Under the old Julian calendar in use in Czarist Russia, on today’s date in 1861, Romantic composer Anton Arensky was born in Novgorod. If you prefer, you can also celebrate Arensky’s birthday on July 12 — the same date under the modern Gregorian calendar, but Arensky was such a Romantic that the Old Style date seems, well, more appropriate somehow.

Arensky studied with Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, and admired the music of Tchaikovsky. Arensky taught at the Moscow Conservatory and published two books: Manual of Harmony and A Handbook of Musical Forms. His own students included a number of famous Russian composers, including Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Glière.

Arensky wrote three operas, two symphonies, concertos, chamber works and suites for two pianos — but it’s his Piano Trio in D minor that gets performed and recorded more often than any of his other works.

A victim of tuberculosis, Arensky spent the last years of his life in a Finnish sanatorium. He died young — at just 44 — in 1906.

Anton Arensky (1861-1906): Piano Trio No. 1; Rembrandt Trio; Dorian 90146

The reign of the Roman emperor Nero, notorious for his horrific deeds, was chronicled by the historian Tacitus. His account of the rise of the courtesan Poppea from Nero’s mistress to his empress, provides the plot of one of the operas written by the 17th century Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi.

Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea was first performed in Venice at the Teatro Sanctae Giovanni e Paolo in the autumn of 1643.

The first performance of Monteverdi’s Poppea in modern times had to wait until 1913, when the French composer Vincent d’Indy presented his arrangement of Poppea in Paris. In America and Britain, Poppea was first staged in 1927, at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and at Oxford University in England. It wasn’t until today’s date in 1962 that a full professional staging of Poppea occurred at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, in a version prepared and conducted by Raymond Leppard.

Monteverdi did not prescribe specific vocal ranges for the characters, and since there was no standardized orchestra in the 17th century, it was customary back then to simply give a list of some suggested instruments and leave it to the performers to decide who played what and when. Therefore, any modern performance of a Monteverdi opera is always somebody’s “version” of the surviving notes, based on educated guesswork and the available performers.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): L’Incoronazione di Poppea; soloists; Vienna Concentus Music Vienna; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor; Teldec 42547

A decidedly un-politically correct opera had its premiere at London’s Covent Garden on today’s date in 1905: L’Oracolo or The Oracle by the Italian composer Franco Leoni. Here’s a witty one-sentence précis of the opera prepared by Nicolas Slonimsky for his chronology Music Since 1900:

“L’Oracolo, an opera in one long act, dealing with multiplex villainy in San Francisco’s Chinatown, wherein a wily opium-den keeper kidnaps the child of the uncle of a girl he covets, kills her young lover, and is in the end strangled by the latter’s father, with a local astrologer delivering remarkably accurate oracles; an Italianate score tinkling with tiny bells, booming with deep gongs, and bubbling with orientalistic pentatonicisms.”

Another wag described L’Oracolo as “Puccini-and-water,” suggesting that if Puccini were whisky, Leoni music was definitely a less potent brew.

But when a touring Italian opera company announced a performance of L’Oracolo in San Francisco in 1937, the city’s Asian residents protested, demanding they cut the most racially offensive scenes or, better yet, stage a different opera altogether. A compromise was reached, whereby the House manager preceded the performance with a speech assuring the capacity audience that the opera’s locale and action were pure fiction, and bore no resemblance to San Francisco’s Chinatown past or present.

Franco Leoni (1864-1937): L’Oracolo; Tito Gobbi, baritone; National Philharmonic; Richard Bonynge, conductor; London OSA-12107; LP

According to Emerson, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Well, we’re not sure if composer Arnold Schoenberg ever read Emerson, but we think the 20th-century Austrian composer must have shared this principle with the 19th-century American essayist. Just when many people had Schoenberg comfortably pigeon-holed as an atonal composer, he went and wrote a big tonal piece, resolutely set in the key of G minor.

In the 1940’s, Schoenberg’s publisher asked him to write a piece for high school or amateur wind band. The work Schoenberg finished during the summer of 1943 was entitled “Theme and Variations,” and was described by its composer — with his customary modesty — as “one of those compositions which one writes in order to enjoy one’s own virtuosity and… to give a certain group of music lovers something better to play.”

Schoenberg’s music proved a little too difficult for high school bands, however, so its first performance was given on today’s date in 1946 by the Goldman Band, America’s top wind ensemble of that day, at a Central Park concert in New York City conducted by Richard Franko Goldman, an enthusiastic supporter of new works for band.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): Theme and Variations; Peabody Conservatory Wind Ensemble; Harlan D. Parker, conductor; Naxos 8.570403

In the summer of 1912, the Vienna Philharmonic presented a week-long Music Festival that offered three “Ninths” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Felix Weingartner, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Artur Nikisch, and, on today’s date, the world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, conducted by Bruno Walter.

