Life in the freezer

We're experiencing an unusually cold, snowy winter here in the Boston area, the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) since 1995-96.  The last few nights have been down in the low digits, or even below 0F (yes, we still use Fahrenheit here).  The snow is piling up everywhere and there is nowhere to put it.  Every few days we seem to get more.  Tomorrow, we may have to miss orchestra rehearsal on account of yet more snow.  We'll see.

Speaking of which, I am enjoying preparing this concert very much.  Two outstanding pieces: Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto (with George Li as soloist) and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. I have written the program notes and I will be giving talks before the two concerts.  Our two soloists are outstanding and with all the extra players, the orchestra is sounding really good.  We didn't have to miss the rehearsal although the weather was not good and then overnight we got another 8 to 9" of snow.  The snow is piled high outside and we have no more room.  Let's hope we don't get too much more.

The temperature outdoors has actually warmed up quite a bit and that's helped a lot.  The house just couldn't keep warm the last few days (something's up - I suspect a need to bleed the pipes).

I've never been a huge fan of fiction and what fiction I read tends to be adventure, mystery, and that sort of thing.  I'm behind in reading many of the "classics", although in recent years I've read some non-English classics like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  And, while the Aubrey/Maturin canon isn't exactly one of the classics, Patrick O'Brian's prose style is exceptionally good, especially for an adventure writer.

But nothing had really prepared me for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  Well, I'd seen the mini-series and the recent movie and liked them a lot.  So I knew that the story and the characters were interesting.  But as I got started listening to the CDs (read by none other than Jeremy Irons), it dawned on me that this was writing of a type I'd never known.  It's not that he uses long words or short words or any other particular type of words.  It's just that the way they're put together is simply brilliant.  I imagined that he probably wrote the book very slowly, spending long periods of time finding just the right word.  Au contraire!  He wrote the book, by any standards a lengthy novel, in less than six months.

I didn't know much about him, although it wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's read the book or seen it on the screen that he went to Oxford, Hertford College in fact.  He was also gay, in the modern sense, at least during his time at Oxford.  Nevertheless, he ended up marrying (for a year anyway) another Evelyn (a woman) and again later to Laura, this time more permanently and with two children.  All this didn't stop him creating perhaps his most colorful character in the book, Anthony (or Antoine) Blanche, as an over-the-top pansy (his word). 

Yet the book, which I had initially thought was a literary condemnation of Catholicism turns out to be just the opposite.  He himself converted when he was in his late twenties (about fifteen years before writing the book) and was not in the least critical of the church.  And whereas I had assumed that it was largely autobiographical, and indeed I'm still sure that it is, he and Charles clearly have very different opinions about the Catholic church.

Now, it's back to Mahler and Beethoven for me: a pleasure but requiring inspiration which doesn't always come easily.