read carefully

Fred Pohl's blog post about a Polynesian island and what it meant to him and to Ginny Heinlein was amusing enough, but what stopped me in my tracks was the second comment in response. Sometimes the entire universe seems to be organized just to make ...

concert in the mouth

Yesterday morning, while preparing for a reconnoitering expedition into the territory of his expertise, my dentist casually asked me if I'd done anything interesting over the weekend. When I told him that I'd attended this concert and reviewed it, he eagerly wrote down the website URL.

I shouldn't be too surprised at this interest, for this is an office where I'm as likely as not to be hearing Vivaldi or Bach while having my teeth cleaned.

What I didn't say, for he does not know them, was that I attended the concert in the company of divertimento and danine, and also in the audience we saw liveavatar. I've seen all three of them, usually at once, in this venue before, but this coincidence was enough to remind me that it was divertimento who first introduced me to the previously elusive liveavatar many a year ago. Much water has run down the canyons since then.

We were there to listen to a clarinetist, which in turn was enough to remind me that the last time I went to hear a clarinetist in that setting, it was the same one who later went on to appear at Obama's inauguration. This clarinetist was not quite so breath-taking, but pretty good nonetheless, which I tried to convey in the review.

More challenging perhaps was discussing the work of a composer in an atonal idiom that does not win my favor. Still, I could tell that he is creative and craftful within that idiom, so it was not hard to be complimentary. To speak of "a delight to the intellectual ear" is to imply by omission that it isn't a delight to any other reaction, but it says enough.

Toughest of all was to describe listening to a keyboard concerto arranged for handbell ensemble. So it could be done, but was it worth doing? Visions of Dr. Johnson and dogs walking on their hind legs came to mind, but I suppressed them from the review.

The observation that the concert's shortest piece was by Mahler was divertimento's, and needed no elaboration to make me laugh and ask to borrow it, but we are admonished not to write over our readers' heads, so, just in case, I added a few words on why that's ironic.