rush job

[calimac]

On Saturday morning I got a delayed message from my editor telling me I was on to review a concert that very evening that we hadn't even specifically discussed: three string quartets playing, between them, a surfeit: all six of Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets.

Yikes, rush, rush. I like to prepare for concerts with recordings and a score, especially if I'm reviewing it, and even more especially if I don't know the works well enough off the top of my head to satisfy my own requisites for a good reviewer. And, embarrassingly, I don't even have recordings of all of Op. 18. So, off to the score-poor but CD-rich county public library for a CD (found a good one, the Takacs Quartet, who play like all Hell was on fire: recommended!) and to the CD-poor but score-rich state university library for the other thing. Which meant trouble in itself, because the university is downtown, and this was the weekend that, in a decision of absolute insanity, the city had blocked off half of downtown for an auto race. (Even the racing fans weren't happy, it turned out, because the streets were too narrow for the race cars to pass each other, which kind of takes away the point of auto racing.) It didn't block off the library, but it did restrict access and parking.

Did all of that, got my listening done, had a great time at the concert, got the review written on Sunday, and it's now published here. (What mental glitch caused me to say the concert was on Thursday I can't imagine. This is gonna be one of those embarrassments that cause me to wince for decades to come, I can tell already.)

On Wednesday (I think it's Wednesday), I am to return for the same festival's next installment: Op. 59. There's only three of those, but they're a lot longer.

While working on the review Sunday morning, I got an e-mail from the editors of the forthcoming Tolkien Encyclopedia, for which I've already written ten entries. They want me to do another entry: Parodies. As in Bored of the Rings and like that. OK, I said - I liked that book, it's funnier than Peter Jackson - and decided not to think about it until I get back from England in a month. Instead, I drafted the entire entry in my head that afternoon, and then figured I should get it down while I still had it. It's a start, though of course it'll need work - for one thing I haven't actually read either of the Adam Roberts parodies. (Now I have to: it's research!) The web will not be forgotten, don't worry: I'm mentioning The Very Secret Diaries and the Houseful of Lords (as tnh dubbed it), and the good old Tolkien Sarcasm Page.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What you have is almost certainly the 1877/8. Nobody plays the 1889 any more, and if it were the 1873, the package would say so. Simpson's position is that Bruckner lost the courage of his convictions, and that the 1877 version is already malhandled. I can hear what he means; what I haven't convinced myself is that 1873 is successful.