Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Heard Mendelssohn's Elijah last night with KM, and did not like it very much. The music was not particularly exciting nor memorable, with the exception of the Chorus at the end of Part I: "Thanks be to God, He laveth the thirsty land." After channeling Bach in his St. Paul , Mendelssohn turned to Handel when writing Elijah . The oratorio is, however, no Messiah . Perhaps the fault lay with the New York Philharmonic. I don't know. Of the five adult soloists, Gerald Finlay as Elijah stood out with his rich bass-baritone. We left at the intermission. Tomorrow night, ghazals at Carnegie Hall. I am really looking forward to that.

Eric's poem for me has been published by Q Review, a queer journal based around Columbia College in Chicago. Congrats, Eric! * "Planetary system" is a good description of the set, and the world, of the Met's screening of John Adams's Doctor Atomic last night. Designed by Julian Crouch, the Los Alamos lab on stage was a peculiarly isolated and isolating landscape. In the background, cloths were draped over structures to appear like sharp mountains, over which the bomb, a hideous wired sphere, hung. Everyone constrained to his own compartment, the scientists and staff of the lab stood in the upright grid of a huge box. The marital bed was a scene of disunion. The Native Americans who stood in the top row of the grid in Act II was a constant reminder of a lost world. It was brave to try to fit scientific and bureaucratic language into the operatic idiom. Much of the libretto came from declassified government documents and communications. The singing at these ...