Isolation? It's difficult to imagine being alone on this green planet

 "Animals are not brethren and are not underlings. They are separate nations, caught with us in the net of life and time." Henry Beston, "The Outermost House:"

 For 14 months, we have been constrained by the embargoes and blockades of the enforced cancellation of social activities.  In time, a bug becomes a feature, and it seems that social distancing may just bring us all closer to reality. To wit: Without the momentum break of the past year, I doubt that could have been able to spend hours on my deck yesterday, the book of Willa Cather stories unopened beside me, just hanging around with birds.

 My home is a condo surrounded by Connecticut woodland and wetland, wrapped on two sides with a thousand-square-foot deck. The woodland habitat around me has been protected by the town’s cluster zoning and the understory of ledge that stands firm as a stony barrier to human development. From my deck, I see nothing but woodland. This woodland engulfs me.

 Night here is animated by the calls of barred owls and coyotes. Dawn brings glimpses of fox and bobcat. Small flocks of turkeys transit the grounds while huge turkey vultures wheel overhead, riding the updrafts of the bluff where I perch. Two small ponds on the 44-acre condo complex host winter ducks such as hooded mergansers and ring-necked ducks and spring broods of Canada goslings.

Even through our long stasis, the passage of time here is inescapable. Winter juncos vanish at just about the same time as the owls start calling for their mates. The titmice and chickadees and nuthatches that hog the bird feeder through the icy months are displaced by an array of finches and sparrows.  And now that spring is climaxing, the activity in the woodland is non-stop.

 As I settled in on the deck with my book yesterday, a warm breeze gently rattled the soft castanets of birch and oak in the canopy, that low leafy murmur that so enthralled Andrei Tarkovsky for long cinematic passages. The only sounds were the rustle of leaves and the birds.

 The birds … From where I sat, there were probably 15 to 20 birds in my field of view at any given time, though half would be obscured in the thickets and undergrowth. The first nestings of 2021 complete, many of the birds were adults escorting and guiding their fledglings, birds the same size as the parents, but still living on handouts.

 I have just one feeder on my deck, my third feeder, the one that finally has defeated the squirrels. The feeder hangs just a few feet from a slider, and all day long, the constant avian activity out of the corner of my eye is either a distraction or an attraction, depending on the moment. Each year, the social structure and daily drill of the deck birds changes, as the populations change.

 This year, the day on the deck begins with raucous quartet of immigrants: Three female and one male house finch. They mob the feeder, darting back and forth to the nearby hanging Boston fern where they burrow into the foliage after each other for reasons only they can explain. The four of them come and go from the deck all day, always welcome for their cheery song that brought them here in cages from China in the first place.

 The dawn crew includes many goldfinches that seem to enjoy showing off their brilliant colors by posing on the hanging flower brackets as they wait their turn at the feeder, downy woodpeckers and big, graceful red-bellied woodpeckers that wait their turns at the feeder from a set of well-used tree branches, vividly marked chipping sparrows and a pair of mourning doves – always a pair – that glean the spillage below the feeder, and the two supervisors, the catbirds and blue jays that perch on the deck railings, watch the activity and seldom approach the feeder themselves. Catbirds have long been my favorite backyard birds wherever I have lived for their curiosity and tolerance – even acceptance – of my presence.

 Jays and catbirds being just plain nosey, come and go during the day, but the deck’s constant presence is a lowly male English sparrow, who spends his day moving from plant hanger to plant hanger bearing witness. From time to time, he brings a piece of fluff to the bird box that is too exposed to the midday sun for actual nesting. Instead, he will perch of the roof for hours, calling for a consort to join him. Despite a few weeks of frenetic mating, the male sparrow’s the bird box remains a house, not a home. But he persists.

 As the day progresses, I catch sight of the male phoebe, half of the pair nesting atop the bird box I set under the deck. A shy flycatcher, he keeps his eye on me from the oak trees as I stand above his nest. This year, for the first time in my life, a bluebird comes to my feeder several times a week. I still fall all over myself whenever I catch sight of bluebird – the thrill never wears off.

 Late in the day, a ruby-throated hummingbird makes a pass along my deck rail, where I put out hanging annuals for both of our benefits. My neighbors all have hummingbird feeders outside their windows, and for a week the hummingbird ignored the real plants and came to my window repeatedly, hovering there and – inadvertently or not – tapping on the glass with its beak. The other late day visitor is a young male cardinal, oddly shy around the sparrows and finches despite his bulk, a visitor both polite and brilliant.

 Gone are the Carolina wrens and the house wrens. Both started nesting a months ago and gave up when landscaping and deck work annoyed them after the nests were almost complete. Humans live here too, at least for now.

 Yesterday, I intended to read in the soft breeze on the deck, but there was simply too much activity for me to concentrate. Two pairs of woodpeckers were feeding young in the trees. At times one would swoop in to pluck a sunflower kernel from the feeder to take to Junior, at times Junior would trail the parent along a tree branch as mom or dad dug some buggy snack to feed it.

 The woodland was full of bird murmuring, not the full-throated Here I Am song of spring dawn and dusks, but a low contented chatter that mingled with the rustling breeze.

