Criticultura em Portugal

 I recently saw a play ( Our Town  on Broadway) and a film ( Challengers ) that made me think about how narrative sequence plays into dramatic urgency and character development.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town  won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938, along with wide admiration for its stripped-down, innovative "modern" structure (e.g. Edward Albee called it the greatest American play). I mostly know it as a vehicle for high school and community theater, perhaps because of its immediacy, simple prose, and many characters, offering community troupes lots of participation. Oddly, this lauded Broadway production was my first exposure to it. The play depicts the life (from childhood to death) of members of the town of Grover's Corners New Hampshire. His three acts (Daily Life, Lover and  Marriage, Death and Eternity) do not mess with time sequence, and lay out a very linear chronology, mostly following on the young couple Emily and George. We see a series of snapshots ...

 I was in NYC for a few days at Thanksgiving. The highlight was playing some excellent chamber music with some friends, but I also attended some interesting music events.  The outstanding Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra played in Carnegie Hall under its new 28-year-old Finnish wunderkind conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He has been the subject of much dishy scrutiny and discussion in the classical music world: for his nascent music directorships of three of the world's best orchestras (Amsterdam, Chicago, Paris), his svelte good looks, and for his dating the charismatic and hot pianist Yuja Wang.  I hand not heard him before. Is the hype warranted? Based on this high-profile concert, yes and no. His greatest virtue was a strong sense of sonority, color and timbre. He drew lush sounds out of the strings for Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). .  This piece of post-romanticism (or pre modernism) was originally for string sextet, but is often done, ...

It's been since late summer that I blogged, mainly because of lots of travel.  Let's catch up a bit.  While on a summer hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies and the Galapagos, I had a chance to spend a few days in Quito, the high-elevation (9000 foot) capital of Ecuador. It's well worth a visit for its fascinating mixed cultures of Spain and  indigina  peoples, as well as the steeply sloped and well-preserved colonial heart of the city. Quito is replete with fantastically baroque gilded churches put up by the Jesuits and others, unfortunately at the expense of the locals that they conquered.  In early November I ventured to northern England to play in concerts of the European Doctors' Orchestra, an engaging and talented group of amateurs. We played music of Ravel, Gershwin, and Copland in the uber-modern Newcastle Glasshouse International Centre for Music, perched like spaceship above the River Tyne.  Newcastle is a nice example of how declining industrial c...