Oh wow. Just HAVE to add this in to my list of current listening: Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant. Superb percussive singing - just amazing. If you're wanting to listen to it on a dialup connection, though I'd recommend that you right-click and save the MP3 to your hard disk before playing - the sound file is about 20 minutes long - and correspondingly 27.7Mb.

# posted by minim @ 4:24 PM 0 Comments

At last - autumn! Lovely sunny skies, a nip in the air. The season of snugness is upon us. I'm planning my winter casseroles already :-) I also have a new favourite recipe which has been getting much use lately - Pork tenderloin with balsamic-cranberry sauce. Serve it up with baked jacket potatoes and a green or two. Yum!

This should be quite a short journal today as I've been out of commission following an operation for the past two weeks. But I'm well on the road to recovery now so thought I might as well update this page while I'm slobbing about the house.

Given my convalescence, I've been getting through quite a lot of reading lately - most recently, Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, an extremely readable biography of the famous diarist. I've also been watching my way through Simon Schama's amazing History of Britain on video. Music-wise, I've been listening to a lot of Bach cantatas lately - Ton Koopman's second volume for Erato really is sublime. Also featuring on my listening list (again) is Bill Duckworth's marvellous Time-Curve Preludes, which I'm still wowed by even after nearly 2 years' worth of regular listening.

No concerts recently, of course, but I've booked tickets for the SSO's June performance of Shostakovich's 'Leningrad' Symphony and Kancheli's Styx (be warned - the page under this link will attack you with a rendition of Ravel's Bolero) performed with Yuri Bashmet and conducted by Alexander Lezarev, who I believe conducted the SSO's astounding Shostakovich festival a couple of years ago. Very much looking forward to this. I've taken advantage of their 3-concert offer to nab seats for Stephen Isserlis' 'Symphonic Czech Scenes' (including the world premiere of Carl Vine's new Cello Concerto) and 'Stephen Hough and the Romantic Muse' concerts too. I felt a bit of a traitor not signing up for the Philip Glass Concerto Fantasy concert in October, but didn't feel equal to half a programme's worth of Respighi to go with it, so I plumped for Debussy & Saint-Saëns instead.

Finally, for you composers out there, there's a new book on writing for percussion which has recently been released & which I'll probably be investing in sometime soon - Samuel Z. Solomon's How to Write for Percussion. Mr Solomon is a young percussionist with an apparently chronic commissioning habit - it seems he got fed up with explaining to composers how to write for percussion, so he wrote a book on it. The book seems to be self-published, and I believe it's currently only available in America - but can be obtained through the ever-reliable Amazon.com.

# posted by minim @ 2:28 AM 2 Comments