 As I write this, I glance up. Through the window above my monitor, I watch the finches queue up and swoop in to the feeder. Through the day, it never stops. Isolation and stasis are in the eyes of the beholder.

The idea that the First Amendment can fix this mess is misinformation

 Too many people think the First Amendment gives people the right to lie. But you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. You can’t maliciously slander someone to harm them. You can’t lie about the swampland in Florida you’re selling.

 The First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause only prevents Congress from passing a law to abridge freedom of speech. But countless restrictions on speech have trickled down through the years. A newspaper, television network, Google or Twitter has the right to distribute any information they want. If Twitter decides its advertisers seek to reach only those who believe lizard people from Orion eat babies, Twitter can legally disallow the posting of any content that contradicts that. That’s not much different from MSNBC refusing to cover the presidential coronavirus press conference that Fox broadcasts live.

 But in the end, it's hard to reconcile 18th century concepts of a free press and free speech with robot trolls flashing propaganda worldwide with no accountability. The Constitution fails to address today’s central issues.

 The 18^th century idea was that if one penny press voice ignores an issue important to the population, another will pop up to speak that truth … just as it did in the Colonies. But if Google decides to exclude antivaxxers or environmentalists from its search results, it’s a far different business environment. Another Google can’t just pop up to serve that constituency. Yes, there’s a dark web where odious ideas can flow, but Google exercises its commercial might to seduce us into its world.

 We have Gmail, our free online Google Drive, our Google calendar and our Android phones to make life easy, all linked with Google Chrome. Google has won. Its primary competitor for all these unified services, Apple, has a fraction of Google’s clout. In browsers alone, Chrome/Android users represent about 65 percent of the market, with Safari/MacOS far behind at about 20 percent.(Stats here)  When it comes to desktop usage, the comparison is a joke: Chrome is around 70 percent, and Safari is less than 10 percent.

 It gets worse for diverse voices. The top social media platform is Facebook, with 2.6 billion users. Tied for second place is YouTube, owned by Google. And WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. (Stats here)

 How would Adam Smith’s gentleman farmer or diligent cooper fight back against this duopoly? Both YouTube and WhatsApp arrived on the market to compete with the giants. The giants quickly ingested them.

 The 18^th century Constitution cannot fight misinformation. It fiercely protects misinformation or lying through omission. Any information distribution system not run by the government can block any content they choose. Just as the Times spins its reports for its coastal bourgeoisie readership and Fox spins its reports for its MAGA audience, Google or Twitter get to pick their audience.

 Where does this leave us?

 Trusting capitalists to do the right thing? Sorry, didn’t mean to make you choke …

Trusting government to foster a diversity of voices, when the government duopoly has worked so hard to silence third parties?

 If the owners and operators of our information systems can’t be trusted, and the government has a dismal record of trustworthiness on the most important issues, like wars and health, where do we turn for help?

 In his popular book “Sapiens,” Israeli history professor Yuval Noah Harari makes a case that societies and nations are not bound together by blood or geography, but by unifying myths. It is a unity of beliefs that binds societies, he writes.

 Today, the most “unified” nations are totalitarian, China and North Korea. Continue that train of thought and despair.

Report from Sofia: A building boom in the world’s fastest shrinking nation

Sofia Tech Park 

Cities do not reveal themselves easily to strangers, but this city of Sofia harbors more than its share of secrets. 

Perhaps Bulgaria’s 500 years of occupation by the Ottoman Empire taught this nation to conceal its true nature. But the urban landscape of Sofia is a collage of paradoxes. 

Most striking is the construction boom that’s building lots of big, gleaming office complexes – a spending spree in the European Union’s poorest nation. Why add all these shiny steel and glass boxes in a country where the population is plummeting? Who are they for? And why build new offices next to vacant ones full of space for rent? 

Capitalism has not been kind to this Balkan nation, so many locals simply shrug off this construction as money laundering. But that seems overly dismissive, since these buildings are quickly becoming the new face of the city. So upon my return to Sofia after a year’s absence, I decided to do some reportorial poking around and to get a better understanding of this complicated place. 

But I’ll back up and offer a little background on Sofia for all of you not familiar with Bulgaria: 

This is a very ancient country – Thrace in your ancient history text. But despite its great antiquity, about 7,000 years, Sofia was never a major city like Athens or Constantinople, not even a capital city until the late 19th century when the Russians liberated Bulgaria and designated Sofia to be the new nation’s center. 

Bulgaria was on the wrong side of history in World War II – a sadly recurring theme here – and Allied bombing reduced much of the city, leaving the architectural face of this very old place mostly post-war modern, with the exception of a 20-block area in the center surrounding the Nevsky Cathedral and a few compact gentrified shopping and residential developments. 

The central city’s charming older architecture is primarily neo-classical style from the 19th century, hardly reflecting Sofia's true age. Because Sofia's residential neighborhoods are uniform, run-down and drab apartment blocks, the city lacks a mood of Old World charm. No grand archeological edifices that reach back a millennium, and the Roman and medieval structures that remain are small and visually insignificant. 

