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Springboks success timely boost for South African sport
South Africans celebrated a third Rugby World Cup title against a backdrop of frustration at failures in the other two widely followed sports.
South Africa supporters celebrate Springboks' win in the Rugby World Cup. - AP
Victory at the Rugby World Cup came as a huge relief to South African sport followers after a string of woeful performances by the national cricket and football teams.
The Springboks used forward power to subdue England, then let flying wingers Makazole Mapimpi and Cheslin Kolbe loose to run in the tries that sealed a 32-12 final triumph on Saturday.
Supporters of the national rugby team were hopeful of victory, but no one dared believe they would finish 20 points ahead of a side that crushed trophy-holder New Zealand a week earlier.
READ | South Africa beats England in final to win third title
South Africans celebrated a third Rugby World Cup title in sport clubs, bars and restaurants against a backdrop of frustration at failures in the other two widely followed sports.
South African rugby team celebrates its World Cup win. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
In India last month, the cricketers suffered back-to-back innings Test losses for the first time since the 1935-36 season against Australia.
Before those humiliations, South Africa suffered a 203-run defeat in the first of three Tests on the sub-continent.
A disastrous year for the Proteas also included a 2-0 home Test series beating by struggling Sri Lanka, which had arrived in the republic as no-hopers.
Worse was to follow with South Africa losing five of eight matches at the Cricket World Cup in England to finish seventh in the 10-nation tournament.
"These are the worst of times for cricket in our country, or at least for the time most of us have been alive," wrote Sunday Times cricket columnist Telford Vice.
Football is by far the most popular sport among the 57 million South Africans with the domestic, African and European versions followed avidly.
South Africa was blanked 0-3 by India in the recent Test series. Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
But the national team that drew 85,000 spectators to a pre-2010 World Cup friendly against Colombia in Soweto would be grateful to have a quarter of that support now.
When apartheid-induced isolation ended in 1992, South Africa rapidly developed into a continental powerhouse.
It hosted and won the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations and qualified for the 1998 World Cup in France, where it fell to the host before drawing with Denmark and Saudi Arabia.
Bafana Bafana (The Boys) came second and third in the next two Cup of Nations and secured a second straight trip to the World Cup, beating Slovenia but failing to make the knockout phase.
The national football team drew 85,000 spectators to a pre-2010 World Cup friendly against Colombia in Soweto. Photo: AP
South Africa failed to build on those achievements, however, and the number of footballers from the republic playing in the major European leagues dwindled alarmingly.
Today, no South African commands a first team place in an English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A or German Bundesliga team.
The country is ranked 13th in Africa, behind nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Burkina Faso, who have far fewer resources and facilities.
"We were happy to be there and just wanted to learn," was the startling comment from midfielder Hlompho Kekana after a limp last-eight exit at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations.
Why, many South Africans wondered, is the national team still learning when it has been competing internationally for 27 years.
South Africa lifts Rugby World Cup - Tweets you have to see
Proud Mapimpi reflects on long journey to World Cup glory
Rugby World Cup: It's all about Erasmus' gameplan
Rugby World Cup 2019: Erasmus 'so proud' after South Africa stun England
South Africans hope Rugby World Cup win will bring brighter future

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Founded in 2001 to create a common scientific strategy while pursuing the aim of ecological sustainability, PEER is a network made up of the seven key environmental research centres in Europe.
The collaboration was ratified by a framework agreement signed on 25 June 2002 in Roskilde, Denmark, and renewed in 2007 and 2012. The members of PEER are mainly national and European public institutions working on basic and applied interdisciplinary research that focuses on environmental and social sciences, particularly human-nature interactions.
PEER centres employ approximately 5,000 engineers, researchers and other staff on an annual budget of approximately 430 million euros. They participate in key international networks and programmes and are involved in several projects funded by the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP).
PEER aims to establish itself as a European leader and confirm its position on a global scale by integrating knowledge and expertise in sustainable development, as well as promoting cross-disciplinary and innovative research that supports political decision makers, industry and society.


Very well located family home. Just 2 blocks from the Sportsplex, within sight of the Terrace Mountain Trailhead, this neighborhood is both central and peaceful. The home is spacious throughout, with space abounding for family and guests. Upstairs find the master, complete with ensuite, walk-in closet and plenty of room for your furniture. Three more large bedrooms and a full bath round out the upstairs. On the main, find a huge kitchen, ideal for entertaining and preparing meals. A formal living/dining area, a large family room, 3-piece bath and guest room. A solarium overlooks the backyard, which is complete with basketball court for the kids! Downstairs, a 4th bathroom, storage and a large rec space round out this fantastic home!


We are delighted that MultiChain is being integrated into the product offerings of many companies, whether they are startups or well-established enterprises. Below is a list of companies who are have requested to make this integration public. Please note that we do not explicitly endorse these companies or take responsibility for their products.
See also the separate list of platform partners who offer consulting services for the MultiChain platform.
Aicumen Technologies focuses on value creation in the digital economy by leveraging blockchain, cognitive technologies and IoT. Aicumen is creating a proprietary platform that brings together these technologies in a powerful manner.
Headquarters: Princeton, NJ. Markets served: US, Europe, Asia.
Apuana Corporate is the commercial brand name of a leading Italian manufacturer of marble goods. The company is using MultiChain together with a proprietary tracking system to enable end users to verify the provenance of raw materials and workmanship.
Headquarters: Carrara, Italy. Markets served: Global.
B4Finance is a regtech company offering AI and blockchain-based onboarding and KYC solutions for the wealth management and crypto industries.
Headquarters: Paris, France. Markets served: Europe.
Blockbinder from Chainfrog Oy is a middleware database connectivity product that uses MultiChain to traverse corporate low-trust boundaries and share data between existing databases and ERP systems. This enables a blockchain pilot to be deployed quickly, using legacy systems, without requiring blockchain expertise.
Headquarters: Espoo, Finland. Markets served: Global.
BmyBit is an automated social trading system.
Clicktopurchase is a platform for buying and selling property online, bringing buyers, bidders, sellers, agents and solicitors together. Events are recorded in a multi-node MultiChain blockchain with distributed nodes for transparency and certainty.
Headquarters: London. Markets served: UK and Ireland.
COVAL is a blockchain platform for movable value and enables secure p2p off-chain transport of digital crypto assets and wallets to any user namespace on any identity platform.
Headquarters: Raleigh, North Carolina. Markets served: Worldwide.
Headquarters: Cypress, California. Markets served: USA and International.
Election Explorer is a permissioned blockchain voting platform that guarantees perfect vote counts, verifiable votes and instant reporting.
Headquarters: San Francisco. Markets served: Global.
Encrypgen are building the Gene-Chain, a private blockchain for sharing genomic metadata and data. They sell nodes to labs, research hospitals and companies having genomic storage and sharing needs.
Headquarters: Coral Springs, Florida. Markets served: US, Europe, Latin America.
fuzoDNA enables organizations to effortlessly incorporate the blockchain into their systems and processes, providing full trust and visibility into the digital DNA of their business.
Headquarters: Cape Town, South Africa. Markets served: Africa, Europe.
Geoprise Technologies provides GM-X, a web application suite that combines proven blockchain technology with strong encryption for enterprise supply chain management, sales force automation, supplier relationship management and project and activity execution.
Headquarters: Minnetonka, Minnesota, USA. Markets served: Global.
Greenstage Lab is a fintech startup planning, designing and building a blockchain-based wallet and exchange.
HealthBlocks is a global health IT company with the vision of enabling universal healthcare. Their product suite enables efficient health records management for patients, doctors, hospitals and organizations.
Headquarters: Quezon City, Philippines. Markets served: South East Asia.
Hypatia Technologies offers "Compliance as a Service" to regulators and vendors in regulated industries.
Headquarters: Boca Raton, Florida. Markets served: Worldwide.
Medici Ventures advances blockchain technology through capital investment and software development in six fundamental areas: capital markets, money and banking, identity, land, voting and underlying technology.
Headquarters: Utah, USA. Markets served: Global.
NewBanking is developing an online tool to provide a simpler onboarding workflow for the financial sector and more. Their identity verification platform allows consumers to complete onboarding processes in a few clicks and provides full control and transparency over how personal data is used.
Headquarters: Copenhagen, Denmark. Markets served: Global.
Rights Chain provides artists with a simple tool to mark the date of birth of their artworks in a verifiable way, using multiple digital signature technologies and a blockchain.
Headquarters: London. Markets served: Worldwide, primarily EEC.
Rymedi aims to revolutionize the way highly regulated life sciences industries operate by integrating blockchain protocols, artificial intelligence and deep industry experience.
Headquarters: Raleigh, North Carolina. Markets served: Global.
SMaaS (Smart Migration as a Service) takes care of painful migrations to new technologies, to enable the business of tomorrow.
Headquarters: Santiago, Chile. Markets served: Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia.
Tagcash is an e-wallets and payments platform for fiat, cryptocurrences and private currencies.
Tilkal is a digital identity platform for physical products notarizing all supply chain events. With industry-centric permissioned blockchains and data at scale, we enable our customers to drive end-to-end transparency and detect illegitimate activities.
Headquarters: Paris, France. Markets served: Mostly European.
Wolfram Research is a powerhouse in technical innovation and has been defining the computational future for three decades as the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language. MultiChain is being integrated into the Wolfram Language and across the Wolfram family of products, enabling Wolfram Language users to write applications that make use of blockchain functionality.
Headquarters: Champaign, Illinois. Markets served: Global.
If you are building a product that works with MultiChain and wish to join the product partner program, please get in touch.


