Pianist Lou Teicher birthday August 24

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Louis Milton Teicher (August 24, 1924, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - August 3, 2008, Highlands, North Carolina) was an American piano player, half of the duo Ferrante & Teicher.
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Manager Scott Smith said... 'The vast library of Ferrante & Teicher recordings (over 1,200 songs) is testament to the rich musical legacy Lou leaves behind. Adored by millions of fans worldwide... Piano's Gold Dust Twins will live on forever'. Their 1950s prepared piano pop (released on a half-dozen LPs before the duo achieved commercial success) was groundbreaking.

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Starlight Symphony conductor Cyril Ornadel, died on June 22 aged 86, wrote the score for the musical Pickwick

Cyril Ornadel, who died on June 22 aged 86, wrote the score for the musical Pickwick (1963) and for many years conducted the orchestra for Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the most popular television variety show of the 1950s. Ornadel had enjoyed an earlier hit song with Portrait of My Love. Recorded under duress by the balladeer Matt Monro, who disliked it intensely on first hearing, it went to No 3 in 1960, and has become a modern songbook standard. Beautiful Instrumentals.com is streaming selections from several of his MGM albums with the Starlight Symphony studio orhestra. (Hollywood Sound Stage, The Musical World of Cole Porter, Jumbo and others ). Cyril Ornadel was born in London on December 2 1924, the son of a dress manufacturer who assumed he would join the family business. When Cyril went his own way, his father effectively had him thrown out of the Royal College of Music by telling it that his son was in breach of the rules by playing piano in a nightclub and dating a fellow student.

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Forvever Young and the Music of Victor Young
The Best of the British on Broadway

Birthday of Hugo Winterhalter August 15

Easy listening arranger and composer Hugo Winterhalter was born August 15, 1909 in Wilkes-Barre, PA, later studying violin and reed instruments at the New England Conservatory of Music. After graduating, he taught school for several years before turning professional during the mid-1930s, serving as a sideman and arranger for Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Raymond Scott, Claude Thornhill and others. Winterhalter also arranged and conducted sessions for singers including Dinah Shore and Billy Eckstine, and in 1948 he was named musical director at MGM. After a two-year stint with the label, he moved to Columbia, where he scored a hit with his orchestral reading of "Blue Christmas." In 1950, Winterhalter signed on with RCA Victor, where he arranged sessions for acts including Eddie Fisher, Perry Como and the Ames Brothers; he also headlined a series of instrumental albums, among them 1952's Great Music Themes of Television, one of the first collections of TV theme songs ever recorded. Winterhalter remained on the RCA payroll until 1963, at which time he joined Kapp Records; that same year, he also penned the main title theme for the film Diamond Head. At Kapp he recorded several albums including The Best of '64 and its follow-up, The Big Hits of 1965, before exiting the label to work on Broadway. He later worked in television as well, and continued recording the occasional LP for budget labels including Musicor. Winterhalter died in Greenwich, CT on September 17, 1973.  - (Notes from video link)



This instrumental version of Canadian Sunset, by Hugo Winterhalter and the writer Eddie Heywood, reached #2 on the Billboard chart in 1956. A version sung by Andy Williams was also popular that year, reaching #7 on the Billboard chart.

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