heliopausa

Literature!  Theatre!  Music!  and a swimming pool!!  It was a brilliant, brilliant weekend.  Oh, and on Friday night, a spectacular and silent lightning storm.  amazing!

The theatre wasn't really on the weekend - it was on Thursday night, but near enough, near enough - and it was terrific.  Sombre in places, and theatre-of-ideas in places (difficult, because I don't have enough language to follow the debates) and romance in places (pah, humbug!) and obligatory funny bits in places (ummm) but still - exciting production, and I loved the sets and the acting, and the ideas, very much.

The lightning storm - how far away does lightning have to be, to be completely silent?  It was amazing and beautiful, a huge storm around a whole quarter of the sky.

I started, and read most of, The Just City - which I'm enjoying, though not without niggles; it feels a bit two-bob-each-way between a novel and a fable, as if in all fairness (because it's a fable,a thought experiment) one shouldn't fret too much about characters or history or finicky pedantic points. (Not every number, Apollo!  You mean every number up to twelve!)  But it's fun watching the experiment work out (doomed to fail! - at least, it seems to me that it has been, but I see there's sequels, which suggests the experiment doesn't end in this volume, anyway) - and in general it's very enjoyable, and a huge step up from Hild. (I bought them both in the same bookshop swoop, last March.)  It reminds me of how Martin Gardner used to wrap up his mathematical/logic problems in very appealing and amusing mini-stories. 

The music was - still is - the Sydney Piano Competition, available via internet for a limited number of days - I think it's four weeks from when they were broadcast.  Here's the first set of three finalists, in the 19th/20th Century concerto section, playing Saint-Saens (an odd choice for competition playing), Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.   So there were swathes of music throughout the weekend.

and swimming for hours!  This is a rare treat, and the opportunity was not wasted, not for a minute, in this hot weather!  I say, swimming, but a good bit of the time - nearly all the time - was also just splashing about, or standing chatting in the watery shade.  ahhhhh...  :)

So, all up, a great weekend.  :)

I like lots of different kinds of music, including laid-back saxophone music.  :)   And tonight, I'll be off to a concert with saxophonist Trần Mạnh Tuấn, whose music I first heard in a taxi, in the taxi's CD player.  Ahhh... it felt wonderful... so cooling  (maybe it was hot day?) and calm.  :)  I loved it so much and enthused so much to the taxi-driver that he wanted to make me a present of it, which just goes to show how mellow saxophone music can make us.   (Thank you, Adolphe Sax.)  I'm not exactly sure, but I think what was playing then was this album.

And to those having Thanksgiving dinners today, or tonight, may they be wonderful and cool (errr...maybe cool is not exactly what's wanted in some places, as the northern hemisphere nudges towards winter) and calm and mellow:   dulcet, mellifluous, smooth, warm, rich, says the online thesaurus -- genial, affable, pleasant, relaxed, easy-going...   Yep.  That's what I'm wishing for all of you, whether at Thanksgiving dinners or not!
 

Hesperion XXI and Jordi Savall and Monserrat Figuerras and all of them have given so much to me as a listener over the years.  I have heard them at several different concerts at different Adelaide Festivals, and have spoken with the (late and much-missed) astonishingly lovely Montserrat Figuerras after a concert one night, as she walked back from the Adelaide Town hall to her hotel - she was most wonderfully gracious and warm and open-hearted. As indeed was Jordi Savall one time in St Peter's Cathedral, when he let a little knot of admirers gather around his viol de gamba, and look at it. He was perceptibly anxious in case some sort of barbarism or idiocy might emerge, but gentle and courteous and willing to trust us.  Just mindblowing loveliness and generosity.

And last night Hesperion XXI presented in Sydney The Jerusalem Project, and are doing it again in Melbourne tomorrow and then Wednesday, using Jewish, Christian and Muslim music to express "the dream of Jerusalem shared by the faiths: a holy ideal transcending walls of stone and the city's tumultuous history." 
From the review:
...the most moving, exquisite vocal and instrumental sounds to be heard this side of heaven, including the gentle enchantment cast by Savall's own viol and rebab. Two recordings are deftly interwoven: Shlomo Katz's heart-rending Hymn To The Victims Of Auschwitz and one by soprano Montserrat Figueras, Savall's late wife.

To have Israel's Lubna Salame and Palestine's Mahmud Husein singing together in the finale makes one's breast ache with hope.

I'm aching with wonderment that people can do so much with music.