Blogging, Interrupted

A thunderstorm on Thursday fried my modem so I wasn't able to do much blogging on the weekend. As a result, however, I finished reading most of Joseph Kerman's fascinating book Opera as Drama in which he casually mentions that Tosca really is a crappy opera and The Marriage of Figaro is actually better than Don Giovanni. These remarks were regarded as scandalous when the book was originally published in the 1950s. I think I might do a retro book review on this one.

I'm also hard at work listening to the rest of the Salonen box and there will be two more reviews coming up on that. He really dragged me, kicking and screaming, into listening to a lot of fairly unfamiliar repertoire. How we tend to fall into ruts!

The first piece on the next disc in the box is the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev with Cho-Liang Lin, violin soloist. This doesn't seem to be on YouTube, so let's listen to Hilary Hahn with Lorin Maazel conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra.