One of the great benefits of working at Bates is the plethora of arts offerings and the fact that most of them are free 😉 I’ve seen quite a bit of classical music in the past few years (in Marosvasarhely there was a fine orchestra,) but tonight’s performance by Alisa Weilerstein was absolutely phenomenal. Her best piece of the evening happened to be by a Hungarian composer, Zoltan Kodaly. Below you’ll find an excerpt of the piece, but alas, YouTube does not do justice to Weilerstein’s rendering of Kodaly’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8. To be so moved by a performance to leap to one’s feet is truly scintillating and rare.
I recommend The Soloist, a novel by Mark Saltzman. It is about a former child prodigy cellist, whose hearing was so acute that he became obsessed with and ultimately incapacitated by imperfections that he alone could hear, forcing him to abandon a career as a performer. Two events help bring him back to life: service on a jury in a murder case and being hired to teach a new prodigy, a immigrant boy from Korea.
marosvasarhely …at first i raised one eyebrow and probably i would have raised a 100 if i had them..
considering that 70% if not more of the orchestra is hungarian let’s say you had one reason. but still… :-S