mick laBriola

Hickson 44 (HCG 44) is a group of galaxies in the constellation Leo. As Arp 316, a part of this group is also designated as group of galaxies in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. NGC 3185/87/90/93.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass.

Several of Lloyd Webber’s songs have been widely recorded and widely successful outside their parent musicals, such as “Memory” from Cats, “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita, and “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 2001, The New York Times referred to him as “the most commercially successful composer in history”. The Daily Telegraph named him in 2008 the fifth-most powerful person in British culture, on which occasion lyricist Don Black said that “Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical.”

Lloyd Webber has received numerous awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to the arts, six Tonys, seven Olivier Awards, three Grammys(as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and two Classic Brit Awards (for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2008, and for Musical Theatre and Education in 2018). In 2018, after Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), he became the thirteenth person to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.

The Really Useful Group, Lloyd Webber’s company, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. He is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools, London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, west London. Lloyd Webber is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992, he started the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the UK.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim (March 22, 1930 – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical.With his frequent collaborators Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim’s Broadwaymusicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre’s traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics are tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.

Sondheim’s interest in musical theater began at a young age, and he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II. He began his career by writing the lyrics for West Side Story(1957) and Gypsy (1959). He transitioned to writing both music and lyrics for the theater, with his best-known works including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987).

Sondheim’s numerous awards and nominations include eight Tony Awards, an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, an Olivier Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He also was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1993 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. A theater is named after him both on Broadway and in the West End of London. Film adaptations of his works include West Side Story (1961), Gypsy(1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music(1977), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Into the Woods(2014), and West Side Story (2021).

Aurelio Martínez Suazo, the Honduran musician who championed his country’s Garifuna people (also known as the Garínagu) and brought the music to wider international attention, has died. Martínez was one of 13 people killed last night (Monday, March 17) in a small plane crash off the coast of the Caribbean island of Roatán, according to The Associated Press. He was 55 years old.

Born in the isolated town of Plaplaya, in Honduras’ Gracias a Dios district, in 1969, Martínez participated in traditional Garifuna rituals from a young age. Typically performed on acoustic guitar with percussive accompaniment, Garifuna songs combine West African rhythms with Latin, reggae, and calypso music. At the age of 14, Martínez moved to the port city La Ceiba, where he began performing in various latin jazz ensembles. Eventually, he formed his first group, Lita Ariran, whose 1995 album, Songs of the Garifuna, made them one of the first Garifuna bands distributed on an international label.

Two years later, Martínez met Andy Palacio, a fellow rising star in Garifuna music from Belize, when the two recorded the duet “Lánarime Lamiselu” for Stonetree Records’ compilation Paranda: Africa in Central America. He put out his debut solo album, Garifuna Soul, in 2004, and, in 2005, was elected as the first member of African descent in the National Congress of Honduras, where he fought for the rights of the Garifuna community. Following Palacio’s death, in 2008, however, Martínez returned to music, and would go on to release three more studio LPs under the moniker Aurelio: Laru Beya, in 2011, Lándini, in 2014, and Darandi, in 2017. Last year, Lándini was named as one of the best Latin American albums of all time in the Los 600 discos de Latinoamérica, a list project compiled by music journalists from the region.

Aurelio Martínez Suazo (26 September 1969 – 17 March 2025), professionally known as Aurelio, was a Honduran singer-songwriter and politician. Known for his Garifuna music, he was considered a cultural ambassador of the Garifuna people. According to The Guardian, he became the leading Garifuna performer after the death of musician Andy Palacio. His acclaimed album “Laru Beya” was considered among the best albums of Latin American music, according to Los 600 de Latinoamérica, a 2024 ranking made by Latin American music critics.

March equinox and the northern hemisphere spring. Famous as the Leo Triplet, the three magnificent galaxies found in the prominent constellation Leo gather here in one astronomical field of view. Crowd pleasers when imaged with even modest telescopes, they can be introduced individually as NGC 3628 (bottom left), M66 (middle right), and M65 (top center). All three are large spiral galaxies but tend to look dissimilar, because their galactic disks are tilted at different angles to our line of sight. NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy, is temptingly seen edge-on, with obscuring dust lanes cutting across its puffy galactic plane. The disks of M66 and M65 are both inclined enough to show off their spiral structure. Gravitational interactions between galaxies in the group have left telltale signs, including the tidal tails and warped, inflated disk of NGC 3628 and the drawn out spiral arms of M66. This gorgeous view of the region spans over 1 degree (two full moons) on the sky. Captured with a telescope from Sawda Natheel, Qatar, planet Earth, the frame covers over half a million light-years at the Leo Trio’s estimated 30 million light-year distance.