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Showing posts with label opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opera. Show all posts
Sunday, March 1, 2015

Whimsy in the face of chaos as Russian history repeats itself (Books & Opera - The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, There Once Lived a Mother.... by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dmitri Shotakovch)

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Today, as more than 50,000 Russians march to honor Boris Y. Nemtsov, the Putin critic who was assassinated a few days ago, it seems timely t...
Sunday, December 13, 2009

The failure of civilization beautifully expressed (Opera - From the House of the Dead by Leos Janacek)

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Leos Janacek , the early 20th century Czech composer wrote music of a distinctive lyrical angularity. The pieces generally have an off-kilt...
Saturday, June 20, 2009

Hiking, opera, tea, theatre, book shopping, friends, and home again...

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This is the B&B we stayed at in the Cotswolds and its garden. Some rain gave us lots of time for reading, but we also took severa...
Thursday, December 4, 2008

Cultural riches, cultural poverty...

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Philip Kennicott writes an excellent review in The Chronicle of Higher Education of two books about the life of the much admired and much m...
Sunday, November 9, 2008

Disturbing the universe (Opera - Dr. Atomic by John Adams & Peter Sellars)

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American composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars have created an unlikely hybrid in Doctor Atomic - an abstract documentary ope...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 8, 2008

Thought and language, revenge and alienation (Books - Thought and Language & The Meaning of Night)

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Lev Vygotsky was an influential psychological theorist who worked from the 1920s - 1930s in Russia. I know of him only as the mentor of ...
7 comments:
Sunday, October 5, 2008

Short stories, short dresses (Opera - Salome with Karita Mattila)

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The short story seems to be poking its head up everywhere these days. First C.B.'s challenge this past month. Then Kate's post on...
1 comment:
Sunday, March 16, 2008

Culpability - It Takes a Village (Spitzer and the new Peter Grimes at the Met)

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In this week of scandal mongering over Eliot Spitzer's frailties, it seems to me the entire press corps and the finger-wagging public co...
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Saturday, February 2, 2008

A little necrophilia to go with your incest? A rave for Stratas as Salome.

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I thought with my adulterous literature kick ( Heat and Dust and The Master Bedroom ) I would add a dash of incest and a little necrophili...