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An update of interest has just been made to this S&F entry.

Featured Past Post #111 (Administrative Note)

The beginning of a new year is almost upon us and what better way for us to start off our Featured Past Post feature for the new year than with a link to a past S&F entry in our ongoing war against that scourge of the opera world, Eurotrash. To that end, our new Featured Past Post is an entry from July 2010 titled, "It's The Music, Stupid!", the link to which is now up on our sidebar.

To our readers, our wish for a happy and prosperous new year for you all.

Featured Past Post #110 (Administrative Note)

It's that season again, and so we offer as our new Featured Past Post the 2005 S&F entry, Handel's Messiah As Drama, the link to which can be found on our sidebar.

A Merry Christmas to all who celebrate.

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Peggy") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the "Most Recent On Rants & Screeds" section.

Pull-quote:

We've pretty much all seen at least one of the Discover Card "Peggy" series of TV commercials and their semi-black, ironic humor never fails to resonate true beyond one's customer service contacts with the credit card industry which is the commercials' instant concern even though the Peggys with whom one usually finds oneself dealing tend to be Indian rather than Russian.

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Evil") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the "Most Recent On Rants & Screeds" section.

Pull-quote:

Here's a suggestion by New York Times columnist Mark Bittman that, on its face, looks merely, um, eccentric, but whose underlying principle is pure evil.

Featured Past Post #109 (Administrative Note)

With the opening of the San Francisco Opera's presentation of its new Eurotrash Regietheater production of the four music-dramas of Der Ring des Nibelungen conceived and directed by American Regie Francesca Zambello just a couple or so weeks away, it seems appropriate and on-point to once again feature our April 2005 entry, "Elegy", as our new Featured Past Post the link to which is now up on our sidebar. Sadly, our comment in that entry stating that "the Met[ropolitan Opera] is today perhaps the only major opera house in the world where one can still see Wagner's operas and music-dramas realized as Wagner envisaged them" is no longer the case that venue having since given itself over to a conspicuously bells-&-whistles high-tech staging in the case of the Ring which, although not Regietheater and therefore not Eurotrash, is not quite what Wagner had in mind given the presence of Le Machine; a presence that by all reports is so overwhelming (even while being largely underwhelming in its dramatic potency) that it has the effect of making Le Machine the principal protagonist in this staging. San Francisco will not be quite so lucky as, by all the evidence available to us in the form of production photos, videos, and descriptions of the physical staging, Ms. Zambello's Regietheater staging is Regietheater of the flat-out Eurotrash sort, and derivative and stale Eurotrash into the bargain picking over the conceptual bones, as it does, of Patrice Chéreau's 1976 Bayreuth staging, the mother of all Eurotrash Ring stagings.

Our condolences to SFO's audiences for this Ring, but you should have known better than to fork over your hard-earned bucks for this trash. After all, you long ago had all the information you needed to make an informed judgment.

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Let's See If We Got This Right") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the "Most Recent On Rants & Screeds" section.

Pull-quote:

Well, it sounds perfectly reasonable to us. After all, in America all persons are equal under the law, are they not?

The Met's Season-Closing Walküre

We posted the following quasi-review to the Opera-L eMail list today and reprint it here simply to make it part of the S&F record.

I listened to the Met's season-closing _Die Walküre_ yesterday via WQXR's excellent live feed and found the performance to be largely disappointing both musically and dramatically. What I don't know and can't determine is how much was due the vehicle (i.e., the streaming audio feed) and how much the actual performance as it was heard in-house.

To bullet-point what was heard via the streaming audio feed:

* Kaufmann (Siegmund): a lovely, lyric, German tenor voice with baritonal colorings but still not quite suited to this role (too light). Also, he sang the role far too lyrically; better suited to Verdi than Wagner and, surprising for a native German singer, his declamation here was also better suited to Verdi than Wagner. Not my idea of an ideal Siegmund.
* Westbroek (Sieglinde): strong but not particularly beautiful soprano voice; a voice largely absent any real dramatic nuance. Also, her German is positively atrocious.
* König (Hunding): A fine performance all round. Voice nicely matched to the role.
* Terfel (Wotan): Fine all-round job musically and dramatically. Voice too light for the role but that disability was largely overcome by his understanding of the role and his dramatic realization of that understanding.
* Voigt (Brünnhilde): Fine, big voice but still not entirely comfortable with the role either dramatically or vocally. She gives promise of becoming one of the best of the current Brünnhildes once she has more experience with the role.
* Blythe (Fricka): An exemplary performance of this role were it not for a single misstep that all but made the entire performance false dramatically: the perfectly idiot, grotesquely-Italian-opera-sentimental [and inappropriate] breaking down in sobs at the close of her line, "die Göttin entweiht er nicht so!". Whether that was something she decided to do herself or was directed to do I have no idea, but it really must be done away with!
* Jimmy and The Band: Something was very wrong there yesterday. The music came across not as a single, seamless dramatic narrative and commentary beginning to end but as a stringing together of many individual sections. That could have been the result of poor or inappropriate miking but I have no way of determining that and so will comment no further on it here.

