The temperature has dropped a degree in the last hour...

To 49° F., Phoebus is the color of a healing wound, reddish pink, but is at least visible this morning-- it is some minutes after eight-- unlike yestereday morning, and while ash continues to fall it does so in amounts far, far less discomfiting than yestereday's eye-irritating event. I'm presuming that the cloud cover is mainly water and no longer smoke and that it will burn off as the morning progresses; I doubt that the temperature this afternoon reaches the low 90s but I may be mistaken.

I feel like a truant from school because I ought to have delayed my morning walk and shopping so that I could stop in at the pharmacy at 0900 (am going to be missing a day of prostate medication)-- as if I have some minor moral obligation to take the capsules, pft. If 'things become worse' because I'm off the med for 24 hours I'm far more decrepit than I believe I am.

While out walking, it occurred to me that on the one day there is the Vinci opera, Strauss's Elektra at the Hofoper, and Holy Mass streamed from Saint-Eugène for the feast of Our Lady's Name: but then I managed to make my memory do its job. The operas are on Friday, the feast is Saturday.

Am listening in a couple of hours to a program of works by Rebecca Saunders (never heard of her-- I'm sure that is a consequence of my living in my own little world far too much of the time and not at all a sign that her music is negligible; and maybe I have seen her name, now that I'm thinking about it) that is an event at the Berliner Festspiele streamed by the Berlin Phil. The premiere is called Either or (two trumpets!) and Skin receives its German premiere. We shall see. YouTube ought to come to my aid here. Dichroic seventeen is from the 90s, I believe.



 

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Estonian Radio is broadcasting a concert from August 8th at the Arvo Pärt Center of music of Purcell, Dowland, William Croft, and Eduard Tubin performed by the countertenor (and conductor) Risto Joost and the ensemble Floridante (the concert is accessible from their Facebook page). From this to Rebecca Saunders in a morning....

 

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Missed the beginning of Either or because I was investigating the 30th anniversary season of the Early Music Festival at Vilnius (which the Polish ensemble Jerycho opened last evening) and lost track of time. 

I have to say I didn't much enjoy Either or except in the peculiar sense that I appreciate the opportunity to hear new music: one's never sure what one is going to be given; the dog noticed it, certainly. Ensemble Musikfabrik performed on two trumpets each of which was fitted? retrofitted? with a second bell? I may have that right, since I see the Wikipedia article describing 'double belled' instruments; perhaps I'll watch again from the beginning later on. 

 

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