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hostakovich bramwell tovey conductor alison balsom trumpet the program britten the young person s guide to the orchestra tovey songs of the paradise saloon shostakovich symphony 5 tovey s trumpet concerto was not a premiere it was something even rarer a piece of new music getting performed several years after its premiere by a soloist other than the one who premiered it songs of the paradise saloon is five years old now and it s a spinoff of sorts from tovey s opera the inventor about the real life civil war era con man alexander keith one short scene of the opera finds keith at manhattan s paradise saloon and tovey has expanded some of the musical ideas from that scene into a concerto in which the orchestra plays the role of the saloon s colorful denizens and the trumpet plays the role of keith manipulating and maneuvering each of them in musical terms that becomes a sort of theme and variations with the trumpet soloist bending twisting and altering the various melodies presented by the orchestra it makes for a fragmented and kaleidoscopic concerto in which the soloist rarely gets a full fledged melody but is instead playing with fragmentary bits and pieces there are frequent jazz influences including a lovely passage in which balsom and the orchestral brass all muted sound like a 40s swing band as in any bar multiple conversations are often happening at once and they don t always quite mix there s one striking passage where the oboes are playing a lovely waltz that s not really in the same key as the rest of the orchestra and balsom is ignoring them all with a series of frantic military fanfares the disjointed nature of the piece makes it hard to fully grasp on a single hearing it s never unpleasant to listen to and there are some fine moments but i can t say that it ever gripped me strongly enough to make me long for a second shot at it the rest of the concert reminded me of how spoiled we are here in los angeles where under esa pekka salonen and gustavo dudamel i ve become so accustomed to thrilling performances that the merely excellent is almost a disappointment tovey s take on the young person s guide was charming and all of the philharmonic s principals made the most of their moments in the spotlight the shostakovich was a solid sturdy performance but for most of the way it felt slightly lacking the largo for instance had me thinking mostly of how heartbreaking it could be with a stronger conductor tovey s interpretation came fully to life though in the final movement especially in the coda which was absolutely thrilling and which brought the audience to its feet for a rousing ovation at 5 43 pm 0 comments labels music email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest november 05 2013 books two boys kissing david levithan 2013 over the course of a single weekend we follow the lives of several high school boys who make up a cross section of what it is to be a young gay guy today a pair of exes engaged in a political demonstration a couple in the comfort of mid relationship a couple who ve just met some singles who are coping or not with the stresses of being gay and alone the narrative voice is in the first person plural made up of the ghosts of the generation of young men lost to aids for me one of the surviving members of that generation that occasionally brought up tears as i was reminded yet again of just how damned awful those years were or as random words or turns of phrase would remind me of particular friends levithan s characters capture what it feels like to be young his narrators capture what it feels like to look back on youth it s a powerful combination and that narrative voice is a glorious thing to read wise and insightful sad without being bitter missing their lives in all their joy and pain and confusion there are thoughts sentences paragraphs that i wish i could have heard at 15 or 16 even if i suspect wouldn t have understood or believed them at the time i loved this paragraph for instance the first sentence of the truth is always the hardest each of us had a first sentence and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it what we hoped and what we found was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first and the third sentence is even easier than that suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs in pages the fear the nervousness is still there but it is joined by a new confidence all along you ve used the first sentence as a lock but now you find that it s the key i m curious to know what the ya audience for whom the book is written will make of that voice and that perspective do they know the history of that era well enough to understand it who these narrators are and will it just come across as old guys preaching at them by the end of the book the narrators are shouting out to borrow whitman s words a barbaric yawp in celebration of life demanding that it be lived and loved and fought for with every ounce of strength stunning book recommended with the highest possible enthusiasm at 8 52 pm 0 comments labels books email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest october 20 2013 music la philharmonic october 20 esa pekka salonen conductor anssi karttunen cello women of the los angeles master chorale the program debussy nocturnes lindberg cello concerto 2 world premiere bartók music for strings percussion and celesta i have come to the conclusion that debussy is a composer whose music i m simply never going to connect to it s well crafted and it s pretty but for me it s a very monotonous pretty like staring at a canvas in eighteen impeccably chosen shades of beige and it washes over me without making any real impression the nocturnes are a bit more interesting than the other debussy i ve heard i will admit there are moments in the fêtes movement that caught my ear particularly a long crescendo that begins with timpani harp and brass and the use of the women s chorus in the sirènes movement is often lovely magnus lindberg s new cello concerto uses a small orchestra by contemporary standards double winds and horns a single trumpet and trombone no tuba harp keyboards or percussion the orchestral writing is dominated by the strings though the brass have a few nice moments they have a particularly lovely moment as the orchestra re enters after the cadenza playing a series of burnished dark chords it would i think take two or three more hearings to get a good grasp on how the concerto is put together those additional hearings would allow me to understand the piece better and there are parts of it that i could even come to like i doubt though that it would ever be a piece that i would love the highlight of the program was the bartók which i like to think of sugar plum fairies in hell it s a piece that mixes creepiness and brutality in fascinating ways and salonen brought out both in spectacular fashion the percussionists were in fine form today as they so often are and the opening of the third movement was a highlight the timpani playing blooping glissandos while the xylophone repeats a single note so insistently that you start to forget it s a pitched instrument and begin to hear it almost as a woodblock at 7 51 pm 0 comments labels music email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tv reign thu 9 cw it s 1557 and 15 year old mary stuart queen of scotland adelaide kane is being shipped off to the french court to