Program Director, Communication and Media, Humanities and Social Sci.
Christopher Funkhouser, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of humanities and director of the undergraduate program in professional and technical communication at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Funkhouser is the creator of a proto-anthology of hypermedia poetry and is completing his dissertation on the subject. He edited The Little Magazine Volume 21 CD-ROM, and is responsible for two on-line poetry and poetics journals: Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe and Passages. His work has recently appeared in Talisman, Hambone, and Callaloo. His hypertext, POETRY WEBS, was produced in conjunction with the 1996 European Media Arts Festival. Funkhouser's contributions to ebr are both found in the Electropoetics special (ebr5): The House of Poetry...:Recent Noticings*, and Poetry@The_Millennium: A Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.
Funkhouser was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in spring 2005 to travel to Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where he taught a course at Multimedia University entitled "Hypermedia Writing" focusing on the history of digital writing. He also led a creative multimedia workshop, a practice in which he has been involved for more than a decade. His research focused on database programming.
I am interested in poetry, digital literature, eletronic media, computer writing, digital literature, and technology nad society.
"Le(s) Mange texte(s) : Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry"
"Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)"
"Augusto de Campos, Digital Poetry, and the Anthropophagic Imperative"
"Le(s) Mange texte(s) : création cannibale et poésie numérique"
"A Vanguard Projected in Motion: Early Kinetic Poetry in Portuguese"
"E-Poetry 2003: An International Festival of Digital Poetry"


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Contact us for a no-obligation quotation or any enquiry about vehicle repairs. We will give u free expert advice.


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Mary Magdalene: The Truth of Mary Magdalene's Journey
Natalie: Recently I had the opportunity to visit the Grotte de la Sainte Baume which is a cave in the south of France where it is said that Mary Magdalene spent much of her time after the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. The cave is on the side of a mountain, and it takes about a 45mins steep walk through glorious and luscious woodland to reach this sacred place. Before entering the cave, I began to communicate with Mary Magdalene to discover the purpose of my visit and why I was being guided to visit the Grotto. Below is what I received, information that Mary Magdalene wanted to share not just with me, with everyone.
Mary Magdalene: It is an honour to connect with you, and I shower you in the vibrations of the Divine Goddess and Goddess Isis. Even as a child I wore the symbol of the Golden Serpent. A symbol of being initiated into the teachings of the Divine Feminine and Goddess Isis. I was and remain a High Priestess of Goddess Isis dedicated to the power, magic, and love of the purest form of the sacred Goddess. It was my training which paved my way to my union with Jesus as well as preparing me to continue the teachings shared with both of us, after his ascension. The teachings Jesus shared were born from love and given in love, they represented the union of the masculine and feminine vibrations of the Creator in harmony and oneness, awakening the same within all. During the times when Jesus shared his teachings, I would also receive the same downloads of energy and inspiration. As a representative of the Divine Feminine, I acted as an anchor, grounding the sacred energy into the Earth and consciousness of humanity.
It was after the ascension of Jesus that I was guided to continue to share the detailed teachings and healing practices I had received with others. One of my greatest purposes at that time was to share my wisdom with those devoted to the Goddess as they would retain the purity of the teachings while preserving them for generations to come. The divine directions and tasks given to me by the Creator seemed endless at that time. I was to develop the presence of the Goddess in many people so this energy may continue to nurture the world and the teachings of Jesus, as well as healing some devastation which occurred in humanity due to misunderstanding when Jesus left the Earth. I was to distribute energetic codes, templates, and healing as well as physical scrolls, objects, tools and crystals of spiritual value in certain sacred places. My purpose was to support the preservation and continuation of the healing and awakening Jesus had begun.
I had another very beautiful role, a role which everyday healed my heartbreak of physically losing Jesus, even though I understood the truth of the matter. This role encouraged me to be determined to achieve the tasks given to me by the Divine Creator while also filling my days with fun, love, and laughter. In my opinion, it is the most sacred role of a women, I was given the gift of being a mother. Sar'h was the creation of the Divine Creator to embody my energies as Mary Magdalene and Jesus' sacred vibrations; she really was the image of the union of us both in more ways than seemed possible. A sacred gift to the Earth and me. She carried many names, the Golden Chalice, the Golden Serpent and the Union of the Divine in Manifestation, to name a few.
Our destination, Sar'h and I, along with a few sisters of the light was France. Our purpose when arriving in the South of France was to begin the process of distributing the many sacred energetic and physical scrolls, tools and templates which had been placed in our possession. These were to be given to specific people and hidden in certain places to preserve their safety. We were greeted and supported by the members of a Goddess Isis Temple dedicated to the Divine Feminine. These women of such profound inner beauty supported our mission and later lead us to a space of sanctuary near their temple. Our sanctuary was a cave in the South of France known now as the Grotte de la St Baume. Sar'h was three years old when we arrived at our new home which was a hiding place for us and a space where I could continue to teach.
Natalie: During my time in the cave the presence of Mary Magdalene was very strong even though this area like a church now has been overseen for many years by monks. The Divine Feminine vibrations still remained within its energy. As Mary Magdalene appeared in my third eye before me, it was Sar'h whom she pushed forth to me. Sar'h seemed to me to be about twelve years old when Mary Magdalene was bringing her into my awareness. Mary Magdalene wanted Sar'h to share some of her insights into her life in the cave. I had never consciously met Sar'h before, so it was a new experience for me.
Sar'h shared some visions with me. The first being a procession of women dressed in white wearing the mark of the golden serpent walking up through the woodland to the cave. Sar'h told me that they came to visit them in the cave everyday bringing food and anything they needed. She said she enjoyed their visits as some of the initiates of the Goddess Isis Temple were of similar age to her or even younger, so she had time to talk and play with them before the daily ceremony lead by Mary Magdalene. She told me how she loved running through the woodland with her friends, like her they did not really know what the outside world was like, however, they enjoyed sharing stories of their inner plane experiences. Sar'h shared that she also enjoyed the daily ceremony held within the cave as it allowed her to see her mother at work, the power, grace and wisdom she exuded.
The second vision Sar'h shared with me was of herself during night time embraced in her mother's arms within the cave as her mother shared her memories of Jesus. She would ask her mother to share everything she knew about her father from his birth to his ascension. Sar'h said she loved these times the most as sometimes in those intimate moments of sharing with her mother her father would appear as an energetic form in the cave to share some time with them. Sar'h told me that she enjoyed living in the cave as she had everything she needed. I believe Mary Magdalene's sharing of Jesus' lifetime with Sar'h was her way of guiding Sar'h through her own initiations and preparing her for her adult life.
Mary Magdalene: After fifteen years when Sar'h was eighteen years old, I knew it was time to support Sar'h in the next stage of her life. I had known from the moment we arrived at the cave that in fifteen years time Sar'h and I would leave the safety of the cave and travel to a sacred Druid community in England. Our destination is now known as Glastonbury. I knew her purpose was to marry and remain with the Druid Community so our journey to England was both exciting as I knew a new life awaited Sar'h while also being heart breaking as I knew I would be making the journey back to France without her.
It was not long before Sar'h was in love and married to a soul who was deeply familiar to her, a soul she had journeyed with many lifetimes together. They had many children and a very blissful life. Sar'h took on the role of sharing the teachings of love passed down to her from her father and myself. Her healing powers were breathtakingly beautiful. Sar'h spent fifty years in Glastonbury. At the age of sixty-eight she journeyed to Scotland where she lived for the remained of her life passing over when she was around eighty years old.
I, Mary Magdalene returned to the South of France and lived out my days within the temple of Goddess Isis with the women who had cared for Sar'h and I for fifteen years. I no longer need to live in the cave to protect my daughter and ensure her safety, so I enjoyed my time surrounded by the beautiful souls of the temple. I visited the cave now and then when I felt that Jesus wanted to appear to me and share some time with me. I travelled a little around France. However I had completed my tasks given to me by the Divine Creator, so I was able to spend much time in peace and solitude, sometimes reliving my memories other times in deep communion with the Creator. I ascended leaving my body behind when I was around the age of one hundred.
I wanted to share the truth of my journey after the ascension of Jesus so we may connect on a deeper level, and so you may further access the truth of my being and soul.
I am Mary Magdalene


