2010 Classical composer anniversaries

2009 was a great year for famous composer anniversaries and 2010 is also a good year. Strangely a lot more anniversaries of births than of deaths.

Births:
Scarlatti (Alessandro) 350 years
Pergolesi 300 years
Cherubini 250 years
Chopin 200 years
Schumann 200 years
Albeniz 150 years
Mahler 150 years
Stravinsky 100 years

Deaths:
Balakirev 100 years

Happy New Year everyone!

I wish everyone a happy and successful new year - and indeed a happy and successful new decade. Let's hope it doesn't go as fast as the last one. I can't believe it is 10 years since the millenium celebrations.

So today we went to the London New Year Parade. It was the first sunny day we have had for some time and there were lots of happy faces (and gossepimples). It is a great show and there were participants from 20 different countries.

Of particular interest are the several marching bands who come all the way from the States just for this parade. So I got some good photos of sousaphones to use on my Sousa page on my 52composers.com site.

I'm getting organised!!

It's the end of 2009 and almost the start of a new decade.
Time to get organised!
For the last three years I've been using an organiser software called AZZ Cardfile and I have been really pleased with it.
It is advertised as 'a modern replacement for Microsoft Cardfile'.
Now with version 4 you can use it with your USB flash memory stick which makes it truly portable so I think I will be upgrading.
It is a freeform database without predefined fields. You can add clickable URLs, email addresses, dialable phone numbers, images shortcuts to files on your computer and much more.
You can see the full spec on their website at:
http://www.azzcardfile.com/

I wouldn't be without it. Honestly!

Happy Christmas everyone

I wish everyone a very joyful Christmas.

I hope that Santa brings everything on your list!

Upside down Christmas

Everything is upside down this Christmas - even the tree!!

Classical Music - 2010 Piano Calendar

Why are there so few calendars with a classical music theme?
There are plenty for pop, rock, hip-hop, jazz etc but hardly any for classical. I have therefore produced four:
Opera, Piano, Great Composers and Russian composers on Zazzle

This one is 12 portraits of great composers for classical piano. They are:

• Bach
• Beethoven
• Brahms
• Chopin
• Debussy
• Haydn
• Mendelssohn
• Liszt
• Rachmaninoff
• Schubert
• Schumann
• Scriabin
  

You can see them at my Zazzle store

Russian Classical Composers - 2010 calendar

A bit late but I have at last published my 2010 calendar of Russian composers. I managed to finish the 12th portrait Balakirev last week.
There is a composer per month:

• Borodin
• Balakirev
• Glinka
• Khachaturian
• Mussorgsky
• Rachmaninoff
• Prokofiev
• Rimsky-Korsakov
• Shostakovich
• Scriabin
• Stravinsky
• and of course Tchaikovsky

You can find it with my other calendars at Zazzle