A Steller's jay came to the sill for a peanut...

With the blinds still raised and while I'm sat here-- I think that was a first. My routine is upset this morning because I have to stop in at the pharmacy that doesn't open until 0900 so instead of leaving the house twenty minutes ago I will depart at 0815 i.e. ordinarily the blinds go down then, at 0600. Perhaps the bird has figured out that at this time of day he's usually safe.

I see that BBC 3 is broadcasting the 1990 recording of the premiere of Sir James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at some point in the next... I cannot find confirmation of this at Radio 3 itself (I begin the day looking at the-- sometimes unreliable-- schedule at World Concert Hall). Usually Radio 3 will have these programs available for later listening and so I'm not going to further confuse my morning by waiting for the 'original' re-broadcast.

I had assumed that the Proms were cancelled; looking about, I see that they were except for a limited series of live performances from the 28th of this month onward. 'Probably' without audiences. Tsk.  

The Steller's jays are returning for the peanuts in spite of my being here, happily enough. They, joined by the scrub jays, are chattering, however, probably telling me to relieve them of their apprehensions and toss the damn nuts out to the lawn.

There is a re-broadcast of a recital by M. Sokolov from Bad Kissingen in 2001 that I won't miss, three more Beethoven quartets performed by the Belcea Quartet livestreamed from Warsaw's International Music Festival, and I see that I have missed a broadcast on Oe1 of a concert at the Innsbruck Early Music Festival given last week by Franco Fagioli and Il Pomo d'Oro of Handel and Vinci arias. 

When I win the lottery I'm going to decamp to Austria for the duration of the Salzburg and the Innsbruck Festivals, travelling back and forth as necessary.

 

 

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Am only just returned from my spatiamentum, the shopping, and the pharmacy which latter task, had I calculated the time correctly when Bavarian Radio would begin its broadcast of the Sokolov recital, I'd have put off until tomorrow (missing a day of thyroid supplement has happened before and doubtless will happen again): I missed all but the last five minutes of Couperin's Suite no 13.

Mozart's Fantasia in C major KV 475, in a recording by a member of the audience at Schwetzingen on May 22, 2001.




The video recording of the Fantasie immediately below this one at YouTube, from 2006 I believe but am not opening YouTube up again to check, evinces a sharp improvement in M. Sokolov's playing, according to the fellow who uploaded it. 

Sokolovites are, some of them, crazy-eyed cultists. Obviously, his first practice run through isn't going to be perfect and most of us earn virtue through hard work and repetition: but I have a difficult time believing that Sokolov would add a work to his program if it weren't as near to Sokolovian perfection as is humanly possible. I shall have to listen to the audio.

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