From the Top returned to the Chautauqua Institution for Show #308 tonight in its opulent and resonant amphitheatre. Despite our vigilant monitoring of impending thunderstorms, the rains held off and our audience was rapt and attentive for spectacular performances by all our kids: my fave performance ever of Chopin’s Andante Spianato & Grand Polonaise by …
From the Top recorded Show #307 in the opulent but intimate environs of the Bill & Sony Rylance home on Commonwealth Ave. Their son, Harry, played two brilliant Scriabin Etudes, and demonstrated admirably how visual art informs music-making: he’d done a talk on Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ and how it was formative in his newborn conception …
I’ve come to know that it’s valuable to reconsider books you may have earlier dismissed: having heard Haruki Murakami’s name bandied about in the bouquet of my most admired writers: David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, to name a few, I years ago picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle only to put it …