Most neighborhoods and most of its municipal facilities were built during the large-scale Russian investment during the Cold War, with rows of 10-story Khrushchev apartments standing as a living museum of the development of Eastern Europe in the 1960s. The developments from the 1970s and 1980s are threadbare and unimproved, and it's obvious that landscape maintenance is not a career path in Sofia. Bourgeois civic pride needs a citizenry to financially support it, and Bulgarians have learned to overlook the cratered sidewalks.

In the Cold War years, the USSR created manufacturing jobs in this agricultural nation. It instituted public services, greatly improved education, and developed infrastructure, raising the standard of living dramatically. The breakup of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 reversed those positive trends, and Bulgaria has been on a downward slide ever since, a capitalist country with no capital. Standards of living fell as foreign corporate raiders bought up national assets and elected officials alike. 

When Bulgaria was admitted to the EU in 2007, doors opened and the country immediately hemorrhaged population. EU identity cards became passports to race westward in pursuit of opportunity, abandoning the countryside. 

Geographically the size of Ohio, Bulgaria is a series of mountain ranges surrounding fertile valleys. You can happily live on local fruit, veggies, cheese, salads, nuts and wines pretty much indefinitely here. Before World War II, four out of five jobs were in agriculture. By 2019, EU inducements created agribusiness practices that reduced farm work to less than 10 percent of national employment. 

Today, Bulgaria has the dubious distinction of being the world’s fastest shrinking nation. It has lost more than 20 percent of its population since 1985, plunging from about 9 million to about 7 million – the kind of collapse generally associated with apocalyptic famines and wars. 

So here is the Sofia paradox: If everyone is leaving, why build all these glittery new office towers amid the vacant ones? Poking around in EU reports and business journals, I found an answer that seems familiar: Globalists feed on fallen economies, scavenging for remaining resources of value.

The population that fled the countryside for Sofia benefits from one important remnant of Soviet times: A strong educational system and educational ethos. Secondary and university graduation rates are significantly higher here than in the U.S., and language skills are a particular strong point. I can get by speaking English to just about anyone in Sofia under 40, the demographic group for whom these offices are being built. 

Sofia’s economic future rises with these offices. The developers call the hands-on computer work to take place here “outsourcing,” even though it’s in-sourced. The future is imported – imported jobs, jobs where English is the mother tongue. It all adds up: Cheap land and rents, low wages and an educated workforce. One countries outsourcing of labor is another’s insourcing of jobs. 

The poorest country in the EU finds its very poverty an asset in the global economy. More than 600 companies in Bulgaria today are devoted to fulfilling outsourcing needs for wealthy stakeholders elsewhere. If you hire a U.S. firm like VMware or a British company such as Scalefocus to revamp your company’s cloud services, security or data processing throughput, the keyboards will rattle in Sofia, not Silicone Valley or London. The trend is so pervasive that Sofia University has developed a masters program in managing outsourcing businesses. 

A vassal state for many centuries, Bulgaria has a fairly complaint population and agreeable government, posing fewer risks to Western businesses than the two Asian giants, India and China. This European Christian country has minimal cultural roadblocks for Western bosses compared to India and China. And if the Zoom meetings aren’t enough, Sofia is just a couple hours from anywhere in Europe – and the airport is just 10 minutes from the business districts. Costs are low, and the weather is great. 

The building boom is a race to simulate Silicon Valley style campuses for both outsourcing firms and tech start-ups. The real estate industry calls these new buildings Class A office space, though the definition of Class A is hazy at best. The point of the new structures is to make long days at the keyboard less grueling and to create as nurturing and homey an environment as possible amid the glass and steel. It’s an outsourced emulation of the campuses built by Apple and Facebook and Google, the tech ideals. 

These new complexes are intended to be villages within the city, so the workers who spend long hours confined in glass boxes will be comforted by amenities close at hand. Housing, health clubs, dry cleaners, groceries, gyms, bars and eateries of all kinds – including those SoCal staples with wheatgrass growing in the windows – complete the village complexes. A sense of open space and fiber optic connectivity complete this world vision. 

The builders tend to call these business hubs “parks,” an odd word for office complexes, but they are certainly more parklike than Madison Square Garden is gardenlike. There’s the sprawling Business Park Sofia in the Mladost area or the growing Sofia Tech Park just off the central artery of Tsarigradsko Shose. 

The sidewalks in these parks are full of predominantly bearded young men with coffee cups, some on scooters, some on skates … a familiar sight around tech centers anywhere. The workforce is almost entirely White Europeans, no doubt another selling point to the globalists who like to avoid ethnic strife and identity politics. 

For centuries a flyover country between Europe and Asia, Bulgaria has found a comfortable niche on the border of Asia within the shelter of Europe. It may be unlikely that future wealth generated by tech firms will remain grounded in Bulgaria, but for a nation on a downward spiral, these outsourcing jobs can be only a benefit. They offer entries into a much wider career world. 

There may be glass ceilings, but at least these offer four walls and a seat at the table.

When Leo Tolstoy takes on opera, Count Leo is the winner

Neither Leo Tolstoy nor his “War and Peace” need a shout-out from me. The best testimonial I can offer is this: After reading the novel for the first time five years ago, I reread all twelve hundred pages of it last week.

And it was even better.

