Opera Arias and Duets and Mark Alburger's Mice Suites opens at San Francisco Community Music Center tonight, and a good time, apparently, is had by all, with fabulous singing in both halves of the show and many familiar faces from Diablo Valley College.
Before, record all the rest of Wayne Wong (George) and Erin Lahm (Slim/Whit, with Maria Mikheyenko as Lennie, above) in this short version of Mice and Men, up in the same classroom at SFCMC, with the weather not quite as hot (for SF) as yesterday.
Before this and after all, climb up the sunshine mountains of orchestration, finishing VIII. On His Way, from Israel in Trouble, Op. 54, with a cliffhanger, clawhammer conclusion, and beginning to conceive the instrumentation of the comedic/parody-rape/mass-murder penultimate movement of same (i.e. talk about objectionable settings and stories -- the defoliation of Jacob's only daughter Dinah, in the sexual kitchen with uncircumcised Canaanites, who are revenge-vendetta x'd by her brothers while recovering from ritual surgery...): musically based on Act III, Scene 3 (the out-of-tune piano bar scene) of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, via a consciousness including The Piano Lesson from Meredith Willson's The Music Man, J.S. Bach's Fugue in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, and a hint of the American folk song I've Been Workin' on the Railroad.
