Harry Baker - Dinosaur Love

(via @NedLunn)

  6:15 pm  |   September 2 2011   |  2 notes  

ajohnny asked: I'm a bit late, but thanks for sharing the link to Glyndebourne's simulcast of Turn of the Screw! I'd never seen the opera before, and I was glad I got to catch a good production of it.

You’re welcome, and I’m glad that you enjoyed it. I’m hoping that online opera screenings become more prevalent. Settling down on your own sofa with a nice bottle of wine for an hour or two of fantastic music is a great pleasure.

Until the next live screenings come around, I can thoroughly recommend checking out the selection available to watch on Classical TV. I watched a beautifully serene performance of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice last night, and have my eye on Britten’s Curlew River for later this week.

  11:11 pm  |   August 30 2011  

Composer Harrison Birtwistle demonstrates the unpredictable properties of his pebble found on Aldeburgh beach.

I’m very much looking forward to going to the UK premier of Sir Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, as part of Prom 70.

(Source: youtube.com)

  11:09 pm  |   August 26 2011   |  1 note  

Reuters’ Felix Salmon ponders how to repatriate 211 tons of Venezuelan gold from central banks across Europe to Caracas, as Hugo Chávez has declared his intention to do. He has a number of cunning ideas, but I personally like one commenter’s notion that could well be the plot of a Steven Segal movie:

A Venezuelan warship carrying the gold is torpedoed and sunk in the Caribbean. Chavez tells the world about evidence that points to a US submarine. Meanwhile, a small group of special forces loyal to Chavez have actually carried out the attack, after pulling the old switcharoo. The gold is actually on a cruise ship, and Chavez plans to keep it for himself.

Little do the bad guys know that the ship’s chef is a retired Navy Seal. With a little help along the way from a plucky young female junior ship’s engineer (who, with her hair down and the grease cleaned off her face, will turn out to have supermodel good looks), the Seal will defeat the bad guys, prove America’s innocence, and return the gold to the people of Venezuela, after they overthrow Chavez.

  8:47 pm  |   August 23 2011   |  1 note  

  6:13 pm  |   August 21 2011   |  1 note  

Do you know what hurts the most? The realisation that I didn’t want you, but merely someone.

  3:48 pm  |   August 20 2011   |  4 notes  

“It is not for nothing that opera is thriving. Just look around you: in 2011 you can see opera in pubs, operas in stately homes, operas in prisons, operas in the street, operas at the cinema, operas on ocean-going liners, operas in concert-halls, operas, not least, in opera houses. It can at its best combine the physical excitement of a rock concert, the drama of a great play, the instrumental beauty of the greatest concert at the Royal Festival Hall, the urgency and relevance of the Ten O’Clock News, the physical splendour of great architecture, the intellectual challenge of great philosophy, the glamour of a Hollywood opening. It’s a hard thing to pull off. It is the most demanding art form known to man and the one given the least chance of succeeding: vastly complicated shows are given no previews, rehearsals are frequently inadequate, a handful of divas and divos still swan in at the last moment. But the messianic passion of the people who produce opera – driven not by money, but by a conviction that opera well done is the best time you can ever have – means that despite every obstacle, it will never die. It has truly never been more alive.”

— ‘Opera has never been more alive’ — Simon Callow for The Guardian.

  3:33 pm  |   August 20 2011   |  2 notes  

My new ride, a Specialized Sirrus 2011. So much lighter and faster than my previous bike. Also, it would seem, desirable, as two nights ago some idiot tried to steal it from the bike store in by building’s underground car park. Obviously they were too stupid to notice the multiple CCTV cameras covering the area, which the Police are now reviewing. Thankfully it would appear that they were disturbed, as they’d only made a shallow cut into the D-lock.

(I find it incredibly hard to not refer to the failed thief as he. Note to self: Gender neutral until proven guilty otherwise.)

Update, 20/08/2011: Last night someone took another stab at nicking the damn thing. Really hoping that those CCTV cameras got something.

  6:53 pm  |   August 19 2011   |  3 notes  

As Hermes once took to his feathers light
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed my idle spright
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes,
And, seeing it asleep, so fled away:
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d a day;
But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

— John Keats

An absolute favorite, declaimed in this evening’s fantastic Proms Plus literary event on Dante’s influence.

  9:02 pm  |   August 17 2011  

Creating a Hubble Galaxy in Two Minutes (by HubbleSiteChannel)

  7:55 pm  |   August 15 2011   |  1 note