Happy Holidays 2013!

It's that time of year again! Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays with a little help of Sulkhan Sintsadze. Stay safe and best of wishes for 2014, too!

PS: Lisa Batiashvili includes 5 Sintsadze miniatures on her Beethoven concerto CD. As you can hear, it's pretty enchanting! 

Holidays Greetings

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noël! Frohe Weihnachten! Честита Коледа! Schöni Fäschttäg! Buon Natale! Feliz Navidad!

Best of wishes to everyone for a safe and happy end to 2012 and a marvelous and healthy 2013!

For my fellow fans of one Vesselina Kasarova, the amazing Bulgarian operatic mezzo soprano, here is a little year end treat.

I don't know why this recording of Handel's Ariodante from the Liceu in Barcelona in 2006 hasn't been made commercially available yet. But here is a bit of it to give your holiday a dramatic stir.

Earth Day at Balboa Park

Happy Earth Day, Earthlings! Apparently Earth Day is not just a day dedicated to Mother Earth and conservation anymore, but has attained a sort of holiday status among many. I would seriously run out of fingers and toes if I try to count how many time I was wished a 'Happy Earth Day!' today. Not that there is anything wrong with that. If only more holidays could be so universally appreciated (or at least appreciable... After all, there's only one earth we can live on, and we all have to share it!)!

Zoro Garden, my favorite bit of Balboa Park, is having a bloomy green spring!

The big Earth Day celebration here in town is, of course, at Balboa Park. Having a little break in between work assignments this weekend, I hopped on the mountain bike and pedaled over to soak in the scene a bit. The place was already pretty busy at 9:30AM, so I was contemplating finding a place to park my fat wheels before proceeding on foot (lest I run over a baby or a dog while distracted by something else) when I spotted a roped off section of the lawn by the Casa del Prado with a 'Bicycle Parking Valet' sign on it. How cool was that??? The San Diego County Bicycle Coalition volunteers, a really friendly bunch of people, registered my bike, parked it and watched over it (and others) while I went out enjoying the festivities. They even provided area biking maps for free! Gosh knows you can't know too many bike-friendly routes around this town.

SDCBC Valet Bike Lot by Casa del Prado

El Prado, the park's main pedestrian thoroughfare was lined with vendors of various shades of green. It can be a bit dangerous browsing through these. If you don't watch it you'll end up signing a bunch of petitions supporting various green and/or environmentally friendly causes. Not that supporting worthy causes isn't good, but I'm a tad paranoid about giving out my contact info to organizations.

I wouldn't have minded giving my contact info to this free-loving and irresistibly cute Bonita Blue Bin, however...

I mean... look at her. Isn't she the perkiest Earth Day party-er you've ever seen (aside from your own kids, that is)??? She took one look at me and tried to recycle me on the spot (thankfully nobody took a picture of it... wouldn't want a foto of me getting swallowed up by a blue recycling bin floating around on the internet now, would I?). Mesmerized, I felt a sudden mad urge to propose on the spot, but some other old geezer beat me to it, so I went off to pet the stuffed raccoon at the Friends of the Laguna Mountains tent instead...

Alas, it wasn't all happy a celebration. A bunch of evangelical Christians turned up trying to scare the crowd into conversion via threats of hell and eternal punishment.

Compared to the passive and cheery Hare Krishna nearby, they were something of a killjoy, I'm afraid. The Christian leader dude got so carried away drowning everyone out by his amplified preaching that a few unwilling audience took offense and told him to cut it out (I spotted one of them telling the park police about it a bit later). I'm sure even this preacher guy and his crew meant well, but their tactics really didn't come off well. The Hare Krishna folks didn't try to evangelize at all, and drew a much more positive crowd reactions.

There was a parade, of course. I didn't follow them beyond the Plaza de Panama (that big round-about where the Museum of Art is), though. It was already almost noon and I wanted to ride on a bit and stop by to see the Maritime Museum's San Salvador Build Site, so I went back to reclaim my bike and took off.

Mostly Religion-Friendly Holiday Music CD

Happy Holidays!

