... sharing my notes for the next classical show on KZYX where you can listen live at 10 am to noon on July 15, 2011...
PLAY LIST
July 15, 2011 “Wondrous World of Music” sitting in for Gordon Black
10:00 station ID, underwriting. Music of JS Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, Francais, and Cimarosa.
Johann Sebastian Bach Concerto for Violin no 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 15:00 approx
In three movements: Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro assai. This Concerto written between 1717-1723.
Performed by Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)
The legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin was the eldest child of Russian-born Hebrew scholars who met in Palestine, emigrated to New York City, and moved to San Francisco soon after their son's birth. As it turns out, Menuhin grew up just a few blocks from where my mother lived, in a Jewish neighborhood where Yiddish was the common language amongst the many immigrants. A true prodigy, after only three years of violin study, Yehudi made a legendary debut at age seven with the San Francisco Symphony. His Carnegie Hall debut came three years later, in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which garnered great praise and began his long, internationally acclaimed career.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Trio in G Major for Three Flutes 4:26
First movement: Allegro
Performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Christian Larde and Alain Marion, flutes
Ludwig van Beethoven String Trio in E flat, Opus 3 38:14
Performed by the Grumiaux Trio – Arthur Grumiaux on violin, Georges Janzer, viola; Eva Czako, cello.
This is Beethoven virtually channeling Mozart – this six movement trio was published four years after Mozart’s wonderful Divertimento and in the same key – some scholars believe this trio was actually written in the same year – 1792 – Mozart’s trio was published, and no doubt Beethoven heard Mozart’s trio performed in Vienna, and may have been able to study the score as well.
Antonin Dvorak Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22. In five movements 27:27
Performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Composed in no more than 12 days, 1875. “The most extrovert and ebullient of all Dvorak’s early works” ... In a very happy period, just after he won the Austro-Hungarian State Prize (Brahms was one of the judges), a year into his marriage, and just before the birth of his second child. During a space of five months he produced a string quintet, four duets, a piano trio and a piano quartet, a major symphony, sketches for a new five-act opera, and this work, the Serenade for Strings.
Jean Francais (1912-1997) L’Horloge de Flore for Oboe & Orchestra 15:50
Performed by Lajos Lencses on oboe with the Radio Sonfonie Orchestra of Stuttgart.
... in 7 short movements, no breaks between them, each lasting less than 3 minutes. Inspiration for this piece came from a poem by Stephane Mallarme which in turn referred to a “flower clock” or “horloge de flore” invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus in the 18th century – a garden plan that would create a clock that corresponded to the day and night opening time of different flowers. Each movement here corresponds to a particular flower – Galant de jour, Cupidone bleue, Cierge a grandes fleurs, Nycthanthe du Malabar, Belle du nuit, Geranium triste, and Silene nociflore.
Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) Concerto in G Major for Two Flutes 9:51
Movement 1 - Allegro
Performed by Robert Dohn and Helmut Steinkraus, flutes, with the Wurtemberg Chamber Orchestra.
14 July 2011
At the Speed of FedEx
It’s a tiresome truism – the virtual world makes the other world, the so-called “real” world real small, really fast. In the virtually real world I talk to my Italian teacher in real time on my real computer, even though she lives in Istanbul within sight of the Bosporus, and I live near the sea at the western edge of California.
Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.
This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.
I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.
By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.
The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?
Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.
About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”
By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.
The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).
Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.
On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:
Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.
You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.
NOTES:
Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.
Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.
The Italian “Internet Bookshop”
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.
Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.
This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.
I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.
By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.
The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?
Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.
About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”
By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.
The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).
Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.
On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:
“The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here – the woman’s sharp intake of breath – but all she says in reply is Thank you. We’ll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later.”
Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.
You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.
NOTES:
Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.
Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.
The Italian “Internet Bookshop”
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.
11 July 2011
A day at the beach below Elk, California
Michael, Christine, Joselyn, Zipper and myself had breakfast at Queenie's Roadside Cafe, then walked down to the beach on a gorgeous July day...
07 July 2011
Summer and a Book (& optional jug of wine, loaf of bread, thou)
Let the record show we were seven days into the month and my Sierra Club Wilderness Wall Calendar was still open to the North Cascades of June, not the Banff fireweed of July.
Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.
The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.
And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.
In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.
A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.
Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.
Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?
This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.
On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.
My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.
I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?
Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.
NOTES:
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.
A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.
As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.
“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
Marianne Moore “Elephants”
The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop
Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database
Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.
The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.
And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.
In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.
A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.
Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.
Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?
This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.
On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.
My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.
I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?
Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.
NOTES:
A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.
A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.
As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.
“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
Marianne Moore “Elephants”
The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop
Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database
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