Archives for October 9, 2013

I brought five books to Louisville to read in between rehearsals of The King’s Man, two for professional reasons and three purely for pleasure:
• A set of bound galleys of J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life, which is, as God is my witness, 914 pages long
• A set of bound galleys of The Most of Nora Ephron
• Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, which for some reason I didn’t read when it came out last year
• Wesley Stace’s Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer (which holds up very well the second time around)
• James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor, my favorite American novel of World War II
We’ll see whether they last me through Sunday. The score so far is four down and one to go….

Paul Moravec and I are about to report to the studios of WUOL, Louisville’s public radio station, where we’ll be chatting about The King’s Man, our new opera, with Daniel Gilliam, WUOL’s program director (who is himself a composer!). The program, which starts at noon ET, is called Lunch and Listen, and we’ll be bringing along several Kentucky Opera cast members to sing excerpts from the score.
If you live in the Louisville area, WUOL can be found at 90.5 on your FM dial. To listen on line in streaming audio, go here.

Allegra Kent and Conrad Ludlow dance an excerpt from the second movement of George Balanchine’s Symphony in C. The score is by Georges Bizet:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.”
Fred Astaire, Steps in Time