buon natale

Merry Christmas!

requiescat in pace

To Ross, who was always a kind soul, may you find peace now. My heart goes out to your family, who has already lost so much.

saturday

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
~ Ian McEwan, Saturday

umbricelli al tartufo

Today, while eating my pasta for dinner, I had a sudden, strong craving for umbricelli al tartufo, with truffles. Alas, I have no way of making it. Or of returning to Umbria, where this dish is plentiful and one can always smell the scent of truffles when walking down the street at mealtime, anytime in the near future. The only thing I can do is reminisce about it on my blog. Oh well. Maybe one day.

oboe!

Just wanted to point out that today, YankeeDiva's pictures feature an oboist!

some things never change . . .

like Illinois politics . . .

MusicianCorps

I wanted to post a link to this NPR story about MusicianCorps and Barack Obama. I think it's an excellent idea and I hope it works. I would like to point out that I DO NOT think that performing artists should take the place of trained music educators, and I don't think that this kind of sporadic, or at least small, arts presence is the ideal for music education in public schools, but it's WAY better than nothing at all, and guess what? We don't live in an ideal world, and the economic situation is only getting worse.