Barbara Day Turner (she refers to herself as BDT most often) is a conductor I’ve worked with frequently. The front cover of the Willow Glen Resident features her quite prominently. Woo hoo!
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Something is up with my ears. This isn’t exactly new, but today I’m going to write about it. Just because. (“Just because” is one of my favorite reasons for something. Who can argue, after all?)
I woke this morning and knew the ears weren’t happy campers. Now I’m at “my” Tuesday morning coffee shop and all I can say is … “Ouch!” When I arrived here I thought, “Do they have to have the bass turned up so darn high?” But then someone dropped an umbrella. And another person dropped his keys. And it hit me—it’s not the bass, it’s my EARS. Every sound is horrendously loud. It’s as if everything has been amplified to pain level.
At times I”ve gotten out of bed and felt a bit woozy and had ear troubles and I’ve always chalked it up to my “Tylenol PM nights”. But last night I went without (and slept fairly well too) so I can’t blame it on that. I do realize I’ve always had sensitive ears—cold air on the ears is extremely painful and any wind and I’m a goner, so I suppose it’s just the way I’m made and nothing is to be done about it. Funny, though, that I’m reacting here and now, and I don’t have this trouble in an orchestra pit. Go figure.
Okay. Ramble over and out. This was all unimportant but I’m good at unimportant so there you go.
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to read that Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was back! Alex Ross blogs about that good news as well as some news he says is bad. (I’m sorry to say I’ve not read Richard Dyer so I guess I won’t know what I missed … or at least I wouldn’t have except that Alex Ross has supplied a link to his writing and now I’ll have to, of course, read his work.)
Anyway, I’m so happy to read that one of my favorite singers has come back, and is sounding wonderful (and looking healthy)! I haven’t blogged about all the speculation, because I didn’t want to jump on the speculation bandwagon. Enough folks had done that anyway and, I dunno, I felt like I would sound like a gossip if I did hop on. (I’m so darn good at gossip and it’s so difficult for me to avoid it. I think this is a typical performer’s plight.) But I was wondering about her, and was relieved to hear that she was back, although I’m sure sorry it wasn’t in time for Dr. Atomic. I’m selfish that way.
My little bitty connection to Lorraine is that she attended San Jose State University when I was there, we played in the San Jose Symphony (RIP) together (she on viola) as well as the Misdummer Mozart Festival Orchestra and, when we played a particular Nutcracker gig each year, she’d play her viola and then sing when we got to the dance of the snowflakes. I also heard her sing in an opera (I’m thinking it was very early opera, but I can’t say for sure) when we were in college; I’ll never forget seeing our orchestra conductor’s jaw nearly drop to the floor when he heard her voice. He knew her as a violist only. She also sang, I could swear it was as a soprano, in San Jose Symphony (RIP) performances of Messiah some years back and just blew us all away. She is one unbelievable musician, to be sure.
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