The following is a republished version of one of my first posts on this blog, updated here for those who may not be familiar with my Mindful Reflection workshops and writings. It was prompted by a recently podcast interview on the Present Moment website: listen here.
Ever since my Mindful Reflection Workshops started in 2002, students have asked me to write a summary of what I teach. They want a handbook for their own use. They also wanted something that would convey to their loved ones that what goes on in those ninety-minute sessions is not weirdly spiritual but utterly practical.
I determined to write reflectively about what I teach in everyday language. I wanted to avoid Buddhist jargon while using an entirely traditional structure. The result is It Begins with Silence, a guide to the teachings of the historical Buddha in just over a hundred pages.
I'd just completed a ten-week workshop and was on holiday in Cuba when the idea came to me to use the ancient Sanskrit style of verse and commentary. The verse, called the Essence, is terse; the commentary, in prose, goes over the same ground at length. There on the beach I composed ten sets of verse, and in the following year back home in Montreal I polished the verses and worked the commentary. The voice is more personal than classical, more reflective than conventional.
The book encapsulates a ten-week workshop, presenting the Buddha's teachings in modern terms while sticking closely to the traditional outline familiar to generations of Buddhists. It teaches the skills of concentration and insight and presents the four tasks, the five heaps and eightfold path, the two levels of truth and the development of loving kindness and compassion. It also rephrases the often misunderstood teachings of karma, detachment, wisdom and nirvana.
It Begins with Silence is neither dry philosophy nor a superficial gloss. Written in the same personal style as my memoir The Novice, it's designed for gradual contemplation — one sentence or paragraph at a time. The rhythm and voice is meditative, to trigger the very states of mind it describes. This isn't a passive read but an active engagement in self-discovery and personal freedom.
To learn more about or to purchase It Begins with Silence, see Guidebook in the Mindful Reflection Workshops menu over on the left. To learn what people are saying about the workshops, see the Feedback page.
Hi Stephen: I've had this book since it came out but I do have a hard time with it! I open the page and feel stuck. Do you have a suggestion on how to use it? I sometimes open a page at random. If feel bad because I haven't found a way to use this book yet!
Perhaps you're expecting something right off the bat; the book doesn't work like that. Let go of any expectations about what it can do for you and approach it instead with curiosity.
Try this: keep the book in your car. When you have to head out alone, read a sentence or paragraph first, so you can think about it as you drive. Remember: you don't have to read the chapters in order. Look at the Table of Contents on page v and pick the chapter title that seems to speak most closely to your present situation. Start with the commentary (the part that follows the verses) and see what happens. Don't read too much at a time. Put it down and let the thoughts penetrate your own. You don't have to agree with them — just think about them.
The voyage you're embarking on is one of discovery, not problem solving. The point isn't so much to answer your questions as to see where they lead, nor to acquire new knowledge but to gather evidence.
Stephen, it's great to see that you've got another book ready for us adoring fans — can't wait to read it! Especially with the approach of having it based on your workshops, that should make it extremely beneficial.


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Home Identity Theft/Fraud Government Identity Theft Is Dropping…Or Is It?
Government Identity Theft Is Dropping…Or Is It?
Eva Velasquez, President/CEO at the Identity Theft Resource Center
When consumers hear about identity theft, their minds may instantly go to their credit cards or their bank accounts. And to be honest, the overwhelming majority of identity theft crimes involve the fraudulent use of someone's financial accounts. But that doesn't mean that the other types of identity theft—like medical identity theft, child identity theft, or even criminal identity theft—aren't serious problems that can have lasting consequences for the victim.
One of the less talked about but increasingly common forms is government identity theft, and it's often misunderstood even by its victims. It occurs when a criminal uses someone's identity to gain employment, sign up for unemployment benefits or the SNAP program (more commonly known as food stamps, but is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), apply for disability benefits, or defraud other similar programs offered through the government. One of the most common crimes associated with government identity theft is tax refund fraud, which is such a lucrative crime that even notoriously violent street gangs have turned to sitting at computers and filing thousands of phony tax returns in order to make a profit.
Tax return fraud is a multi-billion dollar a year problem in the US, one that's only expected to get worse in the wake of record numbers of data breaches. The prevalence of this crime is what led to an unheard of spike in reports to the Identity Theft Resource Center's victim call center this year, with government identity theft calls reaching staggering percentages before slowly decreasing again.
But one of the all-too-easy mistakes to make with government identity theft is the notion that it's only a tax season problem. In the early months of the year, most victims reach out for help once they attempt to file their legitimate returns and are told someone has already filed using their information. Now that the mid-April deadline is well behind us, consumers can't let their guards down; this is the perfect time for scammers to contact taxpayers and pose as IRS agents, claiming the individual's returns weren't filed, weren't paid in full, or other plausible but fraudulent scenarios.
Of course, there's another truth to the decline in call percentage involving government identity theft. The ITRC has found that it's not that this crime has decreased so much, but more than other forms of identity theft have increased to the point that the percentage of calls is now skewed in favor of other types of crime. That means consumers can't be too cautious about protecting themselves from tax and other government fraud, even while having to be extra-vigilant about other forms of identity theft.
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Eva Casey Velasquez is the President/CEO at the Identity Theft Resource Center, a non-profit organization which serves victims of identity theft. Ms. Velasquez previously served as the Vice President of Operations for the San Diego Better Business Bureau and spent 21 years at the San Diego District Attorney's Office. The last 11 of those years were spent conducting economic crimes investigations, with a focus on consumer protection cases such as false advertising and unfair business practices.
An 87-Year-Old Woman and Her Purse
Parking Tickets and Other Violations
Five days a week wake up to the most current fraud article in your mailbox.


