15 August 2003
Disaster, success and a well-earned break
It's been a dramatic few months here - and hectic! My day job at PricewaterhouseCoopers has taken over every waking hour for several months now, but this now seems to be at an end & I am hoping will return to restricting itself to civilised hours.
In the middle of this, I suffered a hard disk failure, losing my entire email archive plus a number of files - so if you've emailed me anytime since about March & haven't had a response, please resend your message to caitlin@minim-media.com - I'm not ignoring you!
My Flash class finally came to an end, and I got through the whole thing & out the other side with a 90% - High Distinction, which was rather chuffing. I'm currently working on a Flash version of Vexations to be posted on Erik Satie's Crystal Ball. My aim with this is to make it as close as possible to a real performance of the piece, rather than a straight repetition of one performance of the themes & will incorporate random selection from a number of renditions of each section, giving slight changes in emphasis, tempo, etc. This idea is a result of my thoughts following hearing the whole of Vexations at the MiniMax festival in July 2002 - my notes on this will shortly be posted on the Crystal Ball too.
More on Satie, Daniel Harding has kindly agreed to let me publish a summary of his work on Erik Satie as a forerunner of Modernism - we will be working through this over the next couple of months & this too will be posted on the Crystal Ball as a major addition to the site.
This semester at uni I'm doing a class in Design History, which is looking very interesting so far. My assessment topic is to look at the Ballets Russes in Australia - their influence on Australian design & use of Australian artists and designers in their Australian productions. This is looking very interesting and should prove a nice extension to the Ballets Russes work I've done from a musical (Satie, of course) perspective.
I am presently in the middle of three weeks off from my "real" job, which I am happily filling with reading (Robinson Crusoe & the first 3 Swallows & Amazons books so far - second childhood here I come), baking (my first sponge cake!) and doing my tax - and of course updating this journal.
I've also been to a couple of fantastic concerts in the past couple of weeks - Steven Isserlis with the Australian Chamber Orchestra was simply wonderful - especially in Carl Vine's Inner Worlds, which really comes to life in concert and I urge anyone who has never heard it or who has only heard the recording to go to the first live performance of it that comes your way. Thrilling stuff.
The other concert was a concert of Australian and Finnish choral works, performed by Sydney Chamber Choir and the Finnish choir Kampin Laulu, directed by Paul Stanhope & Timo Lehtovaara at St James' Church in Sydney. This was part of the excellent Music at St James series (highly recommended for variety of repertoire, quality of performers, and price - especially for people who work in Sydney City), and was an absolutely spellbinding concert - Stanhope's Geography Songs, Nigel Butterley's Exultate Domino, Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi's Shakespeare songs and a number of choral works by Rautavaara were definitely highlights.
