Miscellaneous Round-Up

Blogging time has been scarce lately what with work pressures, but I have a couple of five-day weekends coming up (including over Labor Day) that should enable me to catch up...Reading over recent entries, I realize I am going to have to stop making digs at Joseph Epstein for being such a curmudgeon; curmudgeon, c'est moi!...I finished reading Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which is of middling quality as these non-fiction bestsellers go. The subject-matter is compelling, especially for Chicago-philes like myself, and there is some social capital to be had out of reading such books, because others will have read them too (or at least have heard of them)...I also finished Graham Greene's excellent The Heart of the Matter, and started on a book-length interview with Greene, The Other Man. In this latter book, Greene speaks about betrayal in a way quite reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville, for whom it was also a key theme:

I've betrayed a great number of things and people in the course of my life, which probably explains this uncomfortable feeling I have about myself, this sense of having been cruel, unjust. It still torments me often enough before I go to sleep.

...I filled in my key Bruckner symphony gaps by purchasing and listening to recordings of the "Symphony No. 0" in D minor (Riccardo Chailly, Decca), and the "Study Symphony" in F minor (Georg Tintner, Naxos) -- both sturdy works with fine thematic material. The Chailly recording also includes Bruckner's Overture in G minor; the Tintner recording includes the later replaced "Volksfest" finale from the 1878 version of Symphony No 4, powerful to hear (but there is as yet no integral recording of the complete 1878 version)...Generally speaking, I find it takes me three hearings to truly start absorbing an unfamiliar classical composition. I have been following that protocol in listening to Paul Lewis's recordings of the Beethoven piano sonatas on Harmonia Mundi, since there are many of the sonatas I don't know that well or haven't heard in years. No. 2 in A major stands out as a piece that, if I was a piano student, I think would be fun to learn to play: it's charming...I haven't made a beer entry in a while, but I should say that New Glarus's new Berliner Weisse is probably the best sour beer I have ever had.