This afternoon Peoples' Symphony Concerts presented a brilliant chamber music program at Town Hall in Manhattan. Lise de la Salle, a marvelous young pianist, collaborated with string players from The Knights, a flexible chamber ensemble, to present a very "multicultural" program of music by Martinu, Mozart, Jedd Greenstein, Takemitsu, and Ravel.
Everything was impressively played, but what stays with me the most is the awesome Ravel Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello, performed with great passion by de la Salle and the Jacobsens – Colin (violin) and Eric (cello). There are many ways one can play this. I've heard it done with crystalline clarity and lightness, with classical grace, and with surging romanticism. This performance followed the romantic route, with big tone from all three players, and it really swept me away emotionally. What a great finale to the program!
The concert started with Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola by Bohuslav Martinu, performed by The Knights violinist Guillaume Pirard and violist Kyle Armbrust. This is not an easy work to penetrate. "Madrigals" as a title suggests something archaic and lyrical, but I don't think one could use either of those words to characterize these pieces, which I found quite enigmatic. Then Pirard and Armbrust were joined on the stage by Eric Jacobsen and de la Salle for a dynamic performance of an old favorite, Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478, which I've known and loved since I was a teenager. This brought out a great feeling of nostalgia for me. This is definitely one of Mozart's finest chamber music pieces, one great tune after another, played by these musicians with enthusiasm and technical precision.
The second half of the concert was planned as one continuous span with no real break between the pieces. First was Greenstein's "Be There" for violin and piano, this time with Colin Jacobsen and de la Salle. The piece is a moderately-paced moto perpetuo, a long lyrical line unfolding as if in one long breath, dying down at the end as Jacobsen wandered away from the piano to a separate music stand to join Pirard in Takemitsu's "Rocking Mirror Daybreak" for the two violins. I found this piece the most difficult to penetrate, having a hard time finding any sort of thematic line running through it. As it faded away, de la Salle began the Ravel Trio as Colin Jacobsen returned to sit next to Eric in time for the first sustained notes of that piece.
This was certainly one of the most memorable Peoples' Symphony Concerts programs I've heard, and I hope they will continue to include such imaginative chamber music programs on their series. In structure it was somewhat like the Music from Marlboro programs, presenting contrasting chamber works for different combinations of instruments on one program — also like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and I think this is an ideal way to present chamber music. Town Hall is also an excellent venue for this, with excellent acoustics and great sight lines from anywhere in the house. Large enough to hold an substantial audience, yet intimate enough to capture the sense of closeness on which chamber music thrives….
This afternoon the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio performed a concert at Manhattan's Town Hall under the auspices of Peoples' Symphony Concerts. This group has performed frequently at PSC, and their return is always welcome. Since the retirement of the Beaux Arts Trio, they are probably the preeminent piano trio currently performing.
I was a bit put off prospectively by the conservatism of their program. This program could have been given over 120 years ago: Beethoven's Kakadu Variations, Op. 121a, Brahms's Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 87, and Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio, Op. 50. On the other hand, this group brings together three masters of their instruments who really know how to play the "classics" with panache.
I've always been bored by Beethoven's Kakadu Variations. This performance, while more than merely proficient, didn't get me any more excited about the piece. The Brahms was fluent and energetic, about what I would expect from these performers. Satisfying without being extraordinary.
But the Tchaikovsky was something else again. I have long thought that this piece was among the composer's least successful. It is in two long movements. The first, "Pezzo elegiac," has always struck me as awfully repetitious, over-extended, and not as inspired as, for example, his first string quartet. The second, a theme & variations with an extended coda, just seems to go on and on. Tchaikovsky was not a great writer of variations, and many of them have struck me in the past as quite ordinary.
I have to say that all my preconceptions based on past hearings of the piece went out the window with today's performance. All three musicians seemed to really love this piece, and they were totally on fire this afternoon! It was gripping. Although I still felt the piece was overextended in both movements, I found that I didn't really care because I was enjoying their passionate engagement with the music so much. I wanted it to keep going on!
These folks have been around a long time. One of the first LP's I bought as a teenager was Jaime Laredo's debut concerto recording for RCA of Bach's 1st Violin Concerto (with Munch and the Boston Symphony strings) and Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto (with Howard Mitchell and the Washington National Symphony). And when I bought it, it was already a budget reissue. Another early LP acquisition was a Kalichstein recital on Vanguard's mid-price Cardinal label. Old-time record collectors from the 1960's may remember these recordings. One might think that these senior folks would provide slow, laid-back performances. But nothing of the sort. Bright tempi, passionate engagement, real vigor marked this afternoon's concert. Great going, guys!! Thanks for bringing them back this year, PSC!
Actually, I've never been let down by any Music from Marlboro Ensemble presented by Peoples' Symphony Concerts over the years, but the group that performed at Washington Irving High School on Saturday, April 26, 2014, was about the best I've heard. The core group was a string quartet made up of violinists Itamar Zorman and Robin Scott, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Brook Speltz. The normal procedure at the Marlboro Music Festival summer program is to form chamber ensembles made up of several young musicians and a respected veteran. In this case, the veteran, Samuel Rhodes, is a longtime member of the Juilliard String Quartet. The ensembles then spend their summer developing their interpretation and performance of several substantial repertory pieces, and the best groups are sent out on tour during the regular concert season. Introducing this program, Peoples' Symphony Manager Frank Salomon indicated that the directors of Marlboro had especially praised the performances of the Berg Lyric Suite and the Dvorak Piano Quintet (with pianist Cynthia Raim) that were presented by this ensemble during the summer festivals of the past few years. And I can hear why!
I found the performance of the Berg Lyric Suite by the string quartet to be absolutely revelatory! I have heard recordings of this piece, but had never encountered it in counter before. Despite its early date of composition – 1926 – it is hardly an easy nut for an early 21st century audience to crack, as it emanates from the height of the 12-tone compositional madness of the 2nd Viennese School propagated by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg frequently said, however, that the music of himself and his colleagues would eventually find its place once musicians had figured out how to play it! And these kids, abetted by Rhodes, have figured it out. This was a passionately convinced performance that made music of what in other hands can just sound like random discords. Somebody should get these folks into a recording studio pronto! I found the performance totally absorbing and convincing as music, which is saying a lot for this piece.
They began with Joseph Haydn's Quartet in Bb, Op. 50, No. 1 (1787), which was up to Haydn's high technical standards of composition but did not strike me as particularly inspired in terms of melody and development. Some of the Haydn quartets, even in the best of hands, can be rather plain sounding, as this one was. The performers made the most that can be made of it, I think, but it was quickly forgotten in the excitement of the Berg.
These string player meshed so well that I would encourage them to find a violist of their own generation and form a permanent ensemble!
This was the last concert of the season of Peoples' Symphony's Arens Series at Washington Irving. It has been a splendid season, overall. I missed a few of the programs, unfortunately, but I always either find a substitute to go in my place or donate the ticket back to PSC. Two very memorable concerts on this series were the piano recitals by Alexandre Tharaud and Jeremy Denk, first rate performers who made the most of the opportunity to bring music to the masses in the democratic context of PSC – low prices in a fine high school auditorium with excellent acoustics. Any chamber music lover in NY who is not attending these concerts is missing a really good thing.
Tonight Jeremy Denk presented an intriguing piano recital as part of the Arens Series of Peoples' Symphony Concerts, presented at Washington Irving High School's nicely-refurbished auditorium. Denk presented an eclectic program of Mozart, Ligeti, Byrd and Schumann.
As a long-time attender of Peoples' Symphony programs, I feel like I've watched Denk grow up at the keyboard, since he has appeared several times over the years. Now a mature artist, he hasn't lost that childlike wonder and excitement that make his performances of even the most mainstream repertory seem fresh and newly-conceived. Indeed, although he is clearly playing all the notes with great facility and has thought through exactly what he wants to do, there is an air of improvisation about his work that helps to bring the music to startling life.
He began with Mozart's Sonata in F Major, K. 533/494, a piece patched together from two unrelated manuscripts. I thought the first movement was just too fast at many points, but maybe that's just me. No matter how fast, everything was cleanly rendered, but I think things just don't "sound" if they are played too fast. I had no such complaint about the remaining movements. This performance struck me as a bit old-fashioned, in the sense that it was a large-scale dramatic rendition using the full dynamic range and coloristic capabilities of the piano, far beyond what would have been available to Mozart. The "historically informed practice" people would undoubtedly not approve, but I find that I enjoy performances of old music that break from such strictures… and perhaps ask what Mozart would have done with the capacities of a 21st century concert grand?
Denk is a master of the Ligeti Etudes. Tonight he gave us a selection of six from Book Two, having decided after the program was printed to drop one of the seven that were listed. He plays them with great energy and enthusiasm for ultimate dynamic contrast and rhythmic excitement, although the final one he selected ended calmly, perhaps to create a symmetry with the second half of the program.
After intermission, we had a brief piece by William Byrd from "My Ladye Nevelles Booke" and, as with the Mozart, Denk made no concessions to the age of the music, giving a very pianistic rendition that was quite beautiful in its graceful lyricism.
Finally — and definitely the highlight of the evening for me — Robert Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze, Op. 6, a collection of 18 highly contrasted character pieces, with some recurring motifs, that were constantly fascinating in Denk's very personalized approach. As noted above, a particular feature of his playing is creating an air of spontaneity, even improvisation, but in performances that are technically impeccable and so clearly carefully thought out. I hope he will record this piece before long, understanding that any recording would be a mere snapshot of his constantly evolving conception, but it is at present a conception worth preserving.
Denk's recently-released recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations is a spectacular success, and he favored us with one of the variations as an encore.
This was undoubtedly one of the most satisfying programs of this year's Peoples' Symphony series. It was worth the price of the entire subscription and more.
The first two weeks of March have been quite busy, and again I've fallen behind in posting about my concert-going experiences. So here is a quick catch-up.
I had a double-header on Saturday, March 1, attending the Metropolitan Opera's production of Prince Igor in the afternoon, and a piano recital by Alexandre Tharaud at Peoples' Symphony Concerts in the evening.
The Met's new production of Prince Igor, produced an designed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, takes a new approach to this unfinished opera by Alexander Borodin. When Borodin died, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov picked up the pieces and, with the assistance of Alexander Glazunov, put together an opera using much of Borodin's material and some that Rimsky and Glazunov composed. The overture, for example, was reconstructed by Glazunov from memories of Borodin playing it at the piano, in the absence of any surviving manuscript. In this form the opera made its appearance around the world, but never really won full status in the standard operative repertory, although the Polovtsian Dances, extracted by Rimsky as a concert suite, achieved wide performance in symphony concerts, and the opera was heavily raided for the Broadway musical, Kismet. For this new Met production, Tcherniakov, in collaboration with conductor Gianandrea Noseda and composer Pavel Smelkov (who handled new orchestrations) went back to Borodin's original and put together an opera that leaves behind the new material composed by Rimsky and Glazunov. We are assured in the program book that virtually all the music we were hearing was by Borodin, although he had some help in fleshing things out orchestrally. This process required dropping some scenes that had become familiar, and reordering the remainder. Tcherniakov imposed on the work a new logic and sequence of action, making it more of an interior exploration of the mind of Prince Igor, a minor noble whose attempt to vanquish the Polovtsian tribe's invasion of Russian space was unsuccessful.
It is an interesting experiment. Borodin's music continues to cast its spell, in whatever order it is played, and Noseda conducts a compelling performance by an illustrious Russian cast, with Ildar Abdrazakov an outstanding Igor and Oksana Dyka stunning as his long-suffering wife. As to the production itself, I register my continuing protest against taking historically based operas and resetting them in times other than those contemplated by the composer. Borodin would have expected, as a 19th century composer, that performances of his opera would be staged with sets and costumes suitable for a story taking place in 12th century Eurasia. But here we had on stage soldiers in early 20th century uniforms carrying rifles. We had officers dressed in uniforms that seemed to be from various periods from the late 19th century through Soviet-style uniforms of what might be the 1930s. We had electric light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. We had industrial fixtures suggesting an early 20th century setting. And we had some confusion as well, with a plot summary in the program that is not entirely helpful in explaining what is flashback, what is present, what is taking place in Igor's imagination or dreams, what is actually happening. I found the third act particularly confusing, as one unit set was apparently intended as the interior of Igor's palace in Putivl, but some of the action seems to be taking place elsewhere. Is this in Igor's mind? That occurs to me as an explanation, but didn't as I was watching the scene unfold.
I think the production is a musical success, but I hope that if the Met decides to restage it in the future, they might try to clarify things a bit in the plot summary and maybe even add some explanatory material to the surtitles displayed on the seatbacks.
Despite the odd decisions about how to costume them, I thought the Met chorus (and interloping supernumeraries) were superbly deployed, and the dancers in the Act II dream sequence ballet, played to the Polovtsian Dances, were superb as well.
On to Peoples' Symphony Concerts at Washington Irving High School for Alexandre Tharaud's March 1 recital of music by Schumann, Schubert, Mahler and Beethoven. This was a real attempt at casting against type. Tharaud is mainly known from his recordings and prior appearances as an expert performer in the French piano repertory, with some excursions into Chopin and Scarlatti. But on this occasion he focused on completely different repertory – Austro-German romanticism – with Schumann's "Scenes from Childhood" suite, Op. 15, Schubert's 4 Impromptus, D. 899, Tharaud's solo piano arrangement of the Adagietto movement from Mahler's Symphony No. 5, and Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata (Op. 57). It's two weeks later as I write this and I can remember all the encores, but I recall that one was a sonata by Scarlatti. Tharaud played with the expected clarity and authority, but I felt that some of his interpretive choices were a bit off, including some overemphasis of inner voices and bass lines at the expense of stylistic coherence. The Mahler transcription didn't work for me. Mahler thought orchestrally in his symphonies and the Adagietto in a keyboard arrangement came across to me as clunky and percussive, totally out of character. Maybe I was just tired after the long afternoon with Borodin, but I was not as enthusiastic as I expected to be. I am a huge admirer of Tharaud's work from his recordings, but the recital let me down a bit.
It was back to the Metropolitan Opera on March 5 for the revival of The Enchanted Island, a Baroque pastiche opera assembled especially for the Met by Jeremy Sams, drawing plot elements from Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and music drawn mainly from works of Handel with interpolated material by Vivaldi, Rameau, Campra, Leclair, Purcell, Rebel and Ferrandini. I loved this when I attended the world premiere on New Year's Eve 2011 with William Christie conducting, but I thought the current revival fell a bit flat with Patrick Summers on the podium and slight changes in the cast. One thing that did not change was the excellent supporting part of Neptune sung by Placido Domingo, who really commands the stage. David Daniels' voice seemed a bit submerged by the orchestra. I had particularly bought a ticket of this to see Anthony Roth Costanzo, one of my favorite young countertenors, but I had forgotten how tiny the role of Ferdinand is in this production. One waits for hours, and then Costanzo pops up right towards the end, singing briefly, but beautifully costumed. Indeed, the triumph of this production is in the sets and costumes. But this time around the production didn't hold my interest to the degree it had at the premiere. In light of the many empty seats I saw on a Wednesday night, I suspect the Met will not be in a hurry to bring this one back.
The next night, March 6, I was in Carnegie Hall for a performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis by the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Oratorio Society of New York, with vocal soloists Susan Gritton, Julie Boulianne, Michael Schade and Nathan Berg, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington, whose specialty is historically informed performance of Baroque, Classical and early Romantic music. In line with Norrington's approach, the string players large eschewed vibrato, tempi veered towards extremes of slow and (more frequently fast), phrasing was a bit clipped at times, dynamics a bit exaggerated. Nothing can really sink the Missa Solemnis, one of the greatest creations of one of the greatest musical geniuses, but I did not feel and lift and thrill that I had experienced when I heard John Eliot Gardner lead period forces in a performance at Avery Fisher Hall several years ago. It felt like Norrington had some emotional distance from the music — music that was very emotional on Beethoven's part, and that his performing forces — that is, chorus and orchestra, not soloists — were a bit overmatched by the challenges this piece presents. The chorus was, in short, too large — either that, or the orchestra was too small. Well over 100 choristers were listed in the program, and it was quite a crowd assembled on the stage. This is not a full-time professional chorus, and Beethoven's writing for the chorus in this piece is generally acknowledged to be very demanding. They gave it a good try, but they lacked the polish to carry it all off convincingly. St. Luke's is a highly proficient group, but one cannot adequately balance such a huge chorus with a chamber orchestra in this piece and expect to make the desired effects. The string body was just too small, and sounded even smaller than usual without using vibrato to thicken the tone. They also seemed quite scrappy in the big fugal passages. Not even a near miss, in my opinion.
Now for something completely different. I was visiting in Houston, Texas, on the weekend, to spend time with my Mom and my Houston relatives (brother and sister-in-law, nephew and his growing family with two toddlers in tow, and niece). Arrangements were made by my brother for us to attend the Houston Symphony Orchestra's March 8 program at Jesse Jones Hall. I'd never been in that hall before, to the best of my recollection, and I was very impressed. Better sight-lines than Avery Fisher, and acoustics to rival Carnegie. We were sitting in the rear orchestra, under the balcony overhang, but I felt no diminution of high pitched sounds (as one experiences in the Dress Circle at Carnegie or rear orchestra in Avery Fisher). This room fans out rather than being the severe rectangle of Avery Fisher or the traditional shape of Carnegie, and the result is sonically distinguished.
The Houston Symphony is currently "between" music directors, Hans Graf having retired and a new young man slated to begin next fall. The season includes a progression of guests, but they decided to experiment with something different for this concert, dispensing with a conductor, although concertmaster Frank Huang supervised the preparations and led from the first chair (or, in the Piazzolla, standing in the center as soloist). Apart from a handful of woodwind players and a harpsichordist in the opening Haydn Symphony No. 39, all the musicians on stage were string players. The experiment was a success; they played well together without a conductor. The Haydn is a nondescript early symphony that received a vigorous but forgettable performance. But then, with Astor Piazzolla's 4 Seasons of Buenos Aires concerti, we were in memorable territory. The composer incorporates tango rhythms into classical forms for four brief concerti intended to suggest the various seasons in a South American city. Although most of the solo work was assigned to concertmaster Huang, there were brief solos allotted to some of the other musicians as well. The players obviously enjoyed this piece, getting into the swing of things and sporting wide grins at times reflecting their pleasure in the music. After intermission came a sumptuous performance of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. I've heard several performances of this in recent years, but always played by chamber orchestras, and it was a completely different and agreeable experience to hear it played by a large, well-disciplined orchestra string section. The Houston Symphony strings sounded great.
Upon returning to New York, I found myself in the midst of Carnegie Hall's Vienna City of Dreams Festival, with my subscription ticket for the Vienna Philharmonic's March 13 concert, led by guest conductor Andris Nelsons, who is scheduled to take over as music director of the Boston Symphony in the fall. In keeping with the Festival theme, the program was entirely made up of music associated with Vienna – a symphony by Haydn, two works by Brahms, and encore by Johann Strauss Jr. (The orchestra telegraphed the inevitability of an encore by having a harp on the stage during the second half, when the only work listed on the program did not require that instrument.) Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 90 incorporates a joke on the audience, which almost never fails to succeed. The last movement has a false ending followed by a pause, during which the audience applauds. The conductor waves to cut off the applause and starts things up again, leading to the real ending. It may seem obvious, but this symphony is not played with any great frequency, so audiences are always fooled, apart from a handful of those who correctly interpret the program notes or quickly register before they can applaus that the conductor has not dropped his arms. In a canny bit of linkage, the Haydn Symphony was followed by Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, thus providing a stylistic bridge to the second half's performance of Brahms's Symphony No. 3. We don't hear the Haydn Variations that much in concert, apart from the occasional all-Brahms festival, but it is a marvelous piece compromised by its length. (Modern U.S. symphony concert programs tend to eschew short orchestra pieces – this one runs just over a quarter hour – in favor of "big" symphonies and concerti, reserving the "short piece" slot for something contemporary. Our loss, since we miss out on hearing the huge repertory of romantic overtures, tone poems and suites that were common in programs from early in the 20th century.) The 3rd Symphony is the most difficult to bring off; tempo selection in the first movement is tricky, and it ends quietly so conductors don't like to use it to end a concert. On the other hand, it is the most concise and intimate of the Brahms symphonies, and when it works, it's just terrific.
I think it is difficult to judge an orchestra when it is not playing in its home hall and is being led by a guest conductor. It is hard to know whether what one is hearing has more to do with the leadership on the podium and the acoustic of a strange hall than with the intrinsic strengths and weaknesses of the ensemble. I had a sense throughout the concert that the VPO was a very talented orchestra that fell short of the highest standards we tend to expect from orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, or the Philadelphia Orchestra, to name three major orchestra that perform frequently in New York. By contrast, the VPO sounded to me less precise, less colorful, less well-blended. I have trouble getting past the principal oboe sound (presented by different players in the two halves of the concert), which sets the tone for an orchestra, and which — perhaps by Vienna tradition — is thinner, more piercing, and less rich than the sound cultivated by principal oboe players in U.S. orchestras. Indeed, all the woodwinds have a distinctive sound that seems to me less rich, less legato, more idiosyncratic. Perhaps part of the issue for me is the lack of "hybrid vigor" in an orchestra like the VPO. This appeared to be an all-Caucasian group, overwhelmingly male, and by repute most of the players were students of VPO members before gaining admission to the orchestra. There is a feeling of an inbred traditional style of playing. Perhaps this means that what was presented last night sounded more like what Brahms would have heard at performances of his orchestra music in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century than one would hear from the U.S. orchestra. But I couldn't help noting the extraordinary contrast with the NY Philharmonic, where the string sections have a heavy representation of Asian musicians — mainly women — and women are also well-represented in the wind sections. Last night, there was only one woman on the stage playing a wind instrument, the second oboe during the Brahms Symphony, and during the first half of the concert, there could not have been more than 5 or 6 women on the stage, none in the basses or violas or cellos, and a handful in the violin sections. I found myself thinking several times that this orchestra needed some livening up!! They played well, they gave the conductor what he was asking for, but I was not totally enthusiastic about the results.
