Semi-Hiatus

Some blog postings are in the works, but delayed by the fact that for the rest of the month I'm in system release heck, if not hell. I keep looking at my to-do list and alternately thinking "It's all under control" and "How on earth will I get this all done?" A complicating factor is my ticket to cycle 3 of the Seattle Ring. The cast is mostly not new to me and I saw the production - well, most of it - in 2001, but I am eager to hear conductor Robert Spano's take on the work. I may be taking a laptop to Seattle with me.

What I hope to blog about: the insane concert given by Jeffrey Kahane this past weekend at the Music@Menlo chamber music festival, consisting of a lecture, the Goldberg Variations, the Diabelli Variations, and a Q&A session. Oh, yeah, there was a 75-minute lunch break between variation sets, but the whole thing took from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. anyway. And also the three operas SFO performed this summer under the rubric "The Gamble of Love."

(Why did I only see "most" of the 2001 Seattle Ring? Because my mother, who attended with me, fell and broke her wrist about three hours before the Goetterdaemmerung curtain, and so I spent most of that evening in the emergency room with her. Damn opera is so long I made it to the opera house for Act III anyway. :-)