The 19th-century British writer and critic Matthew Arnold wrote that “a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life.” I turned to “War and Peace” after 40 days of isolation to feel connected to people and, yes, life, once again … to feel reunited with friends.

Rereading it I was struck by subtle shadings of character development that I missed the first time and by Tolstoy’s thematic linkage of the war sections and peace sections. Tolstoy wrote long philosophical sections proposing that history (focusing on 1812) cannot be defined as the result of the actions of great men, as professional historians are wont to do. Tolstoy makes a case that stuff happens – for reasons that too innumerable and complex for mere mortals to grasp. Reading the novel this time, I was struck by how Tolstoy's model applies as well to the interactions of the main families in the tale, whose marriages, scandals, spats and affections look equally whimsical to anyone seeking causations. As Vonnegut would say, so it goes …

One of my main memories of reading “War and Peace” the first time was laughing out loud at Tolstoy’s sly characterizations, often with a simply parenthetical aside. His expositions of personalities are succinct and generally humorous. Take this moment in Part One when Berg, a seemingly one-dimensional officer, is making small talk at a salon. He is speaking of the raise he just received:

“… I get two hundred now,” he said with a joyful, pleasant smile, looking at Shinshin and the count as though it was obvious to him that his success would always constitute the chief goal of everyone else’s desire.

So what jumped off the pages to me this time was Tolstoy’s detailed description of an opera, especially hilarious when you consider that opera is huge and noisy and lurid in comparison with salon small talk. The primary action of this chapter in which protagonists attend an opera concerns the social life in the boxes, the flirting and jealousies and longing glances. But he intersperses the social dynamics with these precise operatic observations:

The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was some painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was glued. They all sang something. When they had finished their song the girl in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, went up to her and began singing, waving his arms about.

First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, then they both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand of the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with her. They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage—who represented lovers—began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing.

Hungry for more? Later he provides more details:

In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there was a round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were raised over the footlights, and from horns and con-trabass came deep notes while many people appeared from right and left wearing black cloaks and holding things like daggers in their hands. They began waving their arms. Then some other people ran in and began dragging away the maiden who had been in white and was now in light blue. They did not drag her away at once, but sang with her for a long time and then at last dragged her off, and behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times and everyone knelt down and sang a prayer. All these things were repeatedly interrupted by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.

It was as if a Mars rover was seeing opera for the first time. As a longtime opera critic, I couldn’t wait for the third act!

The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many candles were burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on the walls. In the middle stood what were probably a king and a queen. The king waved his right arm and, evidently nervous, sang something badly and sat down on a crimson throne. The maiden who had been first in white and then in light blue, now wore only a smock, and stood beside the throne with her hair down. She sang something mournfully, addressing the queen, but the king waved his arm severely, and men and women with bare legs came in from both sides and began dancing all together. Then the violins played very shrilly and merrily and one of the women with thick bare legs and thin arms, separating from the others, went behind the wings, adjusted her bodice, returned to the middle of the stage, and began jumping and striking one foot rapidly against the other. In the stalls everyone clapped and shouted “bravo!”

Save the bravos for Tolstoy! I can’t imagine any satirist writing a more hilarious send-up of opera than Count Leo.

(Note: The opera excerpts are from an uncredited online version. I recommend the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation.)

When musical traditions collide: Maarja Nuut's Estonian stewpot

From trance electronica to film scores to symphonies, music today seems stamped by Minimalism, but that may be because we are attuned to listen for “isms.” We associate Minimalism with composers such as Philip Glass, but some of the style’s underpinnings are more ubiquitous. Consider this succinct definition from the BBC Bitesize site: Layers of ostinato, constantly repeated patterns that are subjected to gradual changes, layered textures, interlocking repeated phrases and rhythms, diatonic harmony. “The combined effect can be almost hypnotic.”



Some of those elements can be heard in everything from tribal chants to electronic dance music. Layers of repeated material, whether in rounds or other harmonic patterns, are heard in almost every culture.
Which brings us to Maarja Nuut … That BBC Minimalism definition fits Nuut’s music, if you consider that hers are basically four-minute folk songs at their core.

This 33-year-old Estonian fiddler, singer, and looper weaves chantlike pieces that often seem without clearly defined beginning or end. After training in classical violin, Nuut spent time in India studying Hindustani music before returning to Estonia to immerse herself into the village music of northern Europe. Her studies of traditional village music at the Viljandi Culture Academy in Estonia collided with current tech trends all around her, a genre-rattling collision of old 78 rpm field recordings and her discovery of looping equipment. In an interview with FaceCulture, she says “the looper was one of the triggers for me.”

Her fiddling reminds us the violin was the peasant dance instrument of choice, and its looped layers create a dense texture and rhythmic pulse. When she strums her violin, she evokes the countless gut string instruments strummed around campfires for eons. The looper lets her sing in a timeless call-and-response.

At times she sings with the soothing lilt of a lullaby. At times she sings with that sharp, forward-projected style we associate with the Balkans, the antithesis of the plummy, round sound of bel canto. It’s hard to track down all of her lyrics in translation, but these songs have very old roots. They tend to be about wildlife and farm chores and the night sky, but the effect is often anything but pastoral. She says her lyrics are all traditional, based in nature and legend, usually metaphorical and often grim. “They’ve been filtered through so many generations, there’s an essence, you can’t make them better.”