Probably the best playing of the night came with the encore, "Seid umschlunger Millionen" Waltzes, Op. 443, by Johann Strauss II. No announcement was made, leaving audience members around me puzzled, apart from guessing that it was by Johann Strauss, as this is not one of the more familiar Strauss waltz sequences. Of course, Carnegie identifies encores after the event on their website under the calendar entry for the concert….
It is also difficult to judge a conductor based on a guest-conducting stint, and I've little past experience with Maestro Nelsons, who has generated a big reputation from his work on European podiums and recordings. He produced a coherent statement in the Brahms symphony, and that is an achievement, since it is the most difficult of the four. The Haydn Variations were well-characterized, the Haydn symphony was memorable. We will hear more of him when he is regularly conducting the Boston Symphony in its Carnegie Hall visits, and I'm looking forward to that opportunity.
My second half of March begins tonight with a 5 Boroughs Music Festival concert of French baroque music in Queens, tomorrow's NY Philharmonic Nielsen concert, a Peoples' Symphony program Sunday afternoon with the Dover Quarter and Leon Fleisher, and a return to Carnegie Sunday night for the grand finale of the Vienna Philharmonic's Festival residency – a three-hour marathon survey of Viennese music led by Zubin Mehta, centered on Gil Shaham playing the Korngold Violin Concerto. It will be quite a music-heavy weekend, on which I will report when it is all over.
January 29, I attended Atlantic Theater Company's production of "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," a play based on a short story by Alan Sillitoe adapted for the stage by Roy Williams and directed by Leah C. Gardiner. This story achieved a fair amount of fame as a result of a movie based on the story that made a splash decades ago. This production puts a different slant on the story by having an extraordinary young black actor, Sheldon Best, played the lead role which Tom Courtenay, a white actor, played in the film. The essence of the story is that a young, somewhat aimless tough guy gets caught in a robbery and sent to a reformatory, where his talent for running is discovered and leads to his extended training for a long-distance race against students from a private school. He is encouraged in this by the authorities of the reformatory, including one particular counselor, but conflict emerges from his fear that he is being "used" and, ultimately, this leads him to make a difficult and controversial decisions as the end of the race draws near. I thought this staging was superb, and the performance by Sheldon Best was pure magic. According to the bio in the program Best is a graduate of Brandeis University and has already performed in a wide variety of stage productions both in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., ranging from classical theater (Romeo & Juliet, playing Romeo, at the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival) to the most contemporary stuff, like a production of The History Boys. He's also been on CBS TV's "Person of Interest." Be on the lookout for him. Very impressive! The rest of the cast was fine, too, but Best really stood out.
The American Symphony Orchestra presented "This England" at Carnegie Hall on January 31. The program was intended to show a range of British music from mid-20th century by composers whose music is infrequently encountered on American concert programs. None of the music could be deemed totally neglected — I have recordings of everything on the program — but I had never heard any of it performed live prior to this concert directed by Leon Botstein. They began with a suite from Sir Arthur Bliss's music for the British film "Things to Come", which was based on work of George Orwell. This was the most "listener-friendly" piece on the program, as one would expect from a 1934-35 film score, falling close to the category of "easy listening" and being at times so simple-minded that I found my own attention wandering. Frank Bridge's Phantasm (Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, 1932) followed, with the excellent Piers Lane as soloist. Lane has been a mainstay of Hyperion Records' Romantic Piano Concerto series, and has a serious interest in unusual repertory for his instrument. The Bridge piece has moments of interest, but using the word "rhapsody" to describe a piece can frequently be a sign of formlessness and sprawl, and such was the case here. Lots of interesting moments, but they didn't add up to a really coherent musical statement. After intermission, we heard Robert Simpson's "Volcano," a brief tone poem for brass and percussion which is avowedly pictorial and which did not hold much interest for me. I first became aware of Simpson as a leading biographer of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen as well as being an important Bruckner scholar, and over the years I've acquired recordings of most of him symphonies and other major pieces. I wish the ASO had played a symphony instead, because I found those to be works of great substance, but the length of this program limited them to a shorter piece. Finally, the one real masterpiece on the program, William Walton's Symphony No. 2, which I have long enjoyed on records and despaired of ever hearing in live performance (unless I happen to travel to England and really luck out with the concert schedule). I love this piece, but I was really let down by the ASO performance, which I found underpowered and lacking the requisite virtuosity from the orchestra. Whether this is a function of limited rehearsal time, the leadership from the podium, or the limitations of the players (who don't have the kind of full-time working relationship of an orchestra that plays together week in and week out) is hard to say, but, especially compared to my favorite recording by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, this one seemed to lack impact. Szell takes everything faster, which keeps the occasionally loose structure from falling apart and gives sharper point to the complex rhythms. There is a big fugal passage in the last movement that is a highpoint of the piece, but the ASO strings seemed to be struggling to stay together during that episode, which the Cleveland strings take in their stride in the recording. I would urge anybody who was at the concert and hearing the Walton symphony for the first time to withhold judgment until you've heard a recording by a major orchestra. I don't know if the Szell is still in print – it was a 1960s Columbia stereo that achieved brief CD reissue, coupled with the composer's Hindemith Variations (another fine work almost never played) and the Partita for Orchestra. We really should hear more Walton in U.S. concert halls. I would love to hear what Alan Gilbert and the NYP would do with this piece. I would also highly recommend Walton's Symphony No. 1, especially in the old RCA recording by Andre Previn and the London Symphony, which has been intermittently available on CD.
On February 2, I was back at Carnegie Hall for a performance of George Frideric Handel's oratorio "Theodora" by conductor Harry Bicket, the Choir of Trinity Church, and The English Concert, an early music ensemble, with soloists Dorothea Roschmann as Theodora, Sarah Connolly as Irene, David Daniels as Didymus, Kurt Streit as Septimius, and Neal Davies as Valens. This is a tale of Roman times, when the governor of Antioch is trying to stamp out the heresy of Christianity. Theodora is a proud Christian who will not be swayed to honor the gods of Rome, and Didymus is a Roman soldier secretly in love with Theodora (and secretly a Christian). Tragedy ensues, at great length. (This three-act oratorio, when performed uncut, is as long as a Wagner opera, and some impatience in the audience express itself in early departures, especially during the second intermission.) Theodora was not a success at its first performance. The program note by Janet Bedell suggest that the subject matter had something to do with this, mid-18th century Brits having little interest in works celebrating early Catholic martyrs, but I suspect it is also the heaviness of the last act and the absence of the more rousing elements – especially choral – that made such works as Judas Maccabeus and Messiah such monster hits in the composer's lifetime. In any event, this was all-star casting with expert direction from the podium, spot-on choral singing, and an instrumental group that provided a rich, colorful framework for the vocal acrobatics. I found it totally absorbing through the entire, lengthy proceeding. But I rather suspect this is a piece that would work best on recordings, where one could take it one act at a sitting and not be overwhelmed by its length.
Looking for an extremely unusual and effective theatrical experience? Imagine Tolstoy's great novel "War and Peace," stripped of the war scenes, leaving only the soap opera of the home front, transformed into a rock musical, played in large space decked out in the style of a Russian night club, with musicians and singers distributed throughout the space, the singers in constant motion, threading their way through the space and around platforms surrounding the audience. This is "Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812," currently playing at Kazino, a large tent-like structure raised on a vacant lot on West 45th Street near 8th Avenue. The adaptation and music is by David Malloy, as directed by Rachel Chavkin and commissioned and developed by an outfit called Ars Nova. It is super-fine, and super-charged, and loads of fun. The program book and production are designed to help the audience quickly sort out the numerous characters and their relations to each other, and then the fun begins. Some of the members of the cast play musical instruments from time to time, and there is singing and much athletic running about. The title characters are played by David Abeles (Pierre) and Phillipa Soo (Natasha), but the character who emerges as the most memorable and central to the plot is Anatole, a Polish aristocrat played by Lucas Steele who is the brother-in-law of Pierre and who makes it his goal to seduce his friend Andrey Bolkonsky's fiancé, Natasha, while Bolkonsky is off with the Russian army fighting the forces of Napoleon. Lucas Steele as Anatole is HOT, HOT, HOT. And I don't mean just because he is handsome and talented; I mean because he radiates an intensity that is positively electrical. He's helped in this by the plotting and dialogue, of course, but Mr. Steele is ideally cast in this part. Also quite effective: Blake Delong in the dual role of Andrey Bolkonsky and his father; Nick Choksi as the saturnine Dolokhov, Grace McLean as Natasha's aunt Marya, Amber Gray is Helene, wife of Pierre and sister of Anatole, and Brittain Ashford as Sonya, Natasha's cousin and confidant. But everybody is truly excellent in this, and conductor Or Matias keeps it all together and constantly driving forward. It's a long show, even without the war scenes (yes, a War and Peace without General Kutuzov or Napoleon Bonaparte), but it never seems long because the staging is so lively and absorbing. A total hit that should run forever… I was there on February 5.
Interesting coincidence. Sid Caesar, the great TV comedian of the 1950s, passed away the other day, just as City Center Encores! was reviving a show that was written specifically for his talents, "Little Me" – book by Neil Simon (who wrote for Caesar's TV shows), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, and music by Cy Coleman. The show is based on a novel by Patrick Dennis (famous for "Mame") which purports to be the autobiography of the great fictional entertainer Belle Poitrine, reminiscing about her life and loves (all seven of her loves, some of whom she even married). In the original production, Caesar portrayed all seven, requiring quick costume changes and changes or characterization (appearance, gestures, costumes), of which he was a master. Although the show was a success, it was not a big hit and faded from view after its initial run. This revival cast Christian Borle, star of the ill-fated "Smash" TV series and Tony winner for Peter and the Star-Catchers on Broadway, playing all the Sid Caesar roles with great success. Veteran Judy Kaye was superb as the elderly Belle, reflecting on her past, and Rachel York was stunning as the young Belle. The cast was packed with excellent people, as is the norm for Encores!, with the extraordinary dancers being a special highlight. Somehow, choreographer Joshua Bergasse managed to recruit an outstanding crew. (Bob Fosse was the original choreographer for the Broadway production.) Rob Berman led the excellent Encores! orchestra, and John Rando created a production that managed to feel complete even without any elaborate sets or many props. I'm glad to have had a chance to hear a live performance of this piece. It's not a great work – Cy Coleman went on to do many extraordinary shows – but many of the songs are quite attractive, and I'm inspired to go back to the original cast album.
I attended the matinee performance of "Little Me" on February 8, and topped off the evening with an excellent program at Peoples' Symphony Concerts, which presented the conductor-less East Coast Chamber Orchestra at Washington Irving High School. ECCO was started by a bunch of Curtis Institute students who enjoyed playing together and wanted to keep doing so after going their various professional ways. Now several years out of school, they are members of major symphony orchestras, established chamber ensembles, but make a commitment to come together a few times a year to rehearse a program and present it in various venues, including PSC now for several years. Their performances are always a highlight of the series. They are a true democracy, rotating seats so that everybody gets a change to play first-desk and to deal with solo passages at some point. They are also innovative in programming, mixing new music with established repertory. For this program, they gave a stylish rendition of Mozart's Divertimento in B, K. 137, followed by the NYC premiere of David Ludwig's "Virtuosity: Five Microconcertos for String Orchestra," Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1, Judd Greenstein's Four on the Floor, a string arrangement of a motet by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (an Italian Renaissance master), and concluding with a string orchestra rendition of Ravel's String Quartet. The entire program was wonderful because of the total commitment and high technical skill of the players, as well as their collective interpretive insights. The Ludwig piece gave the first desk in each section a chance to shine in solo passages, and they truly shone. I found both Ludwig and Greenstein were worth hearing, challenging in some respects but not straying too far from the mainstream of tonal contemporary composition. The arrangement of the Satie, originally a piano piece, for string orchestra by a former member of ECCO, Michi Wiancko, superbly captured the piece's mystery. I've heard Debussy's orchestration of this piece, which also uses some wind instruments, but this all-string arrangement was fine, with the inspired idea of having the theme assigned to different sections rather than keeping it in the heights as the piano version might suggest. Hearing a rich string orchestra sound transformed the Ravel Quartet into a much "bigger" statement without losing any of the delicacy and gossamer of the quieter passages. I would account this concert a total success.
Finally, and a bit off the beaten path, on February 9, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, NYC's LGBT synagogue, presented its annual "Shabbat Shirah" concert at Merkin Hall. This year the program was a tribute to CBST member William Finn, a prominent member of the Broadway community whose musicals have brought LGBT issues into the mainstream, especially through his three early shows that were combined to make up Falsettos. For this occasion, Finn helped to assembly a group of performers who have taken part in various productions of his shows, with a fine young pianist, Joshua Zecher-Ross, as musical director, and Shakina Nayfack as overall director. The result was a marvelous program that ranged over Finn's achievements, including selections from the Falsetto shows, Stars of David, Elegies, A New Brain, LIttle Miss Sunshine, Royal Family (a work in progress), and Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was a one-of-a-kind event that could not be topped, especially when one includes Mr. Finn's performance of a song conceived for the occasion!
So, my past few weeks were packed with cultural events. This week has provide a bit of a break, but my cultural calendar resumes Saturday night at Lincoln Center's American Songbook series with a concert by Jonathan Groff, whose work on "Spring Awakening" caught my attention and whose current venture – the HBO series "Looking" – is bringing him to an entirely new audience beyond his Broadway theater achievements. I look forward to this with much anticipation. Also on the schedule in weeks ahead: A Man's a Man, Werther (Metropolitan Opera), Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall, Prince Igor (Met Opera), Alexandre Tharaud at Peoples' Symphony (quick, get tickets, this is going to be so exciting on March 1), Goerne and Eschenbach performing Schubert's Schoene Mullerin at Carnegie Hall, Enchanted Island (Met Opera), Orchestra of St. Luke's, and that takes me up through Spring Break.
The announced artist for this afternoon's Peoples' Symphony Concerts program at New York's Town Hall was the eminent Hungarian pianist, Radu Lupu. But, alas, Mr. Lupu was ill and had to cancel several concert dates, including this one. In his place, we had a young fellow, Kuok-Wai Lio, in his mid-20s and just starting out on the concert circuit. This recital was undoubtedly a big break for him, and he made the most of it.
I could only fault him, really, for his selection of Janacek's "In the Mists" as his opening piece. Not through any fault of Kuok-Wai, but this is a piece that has never really held my attention all the way through, and it didn't this time either. Not his fault, undoubtedly. But, that aside, I thought the rest of the recital was exceptionally good.
He followed Janacek with Schubert's second set of impromptus, D. 935. At first I thought he was a bit too understated, playing with great gentleness but a bit impersonally, but it seemed he was slowly getting warmed up, and I found myself more and more beguiled by his perceptive phrasing and subtle manipulation of dynamics, all while appearing quite imperturbed at the keyboard. Things got more and more warm and involving, and by the third of the set he was firing on all cylinders, producing an extraordinarily insightful performance. With the final piece, he showed flashes of the humor that Schubert buried in this piece as well. By the end of this set, I was convinced I was in the presence of a young master.
After intermission, he played Robert Schumann's Davisbundlertanze, a lengthy set of brief character pieces, mainly in dance rhythms, that is a distinctive challenge for any pianist to give a coherent structure and dramatic push through the entire half-hour cycle. I felt that here he loosened up a bit more of the reserve that characterized some of his playing in the first half, becoming more physically demonstrative and perhaps slightly less in control of his material. The performance was involving, but perhaps with slightly less of the subtlety that made his Schubert so special. He's a young pianist and perhaps will find a happy medium, but sounded to me quite ready to make a concert career.
For an encore, he played the opening Aria movement from Bach's Goldberg Variations, a curious choice, but once again I heard the restraint and subtlety that characterized his Schubert.
I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sitting next to one of the pianist's teachers, Gary Graffman, now retired after a distinguished career at the Curtis Institute (and, prior to that, a distinguished career as a concert pianist from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, until physical problems with his right hand put an end to his active concert and recording career). I was delighted by this kind of "only in NYC" coincidence, as Graffman was one of the pianistic heroes of my youth, and it was great to be able to compliment him on the recent release of a big 24-CD box of his RCA/Columbia recordings from that period – a box I highly recommend as I am now working my way through it. Especially valuable are the early recordings, long out of print, such as his exciting Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 with Jorda and the San Francisco Symphony for RCA. But on this occasion, he was there as the proud teacher following closely his former student's progress.
So, Peoples' Symphony came through with an interesting substitute for Lupu. With their excellent connections in the concert world, they usually land on their feet when a scheduled artist has to cancel, and they certainly did this time.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that…. I already wrote about the Ned Rorem 90th Birthday Concert that I attended on Tuesday night (Nov. 5), but wanted to mention my other expeditions of the week.
On Monday night, I saw "Kill Your Darlings" at Film Society of Lincoln Center. I thoroughly enjoyed this tale based on real events. It focuses on Allen Ginsberg's first year as a student at Columbia University, and the crowd he fell in with, some of whom went on to become part of his literary circle as "the Beats". But the focus of this is the radicalization of Ginsberg, who came from a somewhat sheltered New Jersey suburban childhood and fell in with a "rad" crowd centered around a wild young man enchantingly portrayed by Dane DeHaan, who steals the film right out from under Daniel Radcliffe (who plays Ginsberg). Also notable are Ben Foster as William Burroughs and Michael C. Hall as a slightly older man who is obsessed with DeHaan's character and comes to be a rival to Ginsberg for his affections. A little curious internet snooping after seeing this film confirmed for me that the main lines of the story depicted in the film are accurate, but not all the details by any means. I'm a sucker for "historical" films, however, and I also loved the score by Nico Muhly (who seems to be everywhere these days).
On Wednesday night I saw a performance of "A Time to Kill," a Broadway play based on the novel of the same name by John Grisham. When I read the book, many years ago, I thought it was a fantastic inside look at criminal defense work that should be read by law students. I was surprised when somebody tried to turn it into a film, which did not turn out particularly well, and even more surprised when I heard somebody was turning it into a play (Rupert Holmes). I don't think this material translates well either to screen or stage. The strength of Grisham's novel is the inside look it gives at the procedure of putting together a defense of a capital murder charge, and much of the interesting detail goes by the wayside, since a film or play has to focus on characters and plotting. And although some of the characters are interesting in their own right in the novel, that is mainly because of the back-stories Grisham gives them, much of which perforce is omitted from the dramatizations. The plot itself is pretty far-out and unconvincing much of the time. One keeps thinking "that couldn't really happen, could it"? On Thursday morning the Times ran the announcement that the play would be closing in two weeks. If the actors received that announcement before Wednesday's production, maybe that helps to explain the somewhat listless performance. I was sitting in the first row of the rear mezzanine, and the overwhelming majority of seats up there were empty. The closing notice was no surprise.
Thursday night I attended a farewell party at Bar-Tini for Brad Snyder, who has stepped down as Executive Director of the LGBT Law Association to take up a development position at the LGBT Community Center. Brad has done wonders for LeGaL, professionalizing the office operation in many ways, putting together great annual dinner programs and CLEs, and most importantly in terms of my involvement working a visual transformation on Lesbian/Gay Law Notes and initiating the monthly Law Notes podcasts. I'll really miss him, and so will the organization. His interim replacement while a search is launched for a permanent successor will be Matt Skinner.
Last night I attended Peoples' Symphony Concert's program at Washington Irving High School. The Borromeo String Quartet caused a bit of a stir by performing from laptops instead of sheet music. As their first violinist explained, this made it possible for them to play from full scores instead of individual parts, which they deemed advantageous. The laptops were fitted out with foot pedals that they used to effect the "page turns" (actually just advancing a page on the pdf's that were exhibited on their screens. In the first half they gave us a suitably serious performance of Beethoven's "Serioso" String Quartet, Op. 95, and the first NY performance of Lera Auerbach's String Quartet No. 7, which was written for them. The Auerbach piece is just modernistic enough to be a little challenging for the audience, but not off-putting to anybody who stays current on new music trends. She has mastered writing for this combination of instruments, and the finale, in particular, ended with a real haunting repeated melody that kept playing in my head after the piece was over. I hope they get to record it. (The concert was taped; I suspect this was to be able to provide Auerbach with a recording of her piece.) After intermission, Richard Stoltzman joined the quartet for a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, one of that master's last works. As a longtime fan of Stoltzman, I'm sorry to report that unless this concert was an outlier, he is no longer up to performing in concert. Although he's only 70 — not a really great age as clarinet players go, as far as I know — the breath control is no longer dependable, the fingers are a bit stiff, and the results are sometimes distressing. His tone on high notes was shrill and metallic, and there were little hesitations at the start of arpeggios and scales that seemed to me more about technical weakness than interpretation. These problems were particularly evident when it came to long sustained notes in the sublime adagio movement; he had difficulty sustaining them with any kind of quality. The third movement – menuet and trio – was the least problematic, but that was partly because Mozart doesn't use the clarinet during the trio portion. As an encore, they played a movement from another clarinet quintet that Mozart abandoned; Kitchen announced that musicologist Robert Levin completed the movement from Mozart's surviving sketches. It struck me as interesting without being special, and that may explain why Mozart abandoned the project.
Finally, for a little mindless diversion this morning before getting to the office, the newest film in the "Thor" series, with Chris Hemsworth as the title character. If one had not seen the first film, one would be very puzzled about who these characters are and what is going on. Even with that, the plotting was minimally comprehensible most of the time, the 3-D effect was minimal, and the screen was filled up with CGI more than people a lot of the time. Lots of noise on the soundtrack, too. In other words, I got what I was expecting – some mindless, fast-paced entertainment. The guy who plays Thor's evil brother stole all his scenes, Anthony Hopkins was almost unidentifiable as Odin, Thor's father. Well, it's a franchise. If the film does well, there will be a third Thor….


