Saturday, 22nd of April, 2000
We got free tickets to the SLSO concert tonight. Leonard Slatkin came back as guest conductor. First, they played a piece he composed, "Housewarming", a really really neat piece. It was very contemporary. They had most of the brass playing in the balcony (yes, where the audience sits). Near the end, the St. Louis Symphony Children's Choirs marched in ringing bells and adding a vocal part. It ended with just the dying off of the voices as they exited the hall, sounding just like an echo.
Sarah Chang was the guest violinist. She played Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D Minor. I have her CD of that particular piece. Pretty impressive, she's only 19.
Then, they played Vaughan William's Symphony No. 4 in F minor. It was very nice. It started out with the nice melody from "Green Sleeves". The entire piece was wonderful. Very dramatic.
This is old, but funny enough to merit posting:
As part of the negotiations Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of the 'k'. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome 'ph' will be replased with the 'f'. This will make words like 'fotograf' 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double leters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling. Also al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent 'e' in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl will be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou' and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to oza kombinations of letas.
After ziz fifz yer ve vil have a rali sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu anderstand ech oza. Ze drem of an united urop vil finali kum tru!
Friday, 21st of April, 2000
I played for Mrs. P's church, St. Paul's Evangelical Church tonight. They had a special Good Friday's service, and we performed Faure's Reqium. We had a nice small chamber ensemble to accompany the choir: 4 violas, 4 cellos, 1 bass, 2 french horns, 1 harpsichord, and 1 solo violin. I turned out sounding pretty nice. Now here's an article about girls in the IT workfield:
"They aren't concerned or scared of technology," Haag adds. "Girls have no problem using technology, such as E-mail and the Internet, they just have no desire to create or design technology. They perceive those jobs as anti-social and solitary, and that's nothing positive to lure them into that career field."
Thursday, 20th of April, 2000
It is extremely windy today. I wonder if that has anything to do with the 5 short blurbs of power outages we had @ the High School today.
Wednesday, 19th of April, 2000
Tuesday, 18th of April, 2000
Monday, 17th of April, 2000
Sunday, 16th of April, 2000
This time I got to see Dallas from a daytime perspective. It is such a nice city.