Her approach to looping can make the seemingly static intriguingly complex. She unconsciously developed numeric systems for her layers of loops, patterns she discovered when reviewing her work for a lecture. She will, for instance, loop 13 beats of violin over 21 beats of violin, then sing 6-beat lines over them. It was this irregular rhythmic unity that made me hear the sounds of Africa in this Estonian performer at first exposure.

Consider: Nuut’s Jaa-ti-daa and Malian singer Rokia Traore’s Laidu. These musicians’ entire first albums seem so similar to me in texture, tempos and effect.

The other intriguing appeal of Nuut’s looping is her kinship with jazz composers in the belief her work can be both composed and fluid. When describing “Une Meeles,” her 2016 first album, she calls the tracks “the documentation of a certain moment in time.” For each piece, change one beat in the loop and shifts can become profound, and each performance is a continuation, a variation on a theme. Just compare this live performance of Hobusemäng (The Horse Game) with the studio recording.

This isn’t just a result of looping vagaries, it reflects her attitude – so similar to Bartók and other nationalists of the early 20th century – that traditional sounds inform, not control, the contemporary. “If you take something from the traditional, from archives, it’s fixed documentation, a fixed form of something,” Nuut says. “It’s sort of dead. I wanted to learn the musical vocabulary, the musical language, so hopefully I can start speaking myself.”

On her second album, the 2018 “Muunduja,” she teamed with Estonian sound sampler Hendrik Kaljujärv (aka Ruum) who makes his own field recordings of ambient sounds for sampling. The album’s sound pallet is more expansive, less obviously village-based, often more soulful and direct. The effect of adding a beat and electronic layers at times sounds remarkably like Argentinian Juana Moliana. Molina followers should give a listen to the album’s first track, Haned kuadunud.

Nuut’s music is immediately engaging, but so far, of limited scope. She is aiming for small things – and hitting her target. Her inventiveness rooted in traditions heard on her first two discs seems fertile ground for future compositions. There are many creative options for her: She can stay on the traditional music circuit, she can go long-form, or she could evolve into Estonia’s answer to Björk. Not all of her influences are locked away in field recordings. What’s next could be great.

From a whole stack of notebooks: The unforgettable concerts

Some of the concerts blur into a gluey mass, but after nearly 50 years of writing music reviews, some are unforgettable.

I was reviewing rock into the late Seventies, and some of those endure as benchmarks: Dylan solo and acoustic in 1964, The Who doing a full “Tommy” at the Boston Tea Party, Bowie as Ziggy Stardust at the Music Hall in Boston, Elvis Costello at the Cape Cod Coliseum. But it’s the chamber, orchestral and opera performances that inhabit me most:

• Mariella Devia in her role as Gilda in “Rigoletto” at the Met walked to the footlights and mesmerized the huge hall with an achingly gorgeous pianissimo.
• In 1995, a 15-year-old violinist named Hilary Hahn performed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at Summer Music in Waterford. The child was audacious in her command of the score and the stage, and I had the temerity to write that she was “well on her way to becoming the best violinist this country has ever produced.” Sometimes a critic is right.
• Pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn wove a dreamworld of Scriabin, layering the mystical overtones in the shimmering acoustics of Musical Masterwork’s unique musical sanctuary in Old Lyme.
• Andre Previn and Dresden Staatskapelle made time stand still, defying Einstein with the final pages of Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” at the Bushnell in Hartford – 25 years after I saw Jimi Hendrix in that cavernous hall.
• The Philip Glass Ensemble gave the single most unforgettable performance I’ve ever seen, let alone reviewed, when they staged his opera “La Belle et la Bête” with four singers lip-syncing to the classic Cocteau film at the Garde Arts Center in New London. Both incomprehensibly technical and meltingly lovely, it was a conception worthy of Bach.
• Violinist Tessa Lark debuted at in 2013 at Musical Masterworks by starting at the top: Bach’s chaconne from the D Minor Partita, one of the singular works of the classical repertoire. She turned the 13-minute solo violin work in a passion play, with pain and redemption and resignation played out measure by measure with gut-wrenching insight.
• Christopher Hogwood and the Handel & Haydn Society performed that best-known oratorio, Handel’s “The Messiah,” as if brand new, a minimalist vocal force of just 16 voices propelling its drama always forward at the Palmer Auditorium at Connecticut College.
• After attending many performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the least likely candidate turned out to be the best. “The Enchanted Island” is a pastiche opera, using scores from Handel, Vivaldi and Purcell with a new fantasy libretto and splashy Met stagecraft. As Placido Domingo in King Neptune regalia led the ensemble in the finale, the audience stood and cheered through the last dozen measures.
• Last but not least, after reviewing many terrific performances of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Toshi Shimada (a group that punches well above its weight), Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony in 2015 stands out. All Prokofiev’s sarcasm and energy lit up the hall, a sonic treat I still stream.

There were so many concerts in so many venues, seeing greats like Anne Sofie von Otter or Yo Yo Ma, but this handful really hit me. They left a mark.

Sweeping away the musical life lint: The great winnowing of the chaff

In the Time of Spotify, what do you do with 2,500 compact discs?

For many years I reviewed classical CDs. It was the Nineties, when CDs surged onto the market, largely propelled by remasters and reissues of great performances by the major record labels and an urge to re-record everything – for better or worse – using new digital technology. I have a set of six beautiful solid cherry CD shelves that hold just about all of them, and they line up to make a wall display of all this loot.

After moving to a new condo, the unpacking of all these CDs made me realize that many are simply life lint: Something that fell into my home and never got swept out. I held onto many simply as reference volumes to prepare for concert reviews before the days of music on demand.

As I pulled them from the boxes to arrange them on the shelves, I sat there staring at a Mahler symphony in my hands and thought, I will never play this. The time had come for the great winnowing, which also was a revelation of how my personal tastes have changed.

Out with the bombastic Romantics and late Romantics, with exceptions for the handful of works from each that I just might play again. Lie in your grave and whine to yourself, Herr Mahler. Take all the time you want in heaven, Herr Bruckner. Go be tedious among friends, Messrs. Walton and Vaughn Williams. Be as dour and cheerless as you like, Herr Brahms. Farewell to those who have suffered from overexposure: Tchaikowsky, Dvořák, Mendelssohn … and all those fringe players are the seams, from Arensky to Zemlinsky.

After the sorting, the CD cases revealed how my tastes have changed. Gentler Baroque and Renaissance sounds have replaced Romantic fever. The limber French have nudged aside the heavy-handed Austro-Germantic gang. The voice has supplanted the orchestra. When I need some energy, there’s the Modernists an d the Haydn quartets. I have found that symphony orchestras do not fit well in my house, but there’s always seating for charming chamber works from the likes of Ravel or Poulenc.

The shelves reveal my tastes of today:

- Haydn chamber works (my default)
- Bach keyboard works
- Berlioz in toto
- The Soviet giants, Prokofiev and Shostakovich
- Anything Anne Sofie von Otter has recorded, from Bartok to Weill
- Schnittke, a personal affliction of sorts
- Schuman the Human, when it’s time for some Germanic soul
- Verdi and Wagner, the twin towers of opera, when it’s time to sizzle

In truth, most of my favorite recordings are on my Spotify playlists, but the wall of CDs are sort of a life trophy … or talisman. Looking at them is reassuring.

Impressions of Sofia, Week 1

We all get caught up in solipsism at times, but it’s important to notice our surroundings more than our feelings. So after a week in Sofia, some impressions:

Some aspects of life here are chastening reminders of just how far the United States has fallen. Here in the poorest country in the EU, public transportation is varied – with buses, trolleys and subway – and clean and efficient. Electronic displays at all stops show how long the wait will be for each bus and trolley, and the wait is never long until after 11 p.m. The richest country has the worst subways, and the poorest has outstanding subways – we can all theorize on the reasons, depending on our political mindsets.

There are very few obviously homeless people on the streets. The streets are generally cleaner than in American cities. For reasons I cannot fathom, there are no big trucks in the city, even on the expressways. I’m not sure how products get into the city, but not by semi. As a result, the expressway a few hundred meters from the apartment never erupts into that assaultive roar of a semi downshifting – it sounds more like surf on a beach. There are far fewer obviously homeless people on the streets of this poor country.

Some aspects are worse than in America. The streets and sidewalks look as if the city had been shelled by howitzers, and parking often resembles the aftermath of a county fair demolition derby. Street signs are clearly optional. So take the trolley …

The food here is cheap, fresh and healthy. The tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches and cherries are consistently the best I’ve ever had. The farm cheese comes in many varieties and is more a staple than a flavor enhancer. You can live on salads, fruit, nuts in countless varieties and good bread with pleasure. The food is cheap. The wonderful cherries cost about a dollar a pound. A fermented wheat soft drink called boza is sweet and acidic, foamy, slightly thick and addictive.

A bottle of Bulleit bourbon that costs $28 in Connecticut and $36 in Massachusetts costs $23 here – after transportation across the Atlantic. Go figure …

After one week here, there has been much to appreciate.

New London’s permanent stain: Class warfare at Fort Trumbull

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In 2000, the City Council of New London, Conn., voted to take the final 15 homes from people in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood by force of eminent domain. Pfizer, the pharm giant, wanted to build a multimillion dollar research center adjacent to the teeming blue collar neighborhood and wanted more upscale neighbors.

Through incompetence, naiveté, corruption, or all three, the City Council did Pfizer's bidding. At that point more than 70 properties and many dozens of families had already been bought out – often intimidated by the bulldozers smashing the house next them – but a dozen homeowners had dug in their heels.

The holdouts against eminent domain found support from a libertarian law group and took the case, Kelo v New London, to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The same city that collected property taxes on these homes from these law-abiding residents for decades labelled homes as “blighted” when it suited corporate interests. The neighborhood was destroyed. The city gifted Pfizer a 10-year tax abatement to build their $250 million research center, and before the 10 years had passed, Pfizer sold out and left the city.