Mansfield, O., Dec. 6. - A serious wreck occured about 4 o'clock this afternoon on the B. & O. three miles west of here. A work train en route to Newark crashed head end into the west bound freight No. 99. which was leaving a sidling. F. R. WOODWARD of Newark, conductor of the work train, was killed. He leaves a wife and children. Harry PETERMAN, of Newark, engineer, was fatally injured. The other men injured were the fireman on each train and a brakeman on the work train.


TISSOT UCI Track Cycling World Cup at Lee Valley VeloPark. Image courtesy of SWpix.
Experience one of the highlights of the track cycling calendar as London's iconic Lee Valley VeloPark welcomes the TISSOT UCI Track Cycling World Cup.
Enjoy some of the best track racing on the planet at this exciting event, as the world's best cyclists compete with the aim of building up qualifying points for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
In an historic first, para-cycling forms part of the Track Cycling World Cup series in 2018. Nine British Paralympic champions, including Dame Sarah Storey, Jody Cundy and Kadeena Cox, join other household names such as Katie Archibald, Jason Kenny, Phil Hindes and Laura Kenny at the event. The Great Britain Cycling Team have enjoyed a strong start to this year's world cup season winning 15 medals so far.
The TISSOT UCI Track Cycling World Cup event returns to London for the first time since 2014 and it's the fourth event of the 2018 series. The other series events take place in France, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Hong Kong.


