Michel Blavet was the best French flutist of the 1730s. Quantz admired him, and Frederick the Great tried and failed to hire him. He was largely self-taught and held the flute to the left. L’Henriette is the first of his Op. 2 sonatas (Apple labels it No. 2). The heart of it is the third movement, an aria named after the sonata: a simple rondeau tune that keeps coming back, each time a little more ornamented. ...

Disclaimer: This post summarizes and comments on a publicly available research paper. All interpretations are solely my own. Brent Neiman gave a talk on his paper with Gregor Matvos, Financial Sanctions and the Global Payments Network. The data come from LexisNexis Risk Solutions: standard settlement instructions (SSIs), which record, for each currency a bank can receive, the correspondent(s) it receives through. Stacked together, they give a map of the correspondent network by currency: 17,403 EMDE financial institutions, six snapshots from September 2021 to August 2026, merged with an OFAC/EU/HMT sanctions indicator. ...

Stravinsky preferred winds to strings, and said so. In a 1924 note on his Octet, he wrote that winds better rendered “a certain rigidity of the form,” while strings were “less cold and more vague.” Coming from him, cold was a compliment. Hence the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Octet, a piano concerto accompanied only by winds, and the Symphony of Psalms, which has no violins or violas at all. ...

Woody Allen’s 1996 musical, with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth and Drew Barrymore. The cast sings old standards in their own voices, and everyone sings awfully. Barrymore was the exception: she got dubbed. The awfulness adds to the fun. If I wanted someone who can sing, I’d watch an opera. The movie is really pretty, though. New York in the fall, Venice, Paris at Christmas, Goldie Hawn floating along the Seine. It even features Perlman. Everything about it is luxurious. ...

Tonight at the Logan Center: the Loeffler Octet, built around Charles Martin Loeffler’s 1897 octet, which clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson found in the Library of Congress in 2020. That was the headline. The highlight came first. Poulenc wrote his Sonata for Two Clarinets at nineteen, in the army, and it’s over in about seven minutes. It’s weird, quirky, and cute: two clarinets winding around each other like snakes poking their heads out of a charmer’s basket, swaying, shaking, ducking back in. Johnson and Zachary Good played it. ...

Here are some useful fundamentals that I found helpful assuring myself that LEAN works: The Foundational Systems Underneath Lean is based on dependent type theory, an alternative foundation as ZFC. (Lean is strictly stronger than ZFC, roughly ZFC + ω inaccessibles.) (“Dependent” means types can depend on values). But note that the continuum hypothesis is independent of Lean too. Proposition as Types Reference: Philip Wadler Proposition as Types (2014). Section 6 and 7. ...

Vittorio Monti was an Italian violinist working in Paris, and in 1904 he wrote the one piece that kept his name alive. Czardas follows the Hungarian dance form: a slow, brooding opening, then a fast section that keeps speeding up. It belongs to the violin, but everyone borrows it. Today it’s Brian Luce on flute and Carrol McLaughlin on harp, the album Allume again. The flute’s tone is woody and a little dusky, which suits the slow opening. In the fast part, the harp plays the cimbalom. ...

Grieg wrote it in 1875 for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: Peer stumbles into the hall of the Troll King, and the trolls want to eat him. The whole piece is one short tune in B minor, played over and over, faster and louder each time, until the hall collapses. Grieg didn’t think much of it. He wrote that it reeked of cowpats and Norwegian self-satisfaction. It is now probably the most famous thing he wrote, heard in cartoons and car ads. ...

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, is a set of eight piano pieces Schumann wrote in a few days in the spring of 1838. The title refers to Johannes Kreisler, a fictional Kapellmeister in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories: brilliant, unstable, and half mad. The pieces alternate between wild, fast music and slow, inward music. These were the two sides Schumann gave names to: Florestan, the impulsive one, and Eusebius, the dreamer. He told Clara Wieck that she was the main idea behind the work. At the time, her father was refusing to let them marry. He dedicated it to Chopin. ...

If I could keep one Firebird, it would be Antal Doráti with the London Symphony, recorded for Mercury in 1959: the complete 1910 ballet, not the suite. Doráti conducted for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the 1930s, and it shows. The tempos are ones you could dance to, and nothing is lingered over for its own sake. Mercury’s engineers did the rest with a few microphones hung close to the orchestra. Every wind solo lands in your lap, and the bass drum in the Infernal Dance is a physical event. Sixty-odd years on, it still sounds better than most recordings made last year. ...