It's About Bloody Time

We've heroically and in seeming isolation been fighting a lonely war on S&F almost since Day One: the war against unnecessary and illogical punctuation even though such punctuation is decreed in practically all U.S. style books of our acquaintance. Like, for instance, the rule that periods and commas are always placed within, never outside, any quotation marks. Sometimes that makes logical sense, and sometimes not. For instance, it never makes sense to include either a period or a comma within quotation marks if the quotation marks are used to indicate, say, a book's title, as in, say,

We find Mr. Jones's new book, "My New Book", to be a crashing bore.

Including that second comma within rather than outside the quotation marks as we've above done simply makes no sense. That second comma is NOT part of the book's title, and therefore has no place within the quotation marks that set off that title.

Well, it appears our isolation in such matters is perhaps at last coming to an end. Ben Yagoda, in an article for Slate, writes:

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, [T]he New York Times, [T]he Washington Post — almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones — the Web and emails, student papers, business memos — with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

RTWT here.

New Entry On Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 6:58 PM Eastern on 2 May. See below.]

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Bloody Embarrassing") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar under the "Most Recent On Rants & Screeds" section.

Pull-quote:

So Osama bin Laden has been found and killed. Good. But why did the President of The United States make the announcement to the world himself?

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Update (6:58 PM Eastern on 2 May): For those who've already read the above referred to Off-Message Rants & Screeds entry, it has been updated (2).

Featured Past Post #108 (Administrative Note)

On the heels of the bankruptcy of one of the world's greatest and and most venerable classical music institutions, the Philadelphia Orchestra — a bankruptcy the City of Philadelphia itself should never have permitted to happen even if it meant dipping into the public kitty to prevent but who shamefully did permit to happen — and anticipating the small flurry of well-intentioned but invariably corrupt pop-culturally-influenced suggestions about "finding a new business model" that's now sure to follow, we thought it meet to remind the powers that be to first always ask the question — THE Question — before deciding on or accepting what should be done to rescue the orchestra from its bankrupt condition and put it on a solid financial footing for the future. Toward that end, we suggest that they (and you) read our December 2010 entry, "Asking The Question", the link to which is now up on our sidebar as our new Featured Past Post.

New Post In Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Something Very Wrong") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our sidebar.

The Deed Is Now (Mostly) Done (Administrative Note)

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:22 PM Eastern on 30-Mar. See below.]

We've now finished our final tweaking of our new grayscale S&F design (why does this have the ring of famous last words?) and we're pleased to have done with it. Not that we didn't enjoy the design process (we did), but it's time we got on with matters more substantive — like, you know, actual blog content. One last thing remains to be done concerning this new design because the design is an especially risky one. When one works with colors one can be reasonably assured the design will look pretty much the same across all browsers and all machines. Not the case when using grayscale exclusively. Gradation of the grayscale depends critically for its appearance not only on the browser used, but on the display type and the machine it's connected to. For instance, we've been able to test this new grayscale design across several Windows machines with various displays (LED, LCD, and the now almost defunct old standard CRT) and they all display the new design just fine as expected, but we haven't a clue as to what the design looks like on any of Apple's Mac machines, and it's that one last thing we need to check out. If all checks out OK on those machines, we can then say the deed is truly done. (If any readers viewing S&F on one of these machines would be kind enough to take a screenshot of S&F's Main page and forward it to us via eMail we would be most appreciative.)

So, given the problems of a grayscale design, why did we choose to go with it? The most straightforward and frank answer is: because it's most decidedly us. We've almost all our life responded aesthetically to brightly- or even mutely-colored representations with some measure of aesthetic repulsion. Too "big-hair" for our tastes. For us, variations of light and shadow and the forms they delineate are the most eloquent and aesthetically pleasing manner of representation of all. At bottom, we guess, we're a minimalist of sorts visually.

Well, as we've above noted, the deed is now (mostly) done, and so it's time for us to move on to more substantive matters. And we will, just as soon as we've managed to lay our design state of mind to a well-earned rest.

Stay tuned.

