Music in perspective

Little joke there. I’m really looking forward to Thursday’s concert at the Lincoln Center Library of music associated with the great sixteenth-century architect, Andrea Palladio — for his beautifully balanced villas on the Brenta canal and his revolutionary perspectival theater in Vicenza.
In celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palladio, the [...]

They also serve, 11/28 edition

From one of those reviews divided against themselves (“I shouldn’t have liked it, but I did”): Manohla Dargis on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some bloody violence, many stampeding hooves.

Pie (ii).

For a decade or more it has been my duty and privilege to bring pie or the equivalent to Thanksgiving dinner. Not pecan: for even longer my cousin C has made two pecan pies every Thanksgiving. Why two? Because each pie uses one-half bottle of Karo syrup. And why pecan pie, [...]

Language Log » Flash from the LSA

One of my favorite blogs, Language Log, is honored.
The Linguistic Society of America announces the 2009 recipient of the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award, given for a body of work that has had a demonstrable impact on the public awareness of language and/or linguistics.
The award will be given to Language Log, a collaborative science [...]

They also serve, 11/21 edition

No clear winner, but a tie this week: Jeanette Catsoulis on “I Can’t Think Straight,” directed by Shamim Sarif: PG-13: Soft-focus passion and hard-line prejudice, or Manohla Dargis on “Twilight”: PG-13: Some violence, little viscera.*
*But can you really use “little” with “viscera”? It’s not a count noun, “few” would be ridiculous, but there’s something [...]

Sliding through the Smoke

via London’s best ice rinks – Telegraph
And I thought it was cool that the Natural History museum was putting up a rink. In London, you can skate in the Tower moat. Also, I long to know more about the band of bass drum, accordion, trumpet, and banjo.
*for those not up on their [...]

Jeremy Denk at Zankel Hall, November 11 — Ives & Beethoven

Thanks to my singing colleague and friend Janet, who was off to Rochester to hear a Europe-based singer, I had a nearly-front and center seat at Jeremy Denk’s beautiful recital at Zankel Hall on Tuesday. The huge black piano was like an ocean liner on the stage. Wearing a charcoal suit and shirt [...]

Drawn [in] by New York

I had the privilege of joining a curator’s tour of Drawn By New York, an exhibition at the too-little-visited New-York Historical Society. (Even if there were no other reason to love it, there’s that 1804 hyphen.)
The curator, Roberta Olson, took the 8500 objects in the Historical Society’s collection of drawings and watercolors and pulled [...]

About those Coming Attractions . . .

It has dawned on me with arctic slowness that anyone who comes to this blog by searching for something specific, or who is good enough to actually put me in their feed reader, is not going to see COMING ATTRACTIONS, which, while it is updated all the time, takes the form of an old post [...]

Polyhymnia and the St. Ignatius of Antioch concert series

I heard Polyhymnia sing a program of Tudor and Jacobean music for the Reformed Chapel Royal (Parsons, Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins) last night, November 8, at St. Ignatius of Antioch. Interesting repertory, only one piece I knew (in its Latin form, not the English contrafactum), effective singing: the second half opener, for [...]