First the big news--it rained! So far since yesterday we have received 1.2 inches of rain, very badly needed. So it's back to cutting grass, beginning tomorrow. The humidity today is unbearable, however, with the possibility of more rain to come. We'll take it.
In other news, Patti's older sister, Joanne, has finally friended me on FB. So maybe I will be able to find out some things about Patti, past 20 years of age. Fingers crossed.
I have been working on newer piano pieces for just over a week now. While the fingers aren't too happy, the brain is dancing once again. Several years ago Deb and I attended the finest music festival we ever heard. It was the Great Lakes Chamber Society's annual June festival, and the theme was Bach and his later influence on composers. So we got to hear a ton of Bach concerts, along with composers who took his works and used them to make their own pieces even greater, composers such as Beethoven and Rachmaninoff. My little brain has been ticking ever since, and I was overjoyed to discover that our complete set of Bach music CDs has a whole category of recordings on the same subject, with dozens of composers who used Bach as a rich resource for their own music.
Anyway, my newest program will feature 6 pieces by Bach on the first half. I am going to pair a Little Prelude with a 2-part Invention, another Little Prelude with a 3-part Invention (also called a Sinfonia), and finally a Prelude and Fugue from the Well Tempered Clavier, all in the key of d minor. This means that the first half will feature music that gradually becomes more contrapuntal and complex, until we arrived at the d minor fugue (Book 1). Clever, huh? Three of the pieces are quite flashy, including the lively Gigue of the Prelude and Fugue, while three are more sedate.
But wait--there's more! The second half will feature the music of Edvard Grieg, namely his Op. 54 Lyric Pieces. There are six of them (same as the first half of the program by Bach), though I am only working on four at the moment, but upon hearing them listeners will be able to find traces of Bach (and many others, to be sure) in the music. Two of the pieces in the set are quite well known and popular, the March of the Dwarves, and his Nocturne.
In movie news, there are two to report, both my choices for the week. Blood Simple, from 1984, was the first feature film by the Coen brothers, a dark comedy/tragedy that takes place in a small Texas town, much of it in a seedy bar. There are four main characters, one of whom is a private detective played wonderfully by M. Emmet Walsh. He first tracks a cheating wife for the husband, who then wants his wife dead. There are some great plot twists and tense moments, but overall viewers are led by the nose by the directors, and by the end it all becomes a bit much. The wife and her boyfriend, a bartender at her husband's bar, are cardboard characters. The husband is a loser in just about everything (though he did catch some nice fish), and provides much of the dark humour in the film. Heavy premonitions of Fargo can be seen and felt in the film. Mostly fun, but not a classic. There are many, many extras with this film, of which we have two of the shorter ones.
Now showing on Criterion, until August 31st. There are some impressive hats in this movie.
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