Watching the Broadway musical Great Gatsby. It’s striking that the proportion of girls parading in dresses significantly exceeds the proportion of guys escorting girls. It made me wonder why. The explanation seems simple. If a girl wants to go to a musical and she doesn’t have a boyfriend, she will bring at least one girl, better yet two. Whereas a guy is more likely not to go at all than to show up with a buddy. Well, with certain exceptions.
I have two weeks of concerts. Today — Pink Martini! Next week Postmodern Jukebox, and this past weekend was a great piano concert (Beethoven, Shostakovich, Chopin, Rachmaninoff at the Washington Piano Festival). Facebook cuts out the sound from concert recordings, so I’m attaching a cool video that’s already been cleared (or missed) by Facebook from some Pink Martini performance, featuring Thomas Lauderdale with Hunter Noack, who is either his wife or husband, and I’ll try to add my own in the comments
At 47, I finally got around to Goethe’s “Faust.” Ordered the book on Ozon, but it will only reach me in a month. So, I decided to start with the audiobook. And what a fabulous production it is! I’ve listened to eight out of sixteen hours, covering all of the first part and a bit of the second. Probably will spend another week chewing through the second part. And when the book arrives – I’ll read it all over again after the audio, which should go really well.
Trukhan’s performance is a masterpiece! The cello, the choice of voice actors, the intonations. I could not imagine a better “Faust” than the one voiced by Chonishvili. Highly recommend. Only occasionally there’s a bit too much with the musical numbers, but I need to check the text, maybe you can’t remove words from a song. The end of the first part in the prison is just fire.
I’m not even sure whether to praise the Metropolitan Opera or criticize them. They have a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, and this year they are showing it exactly once in a live broadcast on April 26 and exactly once in a recording on April 30, and only in select theaters worldwide. They offer recordings for a fee, but never from the current season—well, for obvious reasons. So, Figaro will only be added to their library next year.
Our local cinema failed the live broadcast—they apologized, sent us home, and promised a refund. Four days later, a recorded session was shown in the same theater. That went almost smoothly, if you ignore the severe sound issues during the first 30 minutes. Since I can’t tell if both were issues with the specific theater or poor organization by the Met, I dropped them a support line just in case.
And support apologized on behalf of the theater and, as a nice bonus, sent me a link to a video 1280 × 720, 3h37m, asking me to watch it by Monday because after that the carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Well, okay, not quite an mp3 file, but it streams via m3u8, and yt-dlp manages to convert it into a 6-gigabyte mp4 file in 3 minutes.
Interestingly, this recording starts with the opera artists singing the Ukrainian anthem on stage before the curtain is even raised. This introduction was not shown at the cinema.
I am honest, and of course, I won’t give the file to anyone. I will watch it myself when convenient, and then I may delete it, or might keep it on my personal laptop for personal use. And I might even buy a subscription to the Met this weekend. In short, they’ve done well, though, there is a small nuance 🙂
Here is your text translated into English, preserving the original style and HTML markup:
I feel a lack of a service where I could periodically add what I want to listen to live, within reach from where I live, and where I would receive proposals to buy a concert ticket with dates — mainly based on what I indicated, but I wouldn’t mind getting recommendations sometimes either.
It would also be interesting to see how this model would work: selling tickets on the basis of “I queue up for a ticket costing N dollars, ready to dash on the day of the concert if a ticket comes but also prepared to lose the money if a ticket is available but I can’t attend”. The idea is that, one day before the concert, all the seats not normally sold are distributed to those in this queue starting with those who placed a higher amount in their bid, and if the amounts are the same, then those who applied earlier, and so on until the tickets run out. Meanwhile, the application includes consent that the money will either be charged on a specified day or not at all if no seats are available. Ultimately, the entire venue fills up, and the day before the concert brings in much more money than it would have without this system.
The best thing to do when someone asks, “Can you play the piano? Play something!”
I’ve been listening to Hayato Sumino for the past two hours. His concert Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin’s) is wonderful!
https://youtu.be/pHlqEvAwdVc?si=zpqqnKTugC-l5Fvn
Very good. It’s just a pity that now I will have to read the last book knowing the plot. Otherwise, I would never have learned about it.
But listening to Armen Zakaryan is like reading another book. Simply music to the ears in prose
https://youtu.be/WPrTAOLbz1M?si=rwmfjYZtjuA6pMBe
If, like us, you train a dog to ask to go outside by tapping the window with its paw, and to ask for food by tapping the refrigerator similarly, you quickly notice an interesting effect. Ignoring these requests becomes unpleasant: not because you urgently need to go walking or feed them, but because the tapping turns into something more — into a voice, and teaching the dog to understand the reason for refusal is much trickier. You might want to reinforce — well done, let’s go, I’ll do what you want, you’ve learned to communicate with us, we’ve learned to understand you, but on the other hand, the dog begins to control you, realizing that tapping with its paw actually produces a tangible effect.
The real problem is that if I don’t react, my dog doesn’t think: “Ah, probably not the time right now.” It decides that it’s just not loud enough or persistent enough. In its world, the absence of a response is not an argument but a reason to increase the pressure.
Well okay, it has learned to understand and accept a verbal refusal, after all. But occasionally it doesn’t work. Apparently, in its world, an insufficiently justified refusal is not seen as a refusal.
When we watch movies, we slice cheese for the wine. Yuka knows that when the projector turns on, the smell of wine will soon be accompanied by cheese, and settles nearby. And interestingly, it very clearly senses when the cheese is finished. It can’t see that it’s finished, but apparently, its sense of smell replaces its vision. And as soon as you eat the last piece with it, it stands up and leaves.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 