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5.02.2010

SALON XXXII

Thanks to all for an extremely packed salon and a preview of summer humidity in Chicago. (Bring it on!) Last night marked the final salon for Roger Moseley: here's to the best pianist and sight-reader I ever met! We wish you well on your 53-acre homestead in Ithaca, Roger -- I hear you can get a barn there for the price of a MacBook Pro.

Last night's lineup included:

Clara Christensen (piano), Irene Claude (flute) & Meg Lauterbach (cello), who began with a piano trio Jean Françaix (d. 1997), a French neoclassical composer of the Boulanger clan.

Author of the new book, "The November Criminals," Sam Munson was in town for a reading of his work at the 57th street books cooperative and -- seeing how he was staying with Sidney Nagel, his uncle -- we snagged him for the salon.

On the second half of the program, Thomas Christensen, his wife Clara, and Roger Moseley brought the house down with a 6-hand reduction of the overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville. Thomas and Roger also played a number of other 4-hand reductions as part of a talk Thomas had given Wednesday of this week at the Franke Institute on 4-hand piano transcriptions.

And finally, Jon Ullyot read from a selection of prose poems based on Baudelaire's "Spleen," "a nasty bunch of things," as Ullyot described them. Jon is about to defend his dissertation on the Aesthetics of Failure (this got a laugh, for some reason) in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University.

I'll see you at the next salon, Saturday, June 5.

-m.

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