Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Fredericka von Stade and Pavarotti and MTT , Lisa Delan Janet admiring the red red rose What an exceptional evening.   The SFO choir sang four Dickinson songs(Safe in their alabaster chambers", "A Bird Came Down the Walk", "There's a Certain Slant of Light", and Because I Could Not Stop for Death".  to the composition of Gordon Getty.  First performed by Lisa Delan, in the Festival del Sole in July 2008  The premiere of "A Prayer for my Daughter" written by  WB Yeats on the occasion of the birth of his daughter, Anne.  -- took place this evening!  The Ancestor Suite, originally in ballet form premiered in Moscow, 2009 and is based on the Poet short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher".  Mr Getty funded the acoustics of this symphony hall and is a generous patron of SFO for many decades.    Frederica von Stade sang "Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder" from Ruckert Songs, Mahler, and joined Placido Domingo f...

Anne Sophie Von Otter and Emmanuel Ax  We had front row first tier, excellent seat!        Emmanuel Ax is promoting two new composers from NYC in his Brahms program part of his Brahms project. .    He remarked in an interview that he normally does not accompany voice, but it was a pleasure working with his choice: Frederica Von Stade.      Fredericka Von Stade acknowledges her Swedish heritage in singing one song, which is Serbian, transl into Swedish, which is popular, and also in German, by Brahms. Tor Aulin.   Til en rose (1903)       The composers from NYC  are Nico Muhly(1981)” So many Things, an interpretation of Joyce Carol Oates poem in which woman walks into glass, which shatters and kills her, and of a Cavafy poem    The other composer, a woman, who is present, or   Missy Maaoli, has created   “Bolts of Loving Thunder “   employing a line from a John Ashberr...

Masterpiece Theater, KQED, in San Francisco, has a new series continuing with "Downtown Abbey" .  Last evening, I watched an interview with the current Earl of High Clear Castle, in Hampshire and his current wife, Fiona J.M Aitkin,  whom he married in 1999.  His heir is his son, George, born in 1992, by his first wife, Jayne Wilby, marriage of 1986.  He now has a son, Edward by this wife, Hon. Edward Herbert, born in 1990.   George Herbert, the 8th Earl, is the godson of Queen Elizabeth II.  He went to Eton, and graduated St. John's at Cambridge.   He has done a remarkable job of renovated all the follies in the picturesque landscape designed, by none other than Capability Brown.  They have also restored the glass roof, and early skylight, which is over their heads during the interview.  Lady Jayne goes out riding each morning.  The documentary follows the Earl in his rover over the 5000 acres of land, which is farmed wit...

These are the orchids I now have blooming.   Consulting my THE WAY OF CHINESE PAINTING from the 17th c Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting by Mai -mai Sze, In DIscussions of the Fundamentals of Orchid Painting, " Dotting the heart of the orchid is like drawing in the eyes of a beautiful woman.. .H.D.Thoreau and John Clare confined their attention to the wild orchids which they found represented  as "fair and delicate, nymph like" unspoiled nature. I bought an orchid book, Mark Griffiths, published by the Royal Horticultural Society Archives  so photographed these orchids close up, to be able to identify them.  as a cymbidium, most common in Viet Nam China and Thailand. The other three are odontonia hybrids or odontcidiums  These particular orchids come from Salinas, California, and those not from Asia are from South American species. Chueh Yin, Buddhist monk, Yuan period, says:  " When the emotions are strong and one feels pent up, one should p...

I am rereading this magnum opus, after my trip to Maui.  The myth  must be read slowly, delicately and with full attention; this work will be regarded as  a masterpiece as time goes by. I especially like this first chapter of the section I started to read this morning : The Mountain.  1.  The mountain rises by itself out of the turning night out of the floor of the sea and is the whole of an island alone in the one horizon along in the entire day as a word is alone in the moment it is spoken meaning what it means only then and meaning it only once with the same syllables that have arisen and have formed and been uttered before again and again somewhere in the past to mean something of the same nature but with refractions something recognized in its changes something remembered from what is no longer there and behind it something forgotten as the beginning is forgotten and as the dream vanishes the present mountain is moving at its own ...

I discovered another presence in the literary hills of San Francisco....William Saroyan, whose books were produced in the 1930's  He was rewarded a Pulitzer Prize, for his play, "The Time of your Life", (1939) set in a saloon, like the one in which he liked to drink Grappa, or Izzy Gomez's.  Saroyan  refused the Prize  saying that " commerce cannot judge art ".  Talked with an Armenian, at the reception, reminded of my own trip to Yerevan, and to Mt Ararat, and the Holy Church and the CEDAW training at the law offices and university.  Armenia served as our model for the social work curriculum we created for the university in Tibilisi. WS's cousin, still living in SF, talked about knowing WS growing up.  WS is considered to have represented Armenian life in the USA, especially in his hometown of Fresno, where his mother worked in a cannery(yes, like John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row"...he live in Haight Ashbury, on 348 Carl Street(1932-39...