I have spent the last four days writing up a calendar of events discussed in my twenty-six in-print The Great Courses/Teaching Company courses. (The calendar presently runs 70 pages in length. By the time I finish – with luck, tomorrow – it will run about 90 pages.) My intention is to choose one or two date-appropriate items per week, and post them along with a link to the appropriate Great Courses course. My thinking here is that a spoon full of info helps the shameless self-promotion go down. We lift a glass in a birthday salute to a dear departed friend and former colleague of mine, the American oboist John de Lancie, who was born on July 26, 1921 in Berkeley California and died on May 17, 2002 in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. Aside from being one of the greatest oboists of the twentieth century, a brilliant educator and a ferociously exacting oboe teacher, de Lancie was personally responsible for the composition of the single greatest oboe concerto written during the twentieth century: Richard Strauss’ stunning Oboe Concerto in D Major of 1945. Strauss (1864-1949) rode out the end of World War Two at his country house […]