Music
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When we arrived here 54 years ago, the land was heavily forested but with a limited pallet of northern conifers and deciduous trees. In the first category were pines both red and white, three kinds of spruce, balsam fir, larch and hemlock. Among the hardwoods were sugar maples and red maples, ash, beech, red oak,…
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The George Szell — Cleveland Orchestra recording of Dvorak's New World Symphony, which I purchased sometime about 1952, was the first "long playing" album that I ever owned. The record jacket illustrated above is not, I'm sorry to say, the correct one. I couldn't locate the proper image on the internet, and my…
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"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in…
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Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the…
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Insomnia once again — a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever." During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to…
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Last Saturday, we hiked to the multiplex to hear and watch the Met's HD performance of Idomeneo. Once again, the opera did not disappoint. Early Mozart and glorious, especially the rousing choruses, while soprano Nadine Sierra was a luminous Illia. A silly story, of course, but for once there was a happy ending–a young man and…
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Several times a year, we attend the opera — that is, we wander over to the Metropolitan Opera widescreen HD broadcasts at our local movie theater. Last week, it was Dvorak's Rusalka –overproduced, over-costumed, a mighty silly story, but nevertheless glorious. Sung in Czech. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but then I never do expect to…
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I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching — at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera…
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All that is good and all that is bad about opera is summarized by the following splendid sentence. It comes from a plot summary of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Prepare to savor. "At the pre-wedding feast, Adina and Dulcamara entertain the guests with a barcarole." Is that genius, or what? Here's the situation: the plot's a little thin and…