My holiday music playlist this year is a bit more religion-friendly than usual since I've been spending way too much time with some really religious people of late. The Mormon missionaries I hung out with are required by their mission rules to avoid music that aren't church-based or classical instrumental. That quite foils my attempt at introducing them to many of my favorite tunes since the best bits of the juiciest opera tend to involve more passion than so chaste a post- and pre- polygamy religion can handle. But, a bit of compromise goes a long way in making and keeping friends who don't think the same way I do about things, so I made my favorite missionaries a custom CD of relatively religion-friendly opera and classical for Christmas. Here it is!

1. VILLA-LOBOS: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 [Elina Garanca]

2. MONTSALVATGE: Madrigal - El cant dels ocells [Garanca]

3. Bulgarian folksong: Svatba [Cosmic Voices of Bulgaria]

4. MOZART: Cosi fan tutte: Soave sia il vento [Lorengar, Berganza, Bacquier]

5. HUBAY: Le Zephyr [Mirijam Contzen & Valery Rogatchev]

6. MASCAGNI: Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo

7. MASCAGNI: Cavalleria Rusticana: Regina coeli [Julia Varady]

8. Armenian folk hymn: Soorp [Isabel Beyrakdarian]

9. Rumanian hymn: O, ce veste minunata [Roberto Alagna] 

10. Bulgarian folksong: Day mi, Bozhe, krila lebedovi [Vesselina Kasarova]

11. VERDI: La forza del destino: La vergine degli angeli [Leontyne Price]

12. SAINT-SAËNS: Samson et Dalila - Danse Bacchanale

13. MENDELSSOHN: Violin concerto in E minor [Tasmin Little]

I know I gave her a hard time in a few early reviews of her recordings, but Elina Garanca has been growing on me quite much. The voice is just to die for, and her musicianship is exquisite. She still isn't as keen on varying her vocal color as I'd like her to, but I'm finding her live performances a lot more engaging now than a few years ago. I love her in recital pieces, though. While the opera tracks from her Aria Cantilena CD leave me cold, Villa Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 and Montsalvatge's arrangement of the Catalan madrigal, El cant dels ocells, are great showpieces for her gorgeously flawless sound... and even benefit, I think, from her detachment. The first is a nature-loving chant, and the latter an intonation of the nativity as witnessed by the birds. I wonder if ancient Bethlehem was home to the same sorts of birds that live in Catalan now... but that's besides the point, I think.

One of my all time favorite recordings has to be the first CD of Le mystere des voix bulgare, which features this really cool Boyar wedding song, Svatba. Sung by the Cosmic Voices of Bulgaria Women's Choir, I thought its rousing spunk might spark celestial thoughts in a few listeners. It helps that the tune somehow transfers really well into the farewell trio from Mozart's farcical opera, Cosi fan tutte. The story is silly, but sometimes even the flakiest of ladies are capable of some really benevolent benefaction!

Of course, benevolent benefaction should prudently be taken in small doses or else immediately followed up by an upshot of merry laughter. I would supply my own, but imposing my mischievously evil laughter onto others this time of year could very well be considered bad form, so I outsourced it to a good humored pair of laughadelic violinist and pianist instead, belly-quaking to Jeno Hubay's The Zephir.

People often ask me what my most favorite opera is. It's not an easy question to answer since there are many favorites and they tend to appeal to me differently depending on my differing moods. The safest choice that I can always listen to, though, is Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana... with its gorgeous intermezzo and, since we're being friendly to religious listeners here, Easter hymns. Well, I know it isn't Easter yet, but at least it's better suited to the occasion than Turiddu's lusty Siciliana or his spatty duet with Santuzza (my favorite parts of the show! But then I'm a heathen).

While roaming around youtube checking out various clips by my favorite singers, I chanced on this rather cool one of Isabel Beyrakdarian singing an Armenian hymn. I liked it so much I looked up a few more Armenian songs, then decided to branch out a bit and searched for hymns from other countries with famous opera singers I know of, and hit pay dirt with Roberto Alagna's rendition of the Romanian hymn O ce veste minunata (he isn't Romanian, but his then wife, Angela Gheoghiu, is). Of course, that also led me to Bulgaria and this clip of Vesselina Kasarova singing 'Give Me, God, Wings of the Swan' with the Cosmic Voices of Bulgaria.