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KPMG Names Leaders for Major Businesses
KPMG announced the incoming leaders of the U.S. firm's Audit, Tax and Advisory businesses, as well as new heads of Operations and Innovation & Enterprise Solutions and other key roles. These appointments fill key positions in the leadership team formed by U.S. chairman and CEO Lynne Doughtie and deputy chairman and chief operating officer P. Scott Ozanus, who began their five-year terms as the firm's top leaders on July 1.
The leaders of the firm's three primary businesses are: Carl S. Carande, who succeeds Doughtie as vice chair of Advisory; Jeffrey C. LeSage, who will continue in his role as vice chair of Tax; and Scott Marcello as vice chair of Audit. In addition, Laura Newinski has been named the firm's vice chair of Operations, and Mike Nolan will assume the role of vice chair of Innovation & Enterprise Solutions.
Doughtie and Ozanus also announced other key executives who will continue in their current leadership roles, including Sven Holmes as vice chair of legal, risk and regulatory; Rob Arning as vice chair of Market Development; and Bruce Pfau as vice chair of Human Resources and Communications.
"These individuals are part of a leadership team that brings not just deep knowledge and experience but a proven understanding of how to adapt, innovate and swiftly execute in a marketplace that offers enormous opportunities for our clients and our firm," said Doughtie. "I am incredibly excited about the tremendous momentum that KPMG has today. Our entire leadership team is well positioned to continue to serve our clients with the highest quality, grow our core businesses, and meet every challenge in a time of rapid change."
Rita Garwood July 7, 2015 Industry News


