In 2005, Peshawar district was home to 611,501 Afghan refugees — who made-up 19.7% of the district's total population and 20% of all Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
Peshawar has been attacked by Islamist terrorists many times. They include the suicide bombing of a church in 2013 and a school massacre in 2014. Over 100 people were killed in each of those two attacks.
B'Day
B'Day is the second studio album by American R&B singer Beyoncé, released by Columbia Records on 1 September 2006 outside North America, on September 4, 2006 worldwide, and on September 5, 2006 in Canada and the United States. The album's title comes from the fact that September 4, the date of worldwide release, is Beyoncé's birthday (2006 being her 25th). "B'Day" won the award for "Best Contemporary R&B Album" at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards. A two-CD deluxe edition of the album, including previously unreleased material in English and Spanish, was released on April 3 2007. 6 singles were released from the album: "Déjà Vu", "Ring the Alarm", "Irreplaceable", "Beautiful Liar", "Get Me Bodied", and "Green Light". "Check on It" was also a single, but was released from the Destiny's Child album #1's.
On digital copies "World Wide Woman" is a non-hidden track placed at track 8, and other songs are pushed down the track order.
Aldeburgh Festival
The Aldeburgh Festival is an English arts festival where classical music concerts take place during the summer. Aldeburgh is in Suffolk in the south-east of England. It is where the composer Benjamin Britten lived with his friend the tenor Peter Pears. A lot of Britten’s music is played at the festival, but music by many other composers can be heard as well. Most of the concerts take place in the Maltings, a concert hall in the village of Snape, not far away from Aldeburgh.
The Festival was started in 1948 by Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and the librettist Eric Crozier. They started the festival so that the English Opera Group would have a place to perform their operas, but soon the festival became bigger. There were poetry readings, drama performances, lectures and art exhibitions. The first festival was mostly held in Aldeburgh Jubilee Hall, a few doors away from Britten's house in Crabbe Street. His opera "Albert Herring" was performed, as well as his "St Nicolas Cantata".
Over the years the festival grew. Some of the performances took place in the church, or in churches or other halls in nearby villages and small towns such as Orford and Framlingham. However, the festival needed a large concert hall. In the 1960s the old malthouse (where barley used to be made) in Snape was changed into a concert hall. It was opened by the Queen on 2 June 1967, at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival.
Two years later, on the first night of the 1969 Festival, the concert hall was destroyed by fire. Only the main walls remained. For that year the Festival was moved to other local places, but by the next year the hall had been rebuilt and once again it was opened by the Queen, this time at the start of the 1970 Festival.
The festival is now organized by Aldeburgh Music, which also runs the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme which gives young musicians a chance to learn from famous music teachers and perform in concerts.
The festival has a nice atmosphere because it is in the country near the sea and marshes. New music is often performed. In the past there have been first performances of several works by Britten: ("A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1960; "Death in Venice" in 1973) and also Harrison Birtwistle's "Punch and Judy" in 1968.
The Festival's Artistic Director is now the composer Thomas Adès, who was appointed in 1999.
Lanark (disambiguation)
Lanark could mean:
Peter Pears
Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears CBE (his name rhymes with “cheers”) (born Farnham 22 June 1910 died Aldeburgh 3 April 1986) was an English tenor and life-long partner of the composer Benjamin Britten.
Pears was at school at Lancing College. He then studied music at Keble College, Oxford. He was organist at Hertford College, Oxford but left Oxford without taking his degree. He later studied singing for two terms at the Royal College of Music.
He met Britten in 1934, when he was a member of the BBC Singers. Pears and Britten gave their first recital together in 1937 at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1939 they went to America together because of World War II. However, in 1942 they decided to return to their own country. Back in England they performed Britten's song cycle "Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo" together at the Wigmore Hall in London (Britten was an excellent pianist), and then recorded them for EMI, their first recording together.
Peter Pears was a great inspiration for Britten’s vocal writing. Many of Britten's operas have a main tenor role which was written for Pears to sing. Britten also wrote over 100 songs with piano accompaniment. Britten also wrote works for tenor and orchestra. These include "Les Illuminations", "Nocturne", the "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings" and the Canticles. In Britten’s operas he sang "Peter Grimes" and "Albert Herring" (title roles), "The Beggar's Opera" (Macheath), "Owen Wingrave" (Sir Philip Wingrave), "Billy Budd" (Captain Vere), "The Turn of the Screw" (Quint), "Death in Venice" (Aschenbach) and the three Church Parables.
Pears helped to write the words for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", based on the Shakespeare play. In most of Britten’s operas Pears sang serious roles, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he had a comic role: the part of Flute the Bellowsmender. In this role he was dressed up as a female and did a parody of the great opera singer Joan Sutherland singing the mad scene from "Lucia di Lammermoor ".
Pears’s voice was a lyrical tenor, not a heavy, operatic one. Britten was extremely skilful in writing music for him which suited his voice very well. He sang regularly at the Royal Opera House and many other opera houses in Europe and the United States.
He was also a great singer of Franz Schubert's "Lieder", usually with Britten as accompanist, and he often sang the part of the Evangelist in Johann Sebastian Bach's Passions.
His last great role written for him by Britten was as Aschenbach in "Death in Venice". He sang this in 1973 at the Aldeburgh Festival, and the following year in the Royal Opera House. Britten by then had heart disease and was too ill to go to the performances, dying in 1976.
Pears continued to live in the Red House, Aldeburgh. After he retired from performing he continued to teach young singers at the Britten-Pears Foundation. He was awarded a CBE in 1955 and knighted in 1977.
In his last years Pears also suffered from heart disease. He died ten years after Britten. He is buried next to him in the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul's Church in Aldeburgh.
There are many recordings of Pears’s singing including almost all the music that Britten wrote for him as well as the roles of the Evangelist in Johann Sebastian Bach’s "St Matthew Passion" and "St John Passion " and Gerontius in Elgar’s "Dream of Gerontius".
Me, Myself and I
Me, Myself and I is an R&B/neo soul song written by Beyoncé Knowles, Scott Storch, and Robert Waller for Knowles' solo debut studio album "Dangerously in Love" (2003). In this laid-back, but strong-willed female-empowerment anthem, the song's protagonist comes to terms with a cheating boyfriend, and declares that in the world that there is only one person she can trust who never lets her down: herself. "Me, Myself and I" was the third single to be released from the album, in the last quarter of 2003. It reached number four on the "Billboard" Hot 100 for two weeks, becoming Beyoncé's fourth consecutive top five single in the United States; it also reached eleven in the United Kingdom.
Lanark: A Life in Four Books