I figured to close the CD with a proper Italian opera prayer, Leonora's prayer from la forza del destino, but there was a lot of room left on the blank disc, so I couldn't resist filling it up with a few instrumental favorites. First off the bat, just because I can only stand listening to so much religious music without a proper break, the 'or classical instrumental' escape clause that the Mormon mission gave their missionaries is my main excuse for breaking out of the pious mode with the (in)famous Bacchanale Scene from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila. After all, the story is biblical! 

Amazed that there was still so much room on the disc after all that, I turned into a spoiled brat and put in my favorite recording of Mendelssohn's famous and extremely popular E minor violin concerto that just about every concert violinists has recorded. There are tons of awesome renditions of this thing around, but the fiddler who strikes it closest to my ideal combination of fleet-fingeredness and passion is the rather not that well-known (at least on this side of the Atlantic) English virtuoso Tasmin Little. The lass makes me dance... three legs and all!

Belated New Year Post...

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone is having a good start to 2010! Yours truly is a bit spent at the moment. After years of going to no parties at all, I went to 4 (plus a cozy little get-together with friends) in the two weeks span of Christmas and New Year holidays. A very interesting experience, but one I can now happily put in the 'done that' category and retire back into my more comfortably boring loner mode for the rest of the year. But first thing first, here's a look at what the streets around here looked like at night for 4 weeks or so...


Some San Diegans sure know how to light up their neighborhood!


My flatmate and I went walking about Upas St. in North Park and then Ellingham St. in Rancho Penasquitos during the Christmas weekend, then drove by a particularly well lighted street in Point Loma over New Year. They had the lights on from sundown to about 10PM or so... Pretty good show of the holiday spirits after a rough economic year!


Shots of the much publicized New Year blue moon were taken, of course. La luna was rather disappointingly small for my taste, though she was still quite an effective howl-inspirer.

Sorry, no recording was made of my wolf-ihood, so I'll supplement your imagination of what could have (but surely didn't) sounded when I looked up on the clear year-changing night sky to see the full silvery orb with...


Adrienne Pieczonka's rendition of the Moon Song from Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka, the operatic treatment of the beloved story of the Little Mermaid who gives up her voice in the quest for humanhood and her beloved prince.



It's been a few weeks since the festivities, but I'm still feeling like a bloated blimp. These are some of the varied cuisines I helped to demolished over the holidays: a tableful of savory Filipino food (I was told what they are, but my brain retains nothing :o( ), juicy honey ham (3 of the parties served that and we took home a chunk of left-over), an authentic gingerbread house... without any child-eating witch inside!

It took us 3 weeks to finish off all the left-overs our kind hosts endowed us with. I'm still so round and massive that I'm still using inertia as the main excuse for my sluggish pace at answering emails and reading posts and posting stuff. That, and the fact that I've been working on a side project of interviewing interesting folks around town... The latest being Dr. Gary McKercher of the San Diego Master Chorale (will post the interview separately here shortly) and Ian Campbell, the Impresario of San Diego Opera.

Thanks everyone for dropping by! I hope 2010 has started well for you and continuing to get better. For those in Europe and North America (or other cold places far north of the Equator, for that matter), I hope the weather gets much more manageable and comfortable your way soon! It would be wonderful if you could send me snow and I the warm sunshine in return... I know my fellow San Diegans will hate me for it, but I actually like winter to behave like Winter!

Happy Holiday Shout Outs

It's that festive time of the year again! I'm too well stuffed to think of anything interesting to say so I'll cop out by giving a shout out to a few do-gooders I've heard about recently... in no particular order:

1. Jefferson Lab is making science fun and easy to understand with their excellent Youtube channel.


This is how real science is done, mates! You observe a phenomenon and make predictive guesses (hypotheses) on what makes it go the way it does. Predictiveness is the key! If this causes that to happen, then what will happen if I do this and that to it? This is what makes a scientific guess (hypothesis) special. You can falsify it against real observation and see if you guessed wrong or not.

2. Rachel Maddow, the adorable (though at times in a rather irritating manner) and as-smart-as-a-whip host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and at Air America Radio is making it hard for me to completely give up on journalism.

Photo: The Rachel Maddow Show

She is quite to the left of me and we disagree on a few issues, but she has convinced me that she always does her very best to get the facts straight before reporting them... And that in the rare occasions that she doesn't she always promptly corrects herself and apologizes. Never mind what David Frum says. The lass is an honest and straight shooter who is also a pleasure to both agree and disagree with!

3. Prince William of Wales spending a homeless night out on the frozen street of London for a good cause. It is too easy to sit in a well heated home while lumping all street people together as being deserving of their misfortunes. Some are, to be sure, but many more aren't and it really doesn't take much to help them get back on their feet. It takes guts for a prince to voluntarily have a taste of it without shining a spotlight onto himself (only one photo was released well after the deed was performed). Photo: Centrepoint/AP

I think his mum would be proud!

4. Joyce DiDonato. The American mezzo-soprano not only burns down the stage with her intensity and superb skills every time she goes to work, but also keeps a refreshingly down to earth and regularly updated blog that allows us outsiders a good glimpse at life as a deservedly successful performance artist.

Photo: Sheila Rock

She also posted the best holiday greetings on it this year with a generous gesture worth imitating!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday to all my friends and readers, of course! Thanks for putting up with my smorginess all this time. I'm taking your remarkable patience for granted now and hereby impose upon you yet another one of my operatic indulgences...


This is the marvelous Vesselina Kasarova really rocking the boat (or rather, the concert house in Bremen) with Ariodante's final bravura aria, Dopo notte. Merrily accompanying her from the orchestra is Maestro Harry Bicket (obviously from his pace setting... another rock music lover in disguise as a classical conductor!)!

Out And About All Weekend!

I finally got to hear Beethoven's ninth symphony live on Friday night when the San Diego Master Chorale and the San Diego Symphony under Jahja Ling had their first of three performances of the piece at Copley Hall in downtown San Diego.

Those not familiar with classical music would still probably know a bit of Beethoven's 9th as the famous 'Ode to Joy', of course. That bit of music comes over 50 minutes into the piece, though. The monstrous (in more ways than one) symphony is a remarkable composition that looks both backward and forward in its resolve to enjoy life in all its manifestations. A study in musical story-telling (Wagner probably got his 'Leitmotif' idea from Beethoven's last symphony) that made use of dissonance without losing sight of the virtues of melody and harmony. A genius Beethoven was, he was also mindful that music is communication and that communication is a two-way street (in other words, it ain't no fun just talking to oneself when there are others around). He pushed the envelope without forgetting to make sure that what he was trying to say could be readily shared by his audience... (which is definitely not something I can say of many melody-hating composers that came after him).

Anyhow, it was quite a good performance. I should admit that Jahja Ling always strikes me as someone a bit too even-tempered for the Romantic Period music (especially the moody works of Beethoven), but he did some serious exorcising from the podium on Friday night and elicited quite a spirited performance from the San Diego Symphony Orchestra.

In stead of a bass soloist, they used the baritone Nathaniel Webster to ring in the choral finale of the symphony, so some vocal gravity was missing even though there was an additional shine to the optimism of the piece. Robert Breault (tenor) and Mary Dunleavy (soprano) were in very good form and had no problem soaring over both the orchestra and the (exasperatingly reliably splendid) San Diego Master Chorale. Rounding out the solo voices was pleasingly dusky voiced (if a bit under-projected) mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor. The capacity audience clapped everyone back for 3 well deserved curtain calls. A definite good start to the holiday season!

Saturday morning saw the 46th edition of the North Park Toyland Parade. Even the weather must have been looking forward to it and the multitude of clouds turned up to watch the event while staying high enough above the ground to avoid raining on the crowd of local residents lining University Avenue between Utah and Iowa Streets.

I'm afraid there wasn't any horse this year, though the equine-deficiency was well substituted by the cheerfully wheeled Derby Dolls and a fleet of spiffily shined hot rods.

My flatmate and I also invaded Balboa Park on Saturday evening to catch a bit of December Night celebration. Judging from the size of the crowd, the sluggish economy sure didn't put much damper on the local holiday spirit....

Though the flu is doing a bit of that to my head so I'll have to write up on it later (my nose is putting on a good show of liquefying itself). Hope December has started well wherever you are!

L'Amour est une dinde rebelle....

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Ok... so these aren't exactly turkeys, but two cute pet chickens roaming an art house up in Julian, California. I'm not discriminating much between species of fowls, though. It is hazardous for winged creatures to pass too nearly by my pad this time of year.

On another note... would eating too much turkey turn you turkish?

Smorgerdämmerung

My intracranial stereo is an odd one... It mixes music from different eras on its spontaneous play-list in a way that will likely bug many people. It is a maddening piece of imaginary gadget... Sometimes the same piece of music would get stuck in it for hours, long outlasting its attractiveness. And then there are some days that the IS is afflicted with a serious case of acute attention deficit disorder and keeps modulating from piece to piece. Usually, though, it is pretty responsive of the view I'm enjoying.
Last evening, Independence Day holiday here, I went up the Harbor Tower at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel where the Top of the Hyatt lounge is. A lot of people showed up there just before 9 PM, too, looking for a good vantage point to watch the fireworks over the bay. The line for the elevators was pretty hideous.

The nice and mostly tranquil view of the bay was worth hassling for, though... In coastal San Diego, the sun sets twice in succession every evening thanks to low lying 'marine layer', the thick layer of cloud that is likes to sit very low above the ground. Nothing very notable happens when the departing sun dips below the marine layer... but when it emerges and is caught between the thickest part of the fog and the ground (in this case, Pt. Loma peninsula), that's when you get to see some really spectacular color display.

The fireworks was pretty nice... Though the smaller blasts were sort of blocked by the Seaport Tower. O well, even the biggest fireworks were no competition for the setting sun and the rising moon anyhow.


Not that I wasn't compelled to use up my camera's batteries shooting photos of both... Then I figured I'd use the music that popped up in my head during the few hours I spent watching all those things in the clips... Just to spread the insanity around a bit (a little madness is supposed to be good for you... and your psychiatrist's purse).

A drizzly weekend in downtown San Diego

This was a more outdoorsy weekend than I expected. The San Diego Chinese Center put on their festive Chinese New Year celebration in old China Town (the little area between the Gaslamp Quarters and the Marina District) all weekend. A few neighbors and I got to roam around a bit, checking out the shows they put on at the main stage at the corner of J Street and 3rd Avenue.
It was rather good. They had quite a big turn out despite of on and off rain (well... more like sprinkle, really). We saw the lucky lions and dragon parade twice (I think they were on 3 times a day), lots of traditional dancing from various parts of China and Mongolia, a couple of Chinese theater plays (I think one was actually a Vietnamese play, though; 'Dr Quinn and the Stone Sprout'), some Chinese music performed on traditional instruments, a really good contortionist acrobat who doesn't seem to have any bone in her body (my back hurt just watching her!), a lantern parade... For the life of me I can't seem to remember any performer's name (nor could I manage to remember how to say 'Happy New Year' in Chinese despite of the host's repeated efforts to teach us. I must really be growing tone-deaf with age).
Then... on Sunday I went out for a walk along the Embarcadero Promenade just to get away from my noisy next door neighbor shouting at his tv. It was rather cool and windy, so I kept moving to keep warm... and somehow got all the way up to the outskirt of Lindberg Field (San Diego International Airport). So I naturally snapped a few plane photos simply because I couldn't help myself. I don't know what it is with planes and trains and ships... I can't get enough of 'em.
Talking about ships, the Californian was out roaming the bay today. I thought she was just taking a few visitors out for a peaceful cruise.... until the brat of a ship fired off two smoke cannon shots right at the Carnival Spirit cruise ship before folding her sails and coming back to port. What a loveable floating terror she is!