Mahler had died the previous year, and the Viennese public greeted the posthumous premiere of his last complete work with a roar of applause — and decidedly mixed reviews. The work’s elegiac opening won over most of the professional critics, but many were frankly puzzled by some of the symphony’s raucous middle movements.

Bruno Walter, the Mahler protégé who conducted the premiere, was singled out for praise, however. Walter made two famous recordings of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9: The first made live during a January 16, 1938, concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. On January 16, 1961 — exactly 23 years to the day after that 1938 recording — Walter began making a stereo recording of Mahler’s Ninth at the American Legion Hall in Hollywood, with the Columbia Symphony.

Walter was 84 in 1961, and despite repeated pleas from the control room, couldn’t stop himself from vigorously stamping his foot 17 seconds into the second movement, Laendler — a thump not written in Mahler’s score, but now part of Walter’s classic second recording.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 9; Columbia Symphony; Bruno Walter, conductor; Sony 64452

In the middle of the 15th century, a German printer by the name of Johann Gutenberg invented a method of printing from moveable type cast in metal. His invention revolutionized the way books were printed, and the widespread dissemination of Gutenberg Bibles made him famous in Europe.

In the summer of 1840, the city of Leipzig planned to unveil a new statue of Gutenberg, and commissioned composer Felix Mendelssohn for two new works. The first, for two choirs, would accompany the unveiling of the statue of Gutenberg, and would take place in the city’s open marketplace after the morning church service on June 24. The following day, June 25th, there would be a gala concert in Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church featuring the church choir and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performing a new symphony by Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2, Lobgesang, or Hymn of Praise, is modeled on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, opening with purely instrumental movements, and concluding with a finale for vocal soloists and chorus. Mendelssohn’s text was taken from Martin Luther’s German-language translation of the Bible. Since the premiere was intended for St. Thomas Church, where the master of counterpoint Johann Sebastian Bach had once been Kantor, Mendelssohn chose to end his symphony with a big fugue.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Symphony No. 2 (Hymn of Praise); Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Chorus; Edo de Waart, conductor; Fidelio 9202

Today’s date marks the shared birthday of two of America’s most famous “maverick” composers, both hailing from California.

June 24, 1901, is the birth date of Harry Partch, an Oakland native. Partch devoted his life to developing an alternate system of tuning. Instead of the conventional Western system of equal temperament, in his harmonic world, microtones were welcomed.

To play his expanded scales, he designed and built new instruments with colorful names like “marimba eroica” and “cloud chamber bowls.” For Partch, music was a synthesis of theory and theater, ritual and dance — intensely physical in nature and best experienced live. Harry Partch died in San Diego in 1974.

Another Californian, born on this date in 1935, is Colfax native Terry Riley.

It was in San Francisco in 1964 that Riley’s most famous piece, In C, received its premiere. The score consists of 53 phrases, or modules, with each player freely repeating each phrase as many times as desired before proceeding to the next. The result is an unpredictable, unique music work of canonic textures and polyrhythms, capable of being performed by any group of instruments ranging from a marimba ensemble to a full symphony orchestra, and now regarded as one of the seminal works of the minimalist movement in music.

Harry Partch (1901-1974): Delusion of the Fury; Ensemble of Unique Instruments; Danlee Mitchell, conductor; innova 406

Terry Riley (b. 1935): In C; SUNY at Buffalo Ensemble; Terry Riley, conductor; CBS 7178

Today we remember Russian composer Reinhold Glière, who died in Moscow on today’s date in 1956. These days Glière is probably best known for the popular Russian Sailor’s Dance from his ballet The Red Poppy.

Glière was born in Kiev in 1875, and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later became professor of composition. That was after the Russian Revolution, and Glière could count among his students Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Miaskovsky. With the success of works like The Red Poppy, Glière is often cited as the founder of Soviet ballet.

Glière also wrote several symphonies, all intensely Russian in color and character. The most famous of these is his Symphony No. 3, subtitled Ilya Murometz after a legendary Russian folk hero.

Glière was also intrigued by the folk music of the far eastern republics of the then USSR, incorporating folk themes from the Soviet Union’s Trans-Caucus and Central Asian peoples into some of his orchestral scores.

He was a prolific composer, but apart from a handful of popular works, most of Glière's operas, ballets and orchestral works remain largely unfamiliar to most music lovers in the West.

Reinhold Glière (1875-1956): Russian Sailors’ Dance, from The Red Poppy; Philadelphia Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy, conductor; BMG 63313

Reinhold Glière (1875-1956): Symphony No. 3; Ilya Murometz; London Symphony; Leon Botstein, conductor; Telarc 80609