prepare for her eventual marriage to prince francis toby regbo a marriage which was arranged when they were six but politics have changed in the last decade and the french royals are no longer convinced that an alliance with scotland is in their best interest mary is thrown into complicated intrigue and plotting for which nothing in life has prepared her the one person who seems to be entirely on her side is francis illegitimate half brother sebastian torrance coombs known as bash despite being a bastard he is the favorite son of king henry ii alan van sprang which is an immense annoyance to queen catherine megan follows catherine is most definitely not on mary s side especially after her counselor nostradamus rossif sutherland tells her that according to his visions mary will literally be the death of francis if you re looking to reign for accurate history you will be disappointed nostradamus was about 20 years older than the dashing young man we see here and bash is entirely a fictional creation and since this is the cw everyone is young and pretty bordering on interchangeably so in some cases notably mary s ladies in waiting and the focus is at least as much on everyone s love life as it is on international politics but if you re looking for a swoony romantic fantasia on the life of the young mary queen of scots then this might be just the thing it s surprisingly well made costumes and sets are reasonably stylish by broadcast tv standards and while none of the actors are doing award worthy work here no one is embarrassingly awful and follows has a few nice moments as the show s reigning bitch diva i have no idea whether this will appeal to the cw s young audience or not but the cw is a network that doesn t generally produce a lot of backup shows so it s likely to last for at least a few months at 7 19 pm 0 comments labels tv email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest october 17 2013 books talking hands margalit fox 2007 imagine a group of children raised in isolation whose caretakers do not speak to them and who have no access to any spoken language what sort of language would they develop among themselves and what would it tell us about the way languages are created or about the innate human instinct for language obviously this is not an experiment one could ever actually do which is why linguists jokingly refer to it as the forbidden experiment but occasionally circumstances arise that provide conditions as close to the forbidden experiment as one is ever likely to see and margalit fox s talking hands follows a group of linguists as they explore one such rarity al sayyid is an isolated village in israel with a population of about 3 500 and an unusually high rate of genetically inherited deafness one in 25 residents are deaf 1 in 1 000 is the typical rate because of their isolation the villagers have developed their own sign language and nearly everyone speaks it whether they re deaf or not it s a new language the current generation of children is only the third generation to use it which makes it an ideal topic for study into how languages are created and developed but the team is pressed for time because the village becomes less isolated with every generation and bits of israeli and arabic sign languages are already creeping into the language of those children it s a bit of a challenge to find kids whose local language is still pure it wasn t that long ago fox tells us that studying the sign language of al sayyid would have been considered a waste of time because sign languages weren t thought to be real languages at all they were considered merely glorified pantomime with none of the linguistic subtlety or complexity of spoken language it wasn t until the mid 20th century that linguists began to realize that sign languages had their own syntax grammar and complex rules and that they were every bit as thoroughly developed as spoken languages were fox alternates between chapters showing the team of linguists at work collecting data from the people of al sayyid and chapters on the history of sign language in general with a focus on how our understanding of such languages has changed and deepend in the last fifty years i was particularly fascinated by a chapter on how strokes impact sign language to oversimplify a bit we know that language ability is controlled by the left side of the brain and that dealing with spatial relationships is mostly controlled by the right side of the brain given that sign languages are almost always highly organized in space a sign made in front of the body might not mean the same thing as the same sign made to one side for instance what happens to the ability to use sign language when a stroke injures one side or the other of the brain fox has degrees in linguistics herself and does a very good job of discussing the subject in layman s terms i was fascinated by the history and the details about how sign languages work and i enjoyed the book very much at 6 24 pm 0 comments labels books email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest october 13 2013 tv once upon a time in wonderland thu 8 abc once upon a time in wonderland is a sort of spinoff from once upon a time but only just barely it s a spinoff of concept rather than of characters once again we re following familiar storybook characters on their travels between their worlds and this one there s a very brief prologue set in storybrooke the village from the original series just to establish that the shows share the same continuity but the producers have said that the shows will be independent of one another and they don t plan to do major crossovers we begin with alice just returning from her famous visit to wonderland and immediately thrown into an asylum when she tells her father of her adventures jump forward a few years and alice is now a young woman whose doctors are convinced that she s lying and therefore still delusional when she tells them that she no longer believes that she went to another land she s rescued from the asylum in the nick of time by the knave of hearts michael socha and the white rabbit voiced by john lithgow who take her back to wonderland when she learns that cyrus peter gadiot the genie with whom she fell in love during her original visit which somehow never made it into lewis carroll s telling of the tale might not be dead after all she sets out on a quest to find him if you re thinking that you don t remember any genies in wonderland well this is sort of a hybrid between alice and the disney version of aladdin the genie jafar naveen andrews is one of the show s principal villains teaming up with the red queen emma rigby in a plot to capture alice for some as yet unknown reason the show looks marvelous and its fantasy landscapes are very different from those of the original once upon a time much of it is cgi and the integration of the actors into the virtual sets is occasionally a bit clunky but there are beautiful images like the red queen s castle which looks as if it s been cobbled together from a giant chess set casting is generally solid andrews is an ideal choice for jafar and lowe socha and gadiot are attractive leads the show is none too subtle about the love triangle that must inevitably develop as the red queen rigby is the weak link aiming for the same camp glory that lana parilla hits in the parent show and not quite getting there lithgow s voice performance is less manic than i d have expect...