Joined November 2015
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700 Photos and videos
Roger Parton retweeted
Lucas Imbiriba playing Paganini on guitar… this one is actually insane 🔥
“Impossible Paganini” — a fingerstyle take on Niccolò Paganini’s Sonata in A. The speed, the precision, the musicality… it feels like it shouldn’t even be possible on a single guitar.
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Jun 12
Most Canadians seem happy enough to continue sleepwalking, elbows up and flapping as they step off the cliff
Jun 11
Social media posts deemed to undermine “social stability” would be subject to blocking orders by a federal censor under Bill #C34 introduced yesterday. “The law applies as soon as it comes into force.”
— @MarcMillerVM @CdnHeritage
blacklocks.ca/censor-for-sak…
#cdnpoli
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Roger Parton retweeted
Jun 12
Richard Wagner has spent his time as Chief Justice turning himself into the self-appointed guardian of Canadian democracy: annual press conferences, speeches about the rule of law, warnings about democratic backsliding.
The old convention was that judges speak through their rulings and otherwise keep quiet. Wagner seems to find that beneath him. He wants to be a public figure, not just a judge.
The irony is that every time he steps up to the microphone to defend the court’s legitimacy, he’s the one politicizing it. A judiciary that lets its work speak for itself doesn’t need a spokesman. Wagner has made himself one anyway, and the institution is worse off for it.
Jun 12
Ben Woodfinden: Chief Justice Richard Wagner is disappointed in Canada nationalpost.com/opinion/ben…
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Jun 12
I can't stand "collaborative pianist" and protest it whenever I see it - which, sadly, is now regularly (it was recently earnestly and hilariously explained to me as "an essential piece of anti-oppression praxis"). The balance between singer and pianist is a delicate one, always just ever so much weighted to the singer's preference, and hence supportive on the part of the pianist. It surprises me that more singers don't refuse the term out of sheer extravagant personality, but "anti-oppressive praxis" has probably put paid to those as well
Jun 11
They used to be called “accompanists” — what’s the darn problem??
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Roger Parton retweeted
🎼 Richard Strauss nacido #UnDiaComoHoy es felicitado por la soprano Maria Reining 🎂
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Roger Parton retweeted
Still reading “The Golden Bowl”: a few pages at a time is about as much as my rusty old brain can take these days.
Things are hotting up, though: Fanny Assingham (what a name!) has just had a fresh perception.
And that’s about as much action as you can expect in late James! 😀
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Roger Parton retweeted
Jun 8
1. Give your house to indigenous people
2. Sterilize your depressed gay kid
3. Demonize Israel
4. Replace police with neighborhood vigilantes
I really can’t understand why this stuff isn’t more popular
Jun 8
If you missed over the weekend the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists platform is here twincitiesdsa.org/about-us/p… with highlights below. Voters-get educated!
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Roger Parton retweeted
My teacher Jane Cowan b otd 1915. Of her many tenets, two were perhaps the most basic. Technique: playing the cello must feel (and look) easy. Music: each part of the phrase/each clause has a main note towards and away from which every other note flows - exactly as in speech.
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Roger Parton retweeted
Jun 6
Botd 1875, the great German writer Thomas Mann.
I have been immersed in his writing over the last 18 months, copy-editing these new translations for #OxfordWorldsClassics
Life-changing writing, esp. “The Magic Mountain”, translated by Simon Pare
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Roger Parton retweeted
Jun 4
40 years ago today, l asked my childhood sweetheart, my best friend and the most gorgeous woman l know to marry me.
All three said no.
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Roger Parton retweeted
Long-lost autograph volumes by Antonio Salieri have been rediscovered nearly 200 years after the composer's death. The collection contains 149 vocal works, including pieces previously unknown to scholars.
Read more at moto-perpetuo.com/antonio-sa…
#AntonioSalieri #ClassicalMusic
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Roger Parton retweeted
Jun 2
First you have to prove the statement is false (unlikely), then that refusing to compare residential schools to the Holocaust is "downplaying," then that the refusal was motivated by hate. This is a performance of virtue that insults the intelligence.
Jun 2
.@SenateCA human rights committee votes 7 to 1 to criminalize Indian Residential School “denialism.”
Public statements intended to promote hatred by downplaying impacts of Residential Schools would be outlawed under threat of 2 years in jail.
blacklocks.ca/vote-to-outlaw…
#cdnpoli @TerryGlavin @jonkay
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Jun 1
Agreed!!!
Jun 1
Not that anything at all could make me support the British Labour Party right now, but one of my heuristics is to reject those whose emblem is a fist. What, after all, is a fist for?
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Roger Parton retweeted
May 31
“Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
Not sure I really love Walter Pater’s essay on Du Bellay upon my return to it after many years, but the ending still goes hard.
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Roger Parton retweeted
Beloved Joseph Haydn d otd 1809! His modest creed:
“There are so few contented peoples here below! Perhaps my labours will be a source from which they can derive rest and refreshment... This is why I now look back with cheerful satisfaction on the labours I expended on this art."
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Roger Parton retweeted
May 30
A friend just revealed to me that the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot is Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
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Roger Parton retweeted
May 27
Very sad to announce the death of doyen of British musicology and music analysis Arnold Whittall. He had been ill since the beginning of the year. I’m mourning not only an intellectual giant and valued mentor but also a close friend who we saw for the last time on Saturday.
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Roger Parton retweeted
May 26
This excellent tweet by @bencobley nails the high-handed disdain that blights Deborah Warner's Peter Grimes. Her unconscious (?) snobbery and sub-GCSE social bigotry make a shameful ending to an otherwise good production.
@rbo_org
May 26
To the Opera for the first time in many, many years last night: Deborah Warner's staging of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the @rbo_org.
I absolutely loved it, was transfixed, the whole thing brilliant - just until right near the end when a scene transforms the fishing village's inhabitants into a mob of nationalist bovver boys wearing khaki trousers, crew cuts, football shirts (West Ham prominent) and waving Union Jacks and Cross of St Georges.
I don't recall a single mention of England or Britain in the opera itself, let alone an attack on nations or the working class as emerged in this scene. I experienced the rest of the opera as a great tragedy. But they have to go and spoil it by clunkily crow-barring their standardised, virtue-signalling politics into it. These people just can't help themselves.
Still: overall, very good. At least now I understand Britten's genius.
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Roger Parton retweeted
May 22
My friend Oscar Mandel, who was born in Belgium in 1926, escaped the Nazis in 1940, and taught literature for decades at Cal Tech, died two days ago—just three months shy of his 100th. He was a great thinker, a great stylist, a great wit. The embodiment of culture. His lullaby:
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