Royal Opera
July 12, 2011
It’s rare for a person to be in the position to do for opera what George Lascelles could do — and actually to do it.
Mission Accomplished
July 11, 2011
Having heartily recommended the delights of Caramoor last week, I thought it meet and right to report on my trip thither for the first of two William Tell performances. First, the ambience, which unsurprisingly gave glimpses of the highest earthly felicity in the form of all sorts of people peacefully assembled, in groups and couples, over leisurely picnics. There were hundreds of them in all the kinds of settings that the estate affords.
There follows an album of a variety of views of the “delightful pleasant groves”:
Summering at Caramoor
July 5, 2011
With the Fourth of July now in our rear-view mirror, there’s no denying that we are in high summer. Some of us go off to cool, bucolic spots; some of us slog away at our pursuits in the city heat; but some of us who stay in the city are unwilling to renounce the pastoral pleasures that can be more accessible than many suspect.
I’m thinking here of what is officially called Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, but I think of it as a kind of temporary paradise. I’d be glad to be there even without the sensational programming that they do. Though there’s a style of music for any of myriad tastes at Caramoor, I go for the outstanding classical concerts and the important presentations of operas that are otherwise hard to find in live performance. Such a show is coming up twice in the next two weeks, when Rossini’s masterpiece William Tell is being given a rare outing. It’s a huge work, and that’s why performing outfits rarely have the wherewithal to put it on. And this is one of the things that I love about these concert performances: because they dispense with the expense — and, for me at least, the distraction — of all the stage machinery, one’s own imagination allows them to be more dramatically effective than most stagecraft is likely to make them, and they are certainly freer to concentrate on the drama that is in musical values.
People who live up in Westchester County or nearby Connecticut of course have the advantage of proximity, but I don’t envy them that, since I have the advantage of escape to a radically different place for an evening — or even for a longer time, since the afternoon provides a bounty of enriching preparatory events arranged by the obliging Caramoor folks.
For details of the William Tell performances, including the handy and comfortable “Caramoor Caravan” that leaves from Grand Central Station, check out this link.
And a final thought: while you may be lucky enough to go on one of those perfect summer nights when it is warm-but-not-too-warm, there is also a certain wonderful comradery when rain is falling around the tent or when it is so sweltering as to be almost funny. But the first time I encountered the latter state, I was in tie and jacket. I do not recommend this. The next week I went as though dressed for a picnic (as I had observed more savvy visitors doing), and enjoyed the whole event in great comfort and good humor.
“… are, and of Right ought to be …”
July 4, 2011
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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Many a True Word is Spoken in Jest
July 3, 2011
“97-Year-Old Dies Unaware Of Being Violin Prodigy”: read the fictitious, but all-too-possible details from The Onion.
Rocking Themselves
June 27, 2011
An idea that is the very definition of “not for me, but a really good thing.”
Winning While Losing
June 26, 2011
It seems to me that there’s a lot to be learned from these little kids:
If u cn rd ths u cn be a Mediæval Twitterer
June 23, 2011
Just now I was reading a Twitter message (I understand that the gods of Twitter don’t like us to call it a tweet) when I felt a special kind of déjà vu. Special, because I knew that I had past experience that was substantially the same but superficially different. Here is the text of the message:
I imagine Wmbln also worked on yr approach and knew what you were doing & why (as oppoded to turning to it in desperation)
In a former life, I spent a rigorous and rewarding summer at U.C.L.A. studying (for reasons of my then musicological research) Latin paleography. The teacher, Leonard Boyle, O.P. — the late Prefect of the Vatican Library — made it a joy; and no one would have been more amused, had he survived till now, to observe the flourishing of Twitter and Twitter-influenced texting.
Someday, scholars will probably provide, for study of past Twitter communication, cheat-sheet tables analogous to this:
RogerEvansOnline.com 