Friday Miscellanea

Here is a good story from the Wall Street Journal about the restoration of Pablo Casals' cello and the young cellist who is taking it on a tour. Some details about the restoration:

The most evident problem was that the cello’s neck had, over time, sunk four-tenths of an inch toward the instrument’s base, Mr. Peled said. But Ms. Reed-Yeboah felt the cello needed more than a new neck; the instrument itself had to be stabilized.

So she and her small team opened it up with a tool similar to a large butter knife. They replaced several old wood patches inside the instrument with new patches, using the most aged wood they could find. The patches reinforce the cello’s structure and cover tiny cracks. A new sound post and bass bar were installed.

The restorers also worked out subtle deformities in the cello’s overall shape. They took plaster cast negatives of the front and the back and modified the casts. The front and back then were placed into the casts to be gently reshaped with warm sand bags, a process that required months.

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Weird music video of the week: members of a Danish orchestra perform the introduction to Jacob Gade's Tango Jalousie, then pause, eat a very hot chile and finish the piece. In some discomfort.

Strange people, those Danes.

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Here's an interesting tidbit: Bob Dylan at some point in 1969 was interested in the idea of recording an album with both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Here is the story.

Dylan then dropped a bomb. "He said he had this idea to make a record with the Beatles and the Stones," John writes. "And he asked me if I would find out whether the others would be interested. I was completely bowled over. Can you imagine the three greatest influences on popular music in the previous decade making an album together?"

Johns quickly began working the phones. "Keith and George thought it was fantastic," he writes. "But they would since they were both huge Dylan fans. Ringo, Charlie and Bill were amicable to the idea as long as everyone else was interested. John didn't say a flat no, but he wasn't that interested. Paul and Mick both said absolutely not."

Of course, much later on, Bob got together a few friends and formed the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys that included George Harrison.

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A follow-up to "L'affaire Lazic" as Anne Midgette calls it. Anne (who has commented on this blog) devotes a lengthy column to the debate in which she quotes in full Lazic's letter to the Washington Post asking for her original review to be taken down.

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Another story from the Wall Street Journal offers advice about musical instruments as investments. They don't have a thing to say about classical guitars, though.

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Here is the odd tale of a computer program that was able to write pretty good folksongs. Or not...

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It's the week for odd bits, so here is a rather unusual performance of a Beatles' song. What's unusual? It's not the greatest performance, a little weak actually. But I've heard worse. One odd thing is that Yo Yo Ma is sort of comping along on the cello. But who's that guy singing? Oh, that's the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper.

Next up, Vladimir Putin with a selection of songs by Mussorgsky and François Hollande singing a mélodie by Debussy. Actually the only politician I know of that can walk on stage and deliver a respectable performance is Condoleezza Rice, who is a rather good pianist.

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Hey, I even found a clip on YouTube. This is Condoleezza Rice playing the first part of the first movement of the Dvorak piano quintet at Aspen in 2008: