1893 Leroy Shield – American film score and radio composer and pianist (d.1962); wrote much of the uncredited film music for the Hal Roach studios in the 1930s (including many classic Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang comedies).
1913 first performance of George Butterworth’s rhapsody for orchestra A Shropshire Lad at the Leeds Festival with Artur Nikisch conducting; it’s a sort of postlude for the eleven songs Butterworth composed based on poems by A. E. Housman from the collection of the same name.
1929 Kenneth Leighton – British composer and pianist (d.1988); composed a wide range of music (96 opus numbers) including church music, chamber, organ and solo piano music, as well as large-scale orchestral works and an opera based on the life of the early Irish hero St. Columba.
1933 Michel Plasson – French conductor (91 years old); from 1968-2003, principal conductor of the Orchestre et Chœurs du Capitole de Toulouse; his flamboyant personality and his insistence on playing and recording the French repertoire (on EMI) made the orchestra one of the most visible and most visibly French ensembles in the world.
1942 Thomas Sanderling – Russian-born German conductor (82years old); through a special relationship with Dmitri Shostakovich and his family, stands as an authority on Russian music in general and Shostakovich in particular.
1944 Ton Koopman – Dutch harpsichordist, organist and conductor (80 years old); founded the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in 1979 and the Amsterdam Baroque Choir in 1992; recorded all of Bach's cantatas, a project completed in 2005; former artist-in-residence with The Cleveland Orchestra.
1960 premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in Leningrad by the Beethoven Quartet; written in Dresden, where the composer was to write music for the film Five Days, Five Nights about the firebombing of Dresden in World War II; the work is dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war."
posed based on poems by A. E. Housman from the collection of the same name.