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essentialsaltesAmadeus: Saw the movie with live orchestral and choral accompaniment. I think this was my first time at such a thing -- movie with the music recreated live. So much of it was done so faithfully it was basically seamless and unnoticeable. One of those magic tricks where you don't see how difficult it is because it's all invisible. The only major tonal difference was the celeste (or whatever) in the Magic Flute. This had a very different mellower sound from the very bright tinny one in the film.
And since the focus is on the film screen, it's hard to notice what the orchestra was up to. Probably the most challenging bit is where Frau Mozart has brought examples of his work to Salieri, who examines the scores and flips through them with the music changing at each turn. I tried to pay attention to the orchestra for that stretch, and it looked like a well-oiled machine.
Anyway, a very neat experience.
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Starfarers by Poul Anderson
This has been sitting in my TBR pile for a long time. And my TBR pile is getting remarkably small as I transition more to e-books. So it's a 25 years old book by someone who was already a septuagenarian SF grandmaster. But it's a pretty engaging story with some great ideas, the main one being... after discovering a very-close-to-light drive, humans have to deal with the huge spans of time that still attend flight to the stars. A few years of shiptime can be centuries of Earth-time. You can never go home again, so they say. The main crew is fairly diverse with clear and distinct characters; the only let down is a tendency for them to exclaim "Ay Caramba!" or "Mazel Tov!" to clumsily reinforce their ethnicities.
And since the focus is on the film screen, it's hard to notice what the orchestra was up to. Probably the most challenging bit is where Frau Mozart has brought examples of his work to Salieri, who examines the scores and flips through them with the music changing at each turn. I tried to pay attention to the orchestra for that stretch, and it looked like a well-oiled machine.
Anyway, a very neat experience.
--
Starfarers by Poul Anderson
This has been sitting in my TBR pile for a long time. And my TBR pile is getting remarkably small as I transition more to e-books. So it's a 25 years old book by someone who was already a septuagenarian SF grandmaster. But it's a pretty engaging story with some great ideas, the main one being... after discovering a very-close-to-light drive, humans have to deal with the huge spans of time that still attend flight to the stars. A few years of shiptime can be centuries of Earth-time. You can never go home again, so they say. The main crew is fairly diverse with clear and distinct characters; the only let down is a tendency for them to exclaim "Ay Caramba!" or "Mazel Tov!" to clumsily reinforce their ethnicities.
