner, Thomas Alexander Erskine Kelly, Emmanuel Johann Joseph Schikaneder,Carl Bernhard Wessely, John Bake, Gustav Schmidt, Timotei Popovici, Heinrich Otto Ludwig, Othmar Schoeck, Matt Higgins Doran, Ruth S White, whoever they are.

Chopin

20 March 1989!

All that Babelfish stuff reminds me of a music essay I put through for translation from French into English.

It translated 'sackbuts and cornets' into..... 'jackboots and corsets'.

Maxim is 31 TODAY!

I thought you'd know

Good to see you back; did you have a nice holiday?

Yup I would wouldn't I

Mixed holiday really. Great time and great music, but we were one short as Liz had been taken ill shortly before we went. (But we still played the Mendelssohn but missed a viola part). But the sad thing is that news of Liz's health throughout the week was not good , and she was rapidly deteriorating. We heard on Friday she has been diagnosed with cancer so as you can imagine it really put a damper on the week.

I went to see her in hospital on my way back yesterday, and she was relatively bright, but in some pain. She is determined to fight it so she has the right mental attitude. I hope it is enough.

So sorry to hear this, Jane. Is this the Liz we all know from the forum? The one who's trying to work very hard to get her diploma? It's very sad but I'm encouraged by her personal courage and positive attitude. It's a good start.

No its not "Forum Liz", but one of the members of my quartet (there are 6 of us, plus various associate members)