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Tag Archives: Beethoven

Late stylishness

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings By Geoff Dyer (Audiobook read by Richard Burnip, 11h 29m, Canongate Books, £21.87) . It’s late June, Wimbledon’s upon us, and Geoff Dyer is talking about his tennis injuries. Geoff Dyer is always talking about his tennis injuries. It’s one of his endearing features. But when […]

‘Cheese sandwich optional’

Review of Lev Parikian’s cheerful and entertaining Into the Tangled Bank: In which our author ventures outside to consider the British in nature. — For Geographical

NEWS AT A GLANCE #1

A lad named Rogers, and other true-ish stories. — For Queen Mob’s Tea House

Creation-ism

This weekend I will be joining a local choral society for their performance of Haydn’s The Creation – and what better way to welcome Spring now that it’s finally arrived. An avowed and much-loved masterpiece from its earliest performances – Vienna, 1798 – ‘whose appeal [I read from A Peter Brown’s DECCA sleeve-notes] was irresistible […]

NB – To the driver of the ice-cream van

If you drive around here one more time while I am listening to Beethoven I swear I will come for you. Yours, etc.

Good show(?)! – Mozart Undone

His circus-like extravaganzas have sliced and diced The Beatles, played fast and loose with Bob Dylan, and spawned successful imitations across the theatre scene in his native Denmark. Now the gleefully wilful director-cum-ringmaster Nikolaj Cederholm brings his trademark ‘theatre concert’ to London’s Barbican, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s temporary residence in the British […]

Interview(ed)

(for the British School in Colombo yearbook 2010/11) 1. So, what’s with the beard? After I graduated from the War Studies Faculty at KCL I rather fancied myself as a war correspondent, so I grew the beard. Then I just rather fancied myself. 2. We somehow get the impression that you are always very sarcastic […]

Don’t evoke me…

Eshantha Peiris, piano, Lionel Wendt Theatre A piano, a pianist, and a soft white light. Good, I think. Good. Neat. Clean. Then I see the banner projected onto the backcloth. It is 15ft by 6, at least. It says ‘EVOCATIVE’.  The pianist begins to play. The banner remains. Sort of. Now it plays a slide-show […]

O worship the Lord with the beauty of… oh, Mendelssohn.

te Deum veneramur – A Celebration of Sacred Music  Last Saturday’s Colombo Philharmonic Choir gig was sold to me almost solely on the strength of the acoustic in Ladies’ College chapel – being as it is not the Ladies’ College auditorium. But I confess I was also in a hurry to hear some good church music […]

Any ‘umbrella of tranquillity’ in a storm

In the first of the Great Artist Series, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Colombo, acclaimed French pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier performed three meisterwerk sonatas to a sell-out Goethe-Institut crowd. Mozart’s Sonata in D Major is a lightish confection, perhaps slightly more icing than cake, from an era when pianos were still quite piano and […]