Monthly Archives: September 2018
Finale 19 – Turandot Act 1
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th September 2018Italian opera as is currently practiced began with Rossini and ended with Puccini. All the Italian operas in the standard repertory were written between 1813 and 1924 – a little more than a century, a blink in the history of art. The last of these operas is Turandot. A magnificent achievement left incomplete at Puccini’s…
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Met Opens Season with Samson and Delilah
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th September 2018The Met opened its current season with Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah. The performance was streamed throughout the world and will doubtless last until the heat death of the universe. It will be telecast on Oct 20 as the second of the 10 operas that will make up the company’s HD series for this season. I’ll…
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Prophylactic Aspirin in Healthy Elderly Adults
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd September 2018Three studies, published online on Sept 16, 2018 by the New England Journal of Medicine, examine the effect of prophylactic aspirin in healthy elderly patients. The subjects received 100 mg of aspirin daily or a placebo for five years. Trial participants were community-dwelling men and women from Australia and the United States who were 70 years of…
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Colorado Springs Philharmonic Opens Season
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th September 2018The CSP opened its 2018-19 season this evening (Sept 15) under the direction of its music director Josep Caballé-Domenech. The Pikes Peak Center was full of an enthusiastic audience that had two out of three pieces to be enthusiastic about. The first was Rossini’s overture to L’Italiana in Algeri. The Philharmonic’s Catalan maestro lead a…
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Highlights from the DSM V
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 13th September 2018Rare and Unusual Psychiatric Syndromes: A Primer and Culture-Specific Psychiatric Syndromes: A Review are articles from Medscape Internal Medicine which is an online compendium of useful information dedicated to practitioners of the specialty. You can read both articles by clicking the above links. The syndromes these articles describe are taken from from the Diagnostic and…
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Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani- Quando al Mio
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th September 2018“Here is the great tenor-baritone duet (Quando al mio) from Act 3 [of I Vespri Siciliani]. Verdi never wrote a better duet. In this piece, Monforte [baritone] reveals to Arrigo [tenor] that he is his son. Arrigo is torn three ways. First, he fears he will lose Elena [his fiance] because he promised her he…
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Zinka Milanov – A Reminscence
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 5th September 2018The article below was written by Raymond Beegle who served as an accompanist for Zinka Milanov (1906-89) during the years after she retired from performing and devoted herself to teaching. He was also her friend. His moving appreciation of the great soprano was originally published in the Spring 1990 issue of Opera Quarterly to mark her (then) recent death….
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Quotation of the Month
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 2nd September 2018This one really speaks to the state of contemporary thought and discourse. “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” ― Marcus Tullius…
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The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 1st September 2018Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was the most original English poet of the 19th century. He was also, perhaps, the oddest. Some have speculated that he suffered from bipolar disorder. Virtually none of his coevals knew anything about his work. His father, Manley, was a minor poet who raised his son in the Anglican faith. He…
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