Yesterday--The Freedom Trail, Today--Quincy and the Adams's Places

I love Boston--or at least the parts of Boston I've been able to see from the Back Bay to Charlestown.  Yesterday, I went down and walked most of the Freedom trail, stopping only at the Old North Church while cheerfully munching a cannoli from Mike's--a place so famous that you can order their cannoli kit online.  This was after a lunch at the Union Oyster House and stopping by the Market and picking up a half-pound of marinated olives to munch on along the way. 

Today I've decided to chance Quincy, although the sky is fearfully overcast and it doesn't bode well for extended sightseeing.  This may be the one and only chance and while in the area I want to take advantage of it.  If I do so, I will have visited the residences of the first six presidents of the United States.  Not that I'm trying to "do" all the President's homes, but Adams has been of interest to me since I first saw the musical 1776 at Lincoln Center in the seventh grade (or thereabouts). 

Anyway, wish me luck in my journeys.  May the weather hold so that perhaps on the way back I can go by the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum or revisit the historic area of Boston.  More on those journey somewhat later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more