5/2014
5/3 After finishing ‘The Goldfinch’, wonderful fiction, I got into biographies and started the new year with Humphrey Burton’s ‘Leonard Bernstein”. This densely written 700 pager was a heavy one to prop up in bed, but is not in print nor available on iPad so I was lucky the library had it. I was totally hooked by page 10, it read like a novel. Of course, any biography’s appeal depends on its subject, and Lenny B. was so dynamic, brilliant, diverse, fascinating and larger than life that he competes with great fictional heroes. And before I finished I was getting his ‘Young People’s Concerts’ recordings from NETFLIX. And they are wonderful, even tho the sound is 1950s and nothing like today’s CDs.
If I hadn’t lived in the Bernstein era I would think there was a lot of exaggeration in the biography, but I remember the concerts on early TV, and saw him conduct fairly often. Once Eric and I heard him do a Mahler Symphony at the Edinburgh Festival and I have this vivid mental picture of his jumping and singing. He was a nightmare to record, he just couldn’t keep still or quiet. On the DVDs there are a lot of shots of his face, and you realize how music transported him. At a live concert all you see is the conductor’s back and that’s probably OK for many. But not for Bernstein. And last week I saw ‘Cosi fan Tutti’ in HD and the camera never left James Levine’s face and his expressions are also fascinating, and he sings but without sound, just mouths the words. But Levine’s gifts are limited to conducting, while Bernstein was a serious composer, and his musical comedies are fantastically good, and Candide and West Side Story are, I think, masterpieces.
I am now 300 pages into ‘The Power Broker’, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. It is also fabulous, but over 1200 pages, so I took it to Printfast and had it cut in half and rebound as a 2-volume spiral. Still huge, but just about manageable!
5/5 The other day I was birdwatching at Ashland Pond and there were Cedar Waxwings in a more active mode than usual. Two
were flying around, then landing and clearly courting, but in a way I have never seen. They would sit close to each other on a branch and touch bills. Couldn’t describe it as anything but kissing. Then they would fly around together, land and kiss some more. I later googled ‘bird courtship kissing’ and got some hits! One was Cedar Waxwings who are apparently known to ‘kiss’ I’ve just never been in the right place at the right time. Other kissers are a puffin (some kiss that must be), cardinals, and some parrots and pigeons. I was delighted to learn something new about a common species and on a local birdwalk .