by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. When the Abbe Sieyes, one of the first three consuls of the new French government of 1799 was asked what he did during the Terror, he replied “I survived.” Everyone who had done the same would have understood at once just how signal an achievement that was. It …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. As I write, in early October, the Monarch has just about finished its great conjuring trick for another year; rising, flying, gliding, dancing in its millions with sun beams as it hastens, like so many snow birds, on to Mexico and the warmth that sustains its kind. There …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s Program Note. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1950s listening to the musical compositions deemed “classical” was close to a signed admission that you were liberal, progressive, or worse, some kind of left-leaning, long-haired, sexually liberated and Communist sympathizing egg-head, and that’s a fact. Classical music …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. Please note the date: Saturday October 13 for this is the opening of the Christmas preparation season for 2012. Archeologists and cultural historians will be grateful to me in years hence when they get their government grants and write their learned tomes about the whys and wherefores of …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. You are about to be taken inside a world of finesse, exquisite manners, bon ton, a world where la douceur de la vie was perfected in every particular and where every moment away was quite simply unbearable. I am talking, of course, of eighteenth century Europe and more …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. It all happened a long time ago, in 1663 in fact, but some of the good citizens of Connecticut just cannot let it go. And it’s easy to understand why. After all, it was their ancestors who were burnt, hanged and otherwise mistreated because their anxious neighbors deemed …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. We’ve been having a lot of rain lately here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s the kind of rain that all locals greet with amiable forbearance, saying even to total strangers (especially if they are grumbling), “We need the rain.” It makes us feel important when we say it; as …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. It is 3:07 a.m. here in the East. It is not so much that I cannot sleep. Rather, it’s that I don’t want to. I am thinking about my father as I often do. He is undoubtedly asleep now, has gotten safely through another day and will awake …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. Leave it to Mozart, thrilling Mozart, sublime Mozart to produce the most evocative music for the multi-aspect event we call Halloween. It is, of course, from “Don Giovanni” (premiered in Prague, 29 October 1787). I am talking of Il Commendatore’s adamant call to Don Giovanni, his summons to …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. It is exactly 2 a.m. It is as dark as it ever gets in Cambridge and that is very dark indeed. The air is chill and so thick with the promise of rain that I feel sure I could squeeze water from it like a wet towel. But …