Watch previous Faculty videos: Dott. Paolo Lembo, Director of the World Green Economy Organization.
Watch previous Faculty videos: Prof. Ibrahim Al-Marashi, California State University San Marcos.
The Master in Middle Eastern Studies offers high quality training to students from all over the world. Students will take part in team projects with the guidance of important scholars and leading professionals from the Middle East as well as from Europe and the U.S.
Adjunct Professor in History of the Middle East at University of Florence, Faculty of Political Science.


This blog will cover information that is going to help individuals make informative decisions about hair and skin care. I encourage readers to share information among one another in the comment section as we can always continue to learn. Please keep in mind that discussed and noted ingredients will or may work differently for everyone. All rude or offensive comments will be deleted. Also, please feel free to leave a topic you would like to see posted about on this blog in the comment section.


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Julia Rhee and Sarah Street|October 17, 2020
If you're reading this, it's probably pretty clear that the Bi-Line has undergone some substantial changes in the last few months thanks to COVID-19. While students may no longer enjoy our illustrious publication on paper or use it as makeshift whiteboard erasers, the same time and effort went into this month's online issue. We are nonetheless excited to be this year's head editors; it feels like yesterday that we were joining the newspaper staff as reporters.
Because of the circumstances of the pandemic, the publication will be largely based online this year. This means that the newspaper stacks will be empty for the time being, but the Bi-Line will still publish an issue each month. On the bright side, the online focus of the newspaper will be an excellent opportunity to expand the ways in which the community can interact with the Bi-Line. We are excited to offer a new platform for student artists to submit cartoons through the Bi-Line's website. Additionally, we are hopeful that students will use their voices and passions as contributors to the Guest Opinions column, which is open to submissions from all members of the Westminster community. Regardless of the format of the Bi-Line this year, the staff is committed to representing the school with respect and dignity.
We feel as if the news is more important than ever. In the past few months, our hyper-connected generation has been driven apart by social-distancing guidelines that are designed to keep us safe, but which also promote feelings of loneliness and isolation. We learned from home, spit into tubes and prodded our brains with Q-tips, and cheered for our teams through a screen. Despite this physical distance, we hope that the Bi-Line will serve as a space for the Westminster community to observe its commonalities, a reminder that we are, in fact, a community. That's why we're putting a special emphasis this year on articles that highlight Westminster and its students. We want to showcase what is happening on campus in an era marked by change.
In light of the recent dialogue about race, identity, and inclusion, we believe that the Bi-Line has more of a responsibility than ever to elevate the voices of those within the community. We hope that the publication can be a medium for students to share their perspectives and beliefs in the midst of a shifting sociopolitical climate. Not only do we hope to embolden these narratives, but it is our goal to help our readers understand what it means to be a part of a diverse community.
As we send you off into the vast expanse of articles, we hope that you learn something about yourself and others. Thank you for reading, and have a happy October! We'll see you back here in November.
Your Head Editors,
Julia Rhee and Sarah Street
What are we learning? Do you ever ask yourself this question? What kind of knowledge are schools supposed to equip us with? Is it their responsibility...


Beyond your typical home sale, Carl Guild & Associates has success in the comprehensive marketing and sales of New Residential Real Estate Developments, Apartment Complexes, Mixed-Use Developments, Commercial properties and more!
Along with the strength of Berkshire Hathaway's Award-Winning Creative Marketing team, Carl Guild & Associates employs innovative technical use of 3D tours, drone photography, virtual floor plans, and professional photography. Integrated along with social media strategies, direct mail campaigns and traditional print advertising, Carl Guild and Associates crafts customized marketing plans to suit the individual needs of each project.


Perfectly cooked ribeye steak, chicken-thigh bravitos with a piquillo pepper sauce, and alcohol-free Nojitos made with fresh-squeezed juice are just a few tasty treats found on kids menus these days. "As a parent myself, I know there's nothing better than finding a spot where both the adults and kids have favorites on the menu," says Jonathan Rohland, culinary director of taqueria chain bartaco with 17 locations nationwide.
Ammazza, the Atlanta-based pizzeria and restaurant, is set to reopen its original Edgewood location on Tuesday, March 19. The pizzeria's team is looking forward to welcoming back neighbors and visitors after closing for repairs following a car accident that caused extensive damage to the restaurant.


The rat is a small animal that attacks by biting. Rats can be hit by weapons of any material.
There is a 5% chance per hit of catching a disease from a rat.
Rats are immune to poison and disease.
Higher level characters can quickly dispatch rats with a single melee attack, but low level characters may wish to use ranged weapons to avoid disease.
Rats are encountered in the first and second demos.
This page was last modified on 13 August 2018, at 10:48.


The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (BMSB) Council has made an application to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to release the Samurai wasp to help combat a BMSB incursion should one be found in New Zealand.
BMSB is one the biggest biosecurity threats facing New Zealand and is frequently intercepted at our borders. It has the potential to cause significant economic damage to the horticulture industry and to home owners.
Studies overseas have shown the wasp can destroy over 70 percent of the eggs in a stink bug egg mass. The wasp does not sting and is harmless to humans but is a natural enemy of the stink bug. The female wasp lays her eggs inside stink bug eggs, killing the stink bug in the process.
Control options are very limited, with use of broad-spectrum chemicals being one of the only tools currently available. The samurai wasp presents a targeted and self-sustaining control tool that could be used and provides growers with an option other than increasing insecticide sprays.
Public submissions are now open until 5pm, 24 May 2018. We encourage you to have your say.
You can make a submission here. For more information see our Q&A information sheet here.
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