In the pre-dawn darkness. This is one of those days when my morning is upset because I have to go out later than normal in order to collect a prescription at the late-opening (0900! outrageous!) pharmacy. It is, I think, the 130th anniversary of the Estonian composer Adolf Vedro's birth and the 171st of Frydryk Chopin's death. Frydryk saves me from having to change the keyboard to add the accents of Frédéric.
It had slipped my mind that the Chopin Institute's Saturday recital series continues, through this month, I believe. I'll listen to Julia Łozowska perform the Polonaise in E flat minor op 26 n 2 and Sonata in B flat minor op 35 later on.
At 1000, the Berlin Philharmonic (Marc Minkowski conducting) will livestream its concert of Haydn's Symphony no 59 in A major and Beethoven's ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus op 43. I should be back from my errands by ten. Should be. It has been a very long time, decades, since I listened to the entire op 43-- the overture here, an excerpt there... but the entire ballet music? probably 1975.
Every third or fourth time I look at Instagram, Benjamin Appl's Bavarian blondness looks out upon the world and I'm reminded of the Oxford Lieder Festival; finally this morning remembered to go online to investigate-- there is a brief notice at the Guardian (scrolling through Instagram on the iPad is, well, it is reserved for those ordinarily and happily fairly brief periods when I am bound to the one particular seat in circumstances unavoidable-- how's that for a circumlocution?)-- and, of course, it is over today. Apparently, at a cost of ~$50 I can listen to recordings of all the recitals etc. Hmm; I don't think so but there may be an individual recital or two that I will buy access to.
Ante Sextam. I missed the first ten minutes of Haydn's 'Fire Symphony' because I was betrayed into chatting with the pharmacists (they are going to 'manage' my two drugs in such a way that I'll be able to collect the new batches of them in a single monthly trip rather than the two trips I've had to make up to now) and chatting with the supermarket people.
Am going to proceed with my until-now inchoate plan to fry a chicken, tomorrow or Monday, and so had to shop for one this morning; the meat department woman told me that they had stopped stocking already jointed fry chickens a few years ago, imagine that. Evidently not so many people fry chicken these days as did, or not in the coat-and-bread-and-fry-the-pieces way people used so commonly to do.
I had one of the whole chickens, surely intended for roasting, jointed although-- this is occuring to me now but didn't then-- aren't there chickens of some sort or quality destined specifically to being fried, the phrase 'fry chicken' having come so readily to mind supra seems to me to be confirmation of an affirmative answer to that question.
The 24th International Beethoven Festival is continuing in Warsaw; there is a concert now underway (it's at YouTube on Polskie Radio) by the Jerzy Semkow Sinfonia Juventus Orchestra, conducted by Dawid Runtz (principal conductor of the Polish Royal Opera in Warsaw; he looks to be perhaps 15) of Chopin's Piano Concerto no 1 in E minor op 11 (the soloist is Andrzej Wierciński) and Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony no 1 in C minor op 11, along with the Aria from Krzysztof Penderecki's Three Pieces in the Old Style; they are including several of Penderecki's works this year, he having died in March this year, requiescat in pace. Chopin composed this concerto at age 20; Mendelssohn his symphony at 15. 'Old style' is usually translated 'Baroque style', apparently.
Penderecki's Three Pieces was written for a film called Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, The Manuscript found at Saragossa, by the Polish director Wojciech Has in 1965. Neither the Penderecki opera page at Wikipedia nor the movie's page give any information about instrumention; there are orchestral and string versions on YouTube.
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