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Update (3:22 PM Eastern on 30-Mar): Our thanks to all those who responded to our call for Mac screenshots of S&F's new grayscale design. It's clear from those screenshots that the basic design displays on the Mac almost identically as it does on Windows machines with the exception of the text in both the main column and the sidebar. We've long known that Mac machines display text markedly different from Windows machines and there's little we can do about that. One has to choose one machine or the other as the benchmark and so we quite naturally chose Windows and chose our fonts accordingly, not only because our machine is a Windows machine, but because Windows machines are far and away the more prevalent.

Once again, our thanks to all who responded, both for their screenshots and for their comments.

Featured Past Post #107 (Administrative Note)

It must be in the air or in the water, so to speak. How else to explain the recent outbreak of articles and blog posts yet once again pimping the perfectly absurd and pernicious notion that classical music and pop music (by which we mean music of all pop-culture genres) are of equal value or worth; or expressed more generally, that the artifacts of pop culture are of equal value or worth as those of high culture (so called to distinguish it from the pop sort). That must mean it's time to once again call attention to our 2006 S&F reprint of a piece we wrote in 2003 titled, "A Call For A Return To Hierarchal Sobriety", the link to which S&F entry is now up on our right sidebar as our new Featured Past Post.

An excerpt:

Metaphorically speaking (and once one gets past technical considerations of craft, one can speak of the core matters of aesthetics in no other way), the singular principal hallmark of all artifacts of the realm of high culture is their perceived aspiration to transcendence; transcendence of the quotidian world of experience, of the culture within which they were produced, and even of their very selves as works of art. And that singular hallmark is what's singularly lacking in all the artifacts of the realm of popular culture, their singular principal hallmark being a perceived aspiration to the widely accessible here-and-now entertaining.

Please note, I did not say all the artifacts of the realm of high culture are transcendent. Clearly, only the greatest are. Rather, I said that, in themselves (as distinct from the conscious intentions of their creators), their hallmark characteristic is their perceived quality of aspiring to transcendence. That quality is unmistakable, and can be sensed almost palpably.... And the inherent property of such artifacts responsible for that perceived quality of aspiring to transcendence is that such works always harbor secrets which are given up only slowly and by repeated visits, and then only to the most searching and probing eye or ear, the greatest works seemingly having an almost limitless store which are never divulged entirely no matter how long and deep the searching and probing. There can be no meaningful aesthetic comparison between works that occupy such a realm with works that occupy a realm where their just as unmistakable and almost palpably sensed hallmark characteristic is their perceived quality of aspiring to the widely accessible here-and-now entertaining; works which by their very nature harbor no secrets, or harboring them, give them up almost at once. That last is, in fact, at the very heart of what makes such works "popular".

New Post In Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("It's About Bloody Time!") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our right sidebar.

Featured Past Post #106 (Administrative Note)

In a world where, in America at least, critical coverage of the arts in the MSM is being drastically reduced if not outright done away with, interested parties are turning increasingly to the Web and to blogs to read critical coverage of the arts. Is this a good thing, and is an essentially populist medium like a blog up to the challenge? We touched briefly on these questions in an S&F entry of 2008 titled, "The Arts Critic In A Non-Elitist World", the link to which is now up on our right sidebar as our new Featured Past Post.

New Post In Off-Message Rants & Screeds (Administrative Note)

The link to a just-posted new entry ("Wonder Drug") on S&F's Off-Message Rants & Screeds blog is now up on our right sidebar.

Featured Past Post #105 (Administrative Note)

As we do every year at this time, we offer as our new Featured Past Post the December 2005 S&F entry titled "Handel's Messiah As Drama" the link to which can be found on our right-hand sidebar. The recording referred to in the entry is still very much in print, and for good reason.

Hmmm...

Why is S&F getting repeat hits over the past week or so from the Department Of Homeland Security and the Institute For Defense Analyses? We must be doing something subversive, or are at least suspected of some sort of subversive activity. Or perhaps they consider S&F a terrorist front for...What, exactly? The high-culture arm of the jihadist terrorist movement (if that's not a contradiction in terms)?

Stay tuned.

Featured Past Post #103 (Administrative Note)

We usually try to make our Featured Past Post, um, feature link to a past S&F post that has some tie-in, substantive or peripheral, with something currently relevant as that always seemed to us a fairly reasonable way to go about the business. This time, however, we attempted something different simply because, well, because we were messing about with an ad hoc computer routine that, properly set up, could search through a large file, select items meeting certain criteria, and then select from among those items a single item chosen strictly at random under control of a random number generator. Thus, from among some 1500 items, was chosen our new Featured Past Post ("On One-Sentence Dismissals") from 2007 the link to which is now up on our right sidebar.