Born Today! 28.09.2024

Juan Hidalgo de Polanco (28 September 1614 – 31 March 1685) was a Spanish composer and harpist who became the most influential composer of his time in the Hispanic world writing the music for the first two operas created in Spanish. He is considered by many to be the father of Spanish opera and of the zarzuela. Hidalgo was born and died in Madrid. In either 1630 or 1631 he became a harpist at the Spanish royal chapel where he was responsible for the accompaniment of both sacred and secular music and also played for the King of Spain, King Philip IV. Around 1645 he began to serve as leader of the court's chamber musicians and chief composer of villancicos, chamber songs, and music for the theatre. He personifies the origins of Spanish opera with the work Celos aun del aire matan (es) by the illustrious playwright Calderon de la Barca, based on the story of Cephalus and Procris told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, released on 5 December 1660 to celebrate the third birthday of prince Felipe Prospero. It is considered the oldest opera preserved in Spain. Juan Hidalgo dominated secular and theatrical music at the Spanish court until his death. He was a prolific composer and enjoyed a great deal of popularity throughout his career. His place in Spanish theatre history is equivalent to that of Henry Purcell in Britain and Lully in France. He wrote music for at least nine allegorical religious plays that were performed in public for Corpus Christi. His work for the court stages included songs for 16 spoken plays (comedias), many partly sung zarzuelas and semi-operas, and two full operas which are highly regarded. His output also included a large number of sacred villancicos and some liturgical music. His life is the basis of a novel, The Harpist of Madrid, by the English author Gordon Thomas. Composer Celia Torra based her choral composition Las campanas on a melody by Hidalgo.

Johann Mattheson (28 September 1681 – 17 April 1764) was a German composer, critic, lexicographer and music theorist. His writings on the late Baroque and early Classical period were highly influential, specifically, "his biographical and theoretical works were widely disseminated and served as the source for all subsequent lexicographers and historians".

Jan Václav Stich, better known as Giovanni Punto (28 September 1746 in Žehušice – 16 February 1803 in Prague) was a Czech horn player and a pioneer of the hand-stopping technique which allows natural horns to play a greater number of notes.

Florent Schmitt (French pronunciation: [flɔʁã ʃmit]; 28 September 1870 – 17 August 1958) was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII (Psalm 47). He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers".

Mart Saar (28 September [O.S. 15 September] 1882 in Hüpassaare – 28 October 1963) was an Estonian composer, organist and collector of folk songs.

Václav Kašlík (28 September 1917 – 4 June 1989) was a Czech composer, opera director and conductor, known for his operas, both on the stage and on television.

Cromwell Everson (28 September 1925 – 11 June 1991) was primarily known as a composer during his lifetime. He was brought up as an Afrikaner by his mother, Maria De Wit and father, Robert Everson. He continued this tradition and all his children were brought up as Afrikaners. Everson wrote the first Afrikaans opera, and most of his other vocal works were in Afrikaans. His works consist of five sonatas, a trio, an opera, a set of inventions, four song-cycles, a piano suite, miscellaneous movements for the piano and guitar and an incomplete symphony and string quartet. During Everson's career in Worcester, Western Cape he also gave music lessons to the musician David Kramer. For his Afrikaans opera Everson received in 2007 a posthumous acknowledgement from the ATKV (Afrikaans Language- and Cultural society).

Naum Lvovich Shtarkman (Russian: Наум Львович Штаркман; 28 September 1927, Zhitomir - 19 July 2006, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian classical pianist. He was a student of Konstantin Igumnov at the Moscow Conservatory. Shtarkman was awarded a 5th prize at the V International Chopin Piano Competition and, most notably, attained the Bronze Medal at the inaugural edition of the Tchaikovsky Competition. He had previously won the 1st place at Vianna da Motta International Music Competition. For several decades his concert career was restricted to the Soviet scene. Shtarkman was a professor at the Gnessin State Musical College and the Moscow Conservatory. The first concert with an orchestra, Mendelssohn concerto, he has played at age 11. Incredibly quickly, a year later, he gave a solo concert at the Great Hall of the Conservatory, a program which consisted of works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt. In 1944 he began studying at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of the great pianist and teacher Konstantin Igumnov. He graduated from the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory in 1949, under the instruction of Constantine Igumnov ( Igumnov died in 1948, but Naum Shtarkman refused to finish training with another teacher, and was preparing for graduation without a formal mentor, informal consultation with Sviatoslav Richter). In the 1950s he participated in various international competitions, becoming, in particular, the first winner of the International Piano Competition, named Vianna da Motta (Lisbon, 1957) and received the third prize of the First International Tchaikovsky Competition (1958). However, shortly thereafter, Shtarkman was arrested and convicted under Article 121 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (homosexuality). He was arrested in Kharkov, hours before he was scheduled to perform at a factory, as a special performance. Despite the brevity of the incarceration (8 years), this has totally shattered his concert career: for years Shtarkman was allowed only to perform in the far off provinces or in the secondary concert halls. The arrest had also become an impediment to educational activities of Shtarkman: from 1969 he freelanced unofficially at the School of Gnessin and only in 1987 became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. After that he began to perform in many countries around the world. Since 1993, Shtarkman was the permanent chairman of the jury of the International Competition of Pianists named after Igumnov, ongoing in Lipetsk.

Avraham Eilam-Amzallag (Hebrew: אברהם (אבי) אמזלג עילם; born 28 September 1941) is an Israeli musician and composer.

Hugues Dufourt (French: [dyfuʁ]) is a French composer and philosopher associated with the spectral school of composition. Born in Lyon on September 28, 1943, Dufourt studied piano and composition at the Geneva Conservatory. Dufourt became co-director of the Ensemble l'Itinéraire in 1973 and founded CRISS (Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse Sonore—Instrumental and Sound Synthesis Research Collective) in 1977. It was for CRISS that he composed in 1978–79 his best-known work, Saturne, for percussion, wind ensemble, and electronics—a work inspired by Erwin Panofsky's analysis of etchings by Albrecht Dürer. His work Burning Bright (2014) also received five votes in a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music by living composers since 2000. Many of Dufourt's larger works have been inspired by the paintings of artists as various as Brueghel, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Poussin, Guardi, Goya, and Pollock.

Dorothy Quita Buchanan (born 28 September 1945) is a New Zealand composer and teacher.

Jörn Arnecke (born 1973, in Hameln) is a German composer. Arnecke is the professor of music theory, aural training, and historical music theory at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar.