Next week I am flying to Germany for two weeks, mainly as a holiday and to visit friends. I chose this time because they will be on holiday and it turns out, everyone else is on holiday too! I was hoping to see some concerts, maybe a couple of operas, but there doesn't seem to be much on towards the end of July and beginning of August. But never mind, there are a host of excellent museums that I normally wouldn't even get to that now I will. I will be based in Dresden with side trips to Leipzig, Prague and possibly Berlin.
Here is a list of the major museums in Dresden:
https://www.dresden.de/apps_ext/MuseenApp_en/index
My friends say that the Panometer is particularly interesting and unusual:
https://www.panometer-dresden.de/en/
And, of course, food and wine will also be important themes. This is a particularly good time for North Americans to visit Europe as the Euro is down about 15% this year vis-a-vis the US dollar, so not as expensive as usual. Here is Dresden's main church, the Frauenkirche:
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Interesting interviews with Taruskin:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2022/07/14/1111497758/remembering-richard-taruskin-musicologist
He sounds like someone full of himself and with an ax to grind. He states that he avoids Baroque opera bc there are no castrati around today who can give us the real experience. Logically it falls flat - we don't really know what it sounded like, but we are absolutely SURE the what a countertenor or someone else does today is not it.
Perhaps he is making the perfect the enemy of the good in this case.
I certainly take your point, Patrick. My first impression on reading Taruskin as a graduate student--it was the essay on early music performance from Text and Act--was very similar. How dare he have these odd opinions and hold them so confidently! But as time went on and I read more and more of his writing on music, I came to appreciate his enormous learning and depth of thought on music and to disagree with him a lot less than I did.
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