And left 90 acres of harborside desolation in what has been a neighborhood. New roads were built, and nothing happened. No luxury condos, no hotel, just shattered lives.

It’s 20 years after the predatory realtors began knocking on the front doors of homes there. The sprawling waterfront neighborhood is a vacant lot, covered in weeds and scrub.

I took these photos, and hundreds more, through the ordeal. And almost 15 years ago, I wrote this column for The Day of New London that projected on the mental bluescreen a reasonable outcome for the desolate city plain. Nothing has changed.

Fort Trumbull’s final scene
The scene dissolves from images of bulldozers pushing rubble to a long shot of a sunset sky framing a green meadow below. The soundtrack fades from the roar of diesels to the soft voice of a sparrow. The camera pans to a small brown bird hopping in an oak sapling.

We now script a final scene for the Fort Trumbull tragi-comedy.

The peninsula is quiet, save for chirping birds and the odd car motoring to the state park. The rocky upland knob near the park gate is a now burgeoning forest of oak and maple and sumac, thickets of raspberries bursting at its fringes.

Below, where blocks of homes once defined a neighborhood, spreads a seven-acre field of high grass, thistle and ragweed. The sign that stood for a decade promising "Jobs for your community" has collapsed, and eager milkweed push skyward next to its stumps.

The human actors are gone. The unelected deal-makers who dreamed up the redevelopment of the old neighborhood have moved on. The 80 families who once filled the peninsula are scattered, their houses flattened by eminent domain, their lilac bushes bulldozed under.

The cinematic high drama has played out: Susette Kelo cowering in her little house as wreckers smash the home next door ... police padlocking doors and dragging away the mayor who stood in civil disobedience against the ... the Supreme Court intoning from its marble halls that New London could destroy the homes. La commedia é finata.

The working poor in their powerlessness, the business leaders in their suits, the city councilors in their confusion – all the plot's principals are written out of its denouement. The placard-waving protesters and national TV crews have new agendas. Politicians decry new outrages. Attorneys charge new fees.

All have departed, and the oh-so-optimistic multimillion-dollar new streets of Fort Trumbull are empty. But the thickets are not …

Ironic story lines always imply a moral, and this one is clear: The future arrives without an urban master plan. Here is how the script should end:

While the grand Fort Trumbull project sat idle, its wrecking done but financing missing, self-appointed planners arrived daily. New urban homesteaders quickly saw the peninsula's best potential: single-family housing. They mated and nested and raised generations of young, animating the wasted land. Safeguarded by laws that do not protect human residents, the songbirds thrived.

One nesting pair of little birds – grasshopper sparrows – caught the eye of a bird-watcher. Within a few mating seasons, the pairs multiplied, state scientists arrived, and papers were probated. The land that once housed disposable people became "critical habitat" to highly valued endangered sparrows. Development is prohibited.

Like the Yucatan jungle devouring Mayan pyramids, thickets of birds reclaimed the abandoned peninsula.

The camera pulls back as a sparrow surveys its grassy realm from the signpost for Smith Street.

The End.

Facing the illusion of self

I have been displaced. So have you.

A awareness of self requires a awareness of reality, the context that encompasses self. But all who are reading this are dissolving into vaporous half lives of fading reality. Admit it, reality doesn’t matter much anymore. We are now somewhere else, displaced.

A man plays a fictional decision-making executive on a television program and gets elected president of the real United States. People who disliked the TV program dislike the president. People who enjoyed the TV program like the president. Success and failure are no longer definable in any objective criteria. As Nicholas Roeg informed us, it's all Performance.

Living people such as the Queen of England or Dick Cheney have their identities fictionalized and improved – made more entertaining – and we layer this new titillating persona over the old boring one. Our mental acuity becomes blunted, smothered under layers of perception that more or less resemble each other. We don’t care – in fact, we rather enjoy it. Like Martin Guerre upon his return, the alternative realities are more satisfying. They make sense to us because we can always find a narrative that is self-congratulatory ... even as that sense of self becomes more and more elusive. We define selfhood to fit the data, so no matter what happens, we can feel smugly satisfied.

The phone stays ever-present, and the data reality of each person's choosing cascades incessantly. This reality was designed to be addictive, and we now prefer it to the quotidian drizzle outside our windows. Gamers by the tens of millions ride the bus thinking about the next move in Fortnite, not the coming day at work. The world's top internet celebrity is PewDiePie ... but you knew that, right? This gamer-turned-free-form-idiot has the most YouTube subscribers in the world. Do you feel left out? Go find your own community.

We carry our digital restraining bolts with us at all times. We all feel compelled to check our phones to see what we have missed, ignoring the obvious: If we never check our phone, we never miss anything.

Test yourself. How often do you think about digital interaction … the phone, streaming media, the compulsive 30-second news cycle? The answer is hard to accept. Now try to imagine a healthy outcome from this displaced awareness.

Neil Postman was right.

A quick listening guide to the many and diverse "Messiah" recordings

The music of George Frideric Handel is in steady rotation in my world. Few composers wrote more beautifully for the voice, and his operas are justifiably returning to the repertoire at last. But at Christmas, all ears turn to his oratorio "Messiah," so I'll continue my annual compare-and-contrast posting of recordings grand (but not so great) and small.

