Friday Miscellanea

In case there are Music Salon readers who are as entertained by language as I am, here are Eight of the world's quirkiest phrases in honor of International Translation Day.

Click to enlarge

* * *

The very fine English conductor Neville Marriner passed away this week, at 92, just two days after conducting his last concert. The Guardian has the news.

* * *

I'm not sure many of the readers of the Music Salon are in the right income group, but here are some houses of famous musicians for sale, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. Here's Michael Jackson's modest Las Vegas pad:

Click to enlarge

Here is Billy Holiday's cool townhouse on the Upper West Side in Manhattan:

* * *

Just so you know, I'm not the only curmudgeon left, here is a review in The Spectator of a Björk concert at Royal Albert Hall. Some choice bits:

’Will you be dancing?’ the man in front asks his friend before the lights go down. ‘Most likely,’ she says. Two songs in and it’s looking less and less likely.

The world’s best-known Icelander is fronting a 27-piece chamber orchestra in a strings-only performance of songs from her last album (not her most toe-tapping collection). It feels like hard work. Lyrically, Vulnicura (Greek for ‘cure for wounds’) is a blow-by-blow account of her split with long-term partner Matthew Barney. Musically, anything resembling a good tune is hard to find.

Nice! Here is some more:

Back on stage in a new outfit that looks like a jellyfish, she sings a few older songs. Most are obscure — only ‘Joga’ might be vaguely familiar to the non-devotee — but they sound good without the usual skittering beats. In ‘Pagan Poetry’ there’s a singalong and we all contribute backing vocals in our best Icelandic accents (‘I luff him, I luff him’).

It turns out that it wasn't so bad after all, at least the reviewer, Brian Hancill, came to enjoy it. I probably would have wanted to open my veins after the first set...

* * *

And for our light entertainment today, the string quartet MozART Group demonstrates that they can be at least as delightful as a cat video:

* * *

Neville Marriner (with harpsichordist Thurston Dart) founded the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in 1959 and they recorded an astonishing variety of music. The ones I have been most familiar with, due to being a guitarist, were the complete set of guitar concertos by Mauro Giuliani (think of him as a lesser Mozart with a guitar) done with guitar master Pepe Romero: