For which I am grateful although perhaps not as grateful as the firefighters are. There were at least three thunderstorms that passed through yesterday, with periods of sunlight the rest of the day. It has been raining off and on through the night and earlier morning, lightly.
I forgot about the Chopin Institute Saturday morning recital, ahem, but it is there on YouTube so will listen at breakfast. The pianist is Mateusz Duda; the Etude in E minor op 25 no 5 and the Sonata in B minor op 58.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, requiescat in pace. Dr Althouse was going on about her 'greatness' yesterday, which of course I don't understand.
I must say Prime-- am late to that.
Noticed that Mateusz Duda wore a kippah during his (lovely!) recital, presumably because it is Rosh Hashanah: best wishes to him for many blessings in the coming year.
Am off to say Terce but having the Estonian Radio on, I see and hear that they are broadcasting a performance of the Starry Sky Cycle of Urmas Sisask; the pianists are Piret Väinmaa and Lauri Väinmaa.
Post Tertiam. Sisask's composition is based on Estonian folk songs (some of which Celia Roose performed) about the constellations-- which the Estonians named and counted differently than Antiquity and Ptolemy did. And he is a Roman Catholic, who composes for the Sacred Liturgy. But am not spending the rest of the morning descending into that rabbit hole, as rewarding as such an adventure would be. I've got another thirty years or so, Deo volente.
The Estonian, not the Latin, of the Sanctus. It is beautiful! It makes me think of the mass performances of Handel's Messiah in Victorian England: I'm sure that they were splendid, 'authenticity' aside. (At the Crystal Palace in London, in 1857, there was a 'Great Handel Festival' with an orchestra of 500 and chorus of 2,000 singers.)
Post Sextam. Am listening (on Spotify) to Urmas Sisask's Te Deum op 37 performed by the Pärnu Chamber Choir and the Pärnu City Orchestra. Very obviously based on the plainchant but I imagine it is more appropriate for the concert hall than the Liturgy with its instrumental solos etc.
Starry Sky Cycle is there, on Spotify, I mean, in one recording-- Lauri Väinmaa is the pianist credited-- from 1993, but none of his liturgical music.
Ante Completorium. I tried to begin the television series Young Wallander earlier but gave up about a third of the way into the first episode because I couldn't deal with the protagonist's voice; he's Danish or Swedish or Lithuanian, who knows, and his English, while perfectly grammatical and perfectly comprehensible, well, his voice sounds as if he's a convalescent wraith from Lord of the Rings. No doubt it is the effect of the native tongue beneath the learned English and in Danish or Swedish or whatever he sounds like a human being but... I only have so much patience. Which is an amusing declaration to record because a few days ago I watched three or four episodes of some ridiculous Peyton Place set in a gated community in England, starring Dexter, Michael C. Hall I believe it is, before admitting to myself that even vaguely dozing through a chapter of St Cyril of Alexandria in Latin translation would be less wasteful of my time and energy. The high point was the murder victim's body surfacing in a lake where it had been deposited shortly before-- the daughter, who with her father had attempted to dispose of the corpus delicti, didn't even kill the poor fellow. They, those two together with the less than brilliant mother and spouse, were concerned about their family and business reputation and the daughter's previous minor drugs use 'matter' and were moving the plot forward by attempting (slowly and 'vaguely', as I would say) to rid their house of the body.
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