waste

Before heading back to the busy work of writing a grant proposal (sigh), I'd like to inject a couple of sentences into the internets ... about Karita Mattila's Manon Lescaut happening now at the Met. First off, WTF?? Why is she wasting her time and, more pertinently, my time doing a lyric Italian role when she could be burning eardrums elsewhere in the schedule? For instance, the Sieglinde. If she had switched assignments with sweet-voiced Adrianne Pieczonka, the universe would have been better off. Instead, last night Mattila released the Salome within the Manon, and it was frankly offensive. Mattila's forte is, literally, the forte notes at the extremum of physics. Handicapped by a bland middle register, regrettably uninspired in soft singing, she decimated Puccini's little lyric jewel. It was a merciless assault. Why is she not singing Sieglinde at the Met instead?

Verdi rules!

all of us must vote

As Ramesh Thakur, a political science professor in India, wrote: “We foreigners can but pray that the new president, whoever he or she may be, will return America to its strengths, values and the tradition of exporting hope and other optimism. And so help to lift America and the world up, not tear one another down.”

In Japan, too, there are hopes for American renewal. “Already the fixed idea, ‘Only a white man can become president,’ has been broken,” the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun said Jan. 15. “We are witnessing the history, the process of grass-roots democracy turning into the U.S. strength.”