"Messiah" is America's best-loved chorale work for so many reasons … First of all, the text is in English, and second, it's tied to the Christmas season, when music fills the air. There are dozens of recordings of "Messiah" out there, and some differ in the extreme.

So here are some sample tracks that should catch your ear, since this is the one piece of classical music everyone knows.

Handel wrote "Messiah" in a two-week blaze of composition in 1741, and he revised it many times before his death in 1759. Then, along came a next-generation composer named Mozart who lovingly re-orchestrated "Messiah," adding clarinets and trombones and extensively rescoring the oratorio. Who are we to argue with Mozart? That version was performed most often until the early music movement came along in the 1980s and restored Baroque music to its glory.

The many rescoring efforts for "Messiah" could be extreme. Just sample the 1959 extravaganza by British conductor Thomas Beecham, who added harps, triangles, cymbals and massive orchestral weight. It fit the imperial British love of choral giganticism, and it certainly adds sonic heft to the choruses, but … well, Beachem needed someone to get him down from his imperious vision.

A counterpoint to Beecham's Cinemascope spectacular is Christopher Hogwood's 1991 recording using the 1754 Handel version, which, like the original employs trebles – boys – instead of sopranos in the choruses, to create a celestial, silvery sound. The tempos are lively, and the lighter orchestration simply gleams. More importantly, the recitatives – the semi-sung passages of text – have a real sense urgency – you feel like they are telling you an important message.

(I had the pleasure of seeing Hogwood lead a force of just 16 voices in a "Messiah" at Connecticut College almos 30 years ago.)



So this playlist includes some comparisons of three versions:

● "For unto us a child is born," is offered first in Beecham's huge setting with a zillion voices and added percussion, then Hogwood's bright and gleaming Handel version, with a choir of angels … no, they're trebles. (This is my favorite section of "The Messiah," so thrilling at "Wonderful, Counselor …")

● "All we like sheep …" is offered as the first in the Mozart version, led by Charles Mackerras. It opens with pulsing horns that chug along and is full of horn figures to ornament it. In the Handel orchestration by Hogwood that comes next, the voices take the forefront (no need to tart this up).

● "There were shepherds abiding …" The big Beecham version is spread across four, short recording tracks and is set in a single track for the Hogwood version. In the Beecham, we get cymbals to start "Glory to God" and booming percussion … for some reason. In Hogwood's, the recitative by soprano Judith Nelson has a fervor that leads to "Glory to God" far better than any hey-wake-up cymbal crash.

● The "Hallelujah" chorus, in Beecham's version sounds like a marching band at a Big Ten football game, feeling rushed after the pokey, faux-grand tempos he uses elsewhere. Hogwood's is quick, not hasty, the vocal counterpoint is accented, and the trumpets sing out above it all like heraldry, instead of being buried in a wall of sound.

So, I cast my vote. There are countless fine "Messiahs" in the catalog. Which is your favorite?

The best of cinema: Visual splendor with achingly moving humanity

Speaking up for “Roma” is like putting in a good word for Bach. At this point, any praise feels like joining a flash mob.

But the film has so many compelling elements that Alfonso Cuarón’s deeply personal tale succeeds on almost every cinematic goal:

- The production values are bottomless, yet never showy. To recreate 1971 on so many levels, as the camera lovingly caresses each detail without seeming self-congratulatory, is a singular achievement. There are street fighting scenes – remember, this is the director of “Children of Men” – of the 1971 uprising in Mexico City, vast expanses of shanty towns, an elaborate party in a hacienda, but it’s the street scenes in Mexico City that turn back the clock with a cast of many hundreds. The long tracking shots on the crowded streets, especially the scene in which the family walks to the movies, simply carry you away.

- The cinematography is gorgeous and transfixing. The indoor scenes have a luminous tonal range (Cuarón tweaked the tonality in the editing for a uniform warmth) and the outdoor scenes are awash in a high-key glare to capture the wash of light on the high Mexican plateau. The camera glides over details of housekeeping – washing dishes, cleaning dog poop, hand-washing laundry – but never stays trapped in the details. These images are narrative, describing lives.

- The performances resonate long after the film ends. The protagonist, a servant in a doctor’s household named Cleo, is played by a non-actor named Yalitza Aparicio, selected from 3,000 (yes, 3,000!) women auditioned in villages for the role. Like so many first-time actors (think of Wei Tang in “Lust, Caution”), her performance is naked. She does not assume a character, but the character is revealed within her. Few starring roles have been less showy and more powerful. The scenes of familial love shared with the family’s four children that she projects are the beating heart of the film. Cuarón used New Wave techniques of filming in sequential continuity, with the actors unaware of what comes next, and the naturalism of their performances fills each with the hesitations and uncertainty that fills us all.

It’s hard to know where to stop … Cuarón uses no musical score to manipulate the viewer. Each moment is vivid enough. The eyes can linger over scenes like Cleo’s rooftop laundry work, echoed in the distance by other servants on other rooftops, almost endlessly, yet the next scene pulls us forward, always.

The film is, above, full of love informed by loss and hope. This all seems true.