I remember once going on a date when my friend casually said, “I love opera. Someday, I want to go to London and watch The Phantom of the Opera live.” At that moment, I was honestly terrified — what an ignorant, pretentious idiot?! But then… I stumbled across a live concert by The 3 Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti — accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the legendary Zubin Mehta....

A lighthearted vignette.

As I’m practicing this piece, here’s a bit more about it: “In my concertos I have allotted the instruments the types of themes which correspond to their particular tone qualities and respect their expressive possibilities.” This statement of Jacques Ibert’s certainly applies to his Flute Concerto, written over the years 1932-1933. The work was dedicated to Marcel Moyse (who’s quite the central spotlight of Paris-school flute, read more about him here), who was the featured soloist in its premiere performance, under Philippe Gaubert’s direction, in Paris on February 25, 1934....

Here’s one more interesting matrix completion paper: Matrix Completion from Non-Uniformly Sampled Entries Yuanyu Wan, Jinfeng Yi, Lijun Zhang https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1806.10308 we assume that a small number of columns are randomly selected and fully observed, and each remaining column is partially observed with uniform sampling. To recover the unknown matrix, we first recover its column space from the fully observed columns. Then, for each partially observed column, we recover it by finding a vector which lies in the recovered column space and consists of the observed entries....

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune) is an orchestral work composed by Claude Debussy in 1894. It was inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune, which evokes the dreamy, sensual thoughts of a faun on a languid afternoon. It’s called a prélude because Debussy meant it as a musical introduction to the poem’s atmosphere, not a literal retelling. A Faun’s Afternoon (Snippet) Stéphane Mallarmé and Richard Howard...

Meituan, the parent company of DianPing (often called “China’s Yelp”), has quietly launched a new food rating app called Duck Finding Food. Screenshot of the app’s logo, UI, recommendation policies. The app is still very beta — currently only available in Beijing. At its core, the app is for finding good places to eat. What makes it interesting is its ambition: 100% ad-free, bot-free, and purely based on authentic recommendations....

In 1936, critiques were targeted towards Shostakovich’s successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), which led to his first downfall. Cause the plot of Lady Macbeth is, well, very wild: TL;DR for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Katerina Izmailova, a bored and lonely merchant’s wife in a provincial Russian town, begins an affair with a worker named Sergei. To escape her stifling life, she helps him murder her father-in-law, then her husband....

In memory of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich (Sept. 25, 1906 — Aug. 9, 1975): Shostakovich’s life reads like a legend. He seemed to live with his whole heart, navigating both artistic triumph and personal turbulence. His early breakthrough came with his Symphony No. 1 (1925), written at just 19, which won acclaim in both Russia and the West. But in 1936, official criticism targeted his work — especially his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932)....

and let’s read this: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time By Nicolas Slonimsky Amazon Link The prelude by the author ‘Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar’ gives a nice bird-eye view for all the trash talks upcoming in the later chapters. Critics find faults from every perspectives, and came up with thousands of ways to say “this piece is bad”. It can be ’too modern’, ’not melodic enough’, ‘sounds like Chinese/animal noises/etc’, ’too loud/weak’, or even, comparable to math:...

Kunming’s Dounan Flower Market I visited the Dounan flower market today — ha! So naturally this is the time to talk a bit about The ‘Dutch Auction’ The modern flower auction began in the Netherlands in the early 1900s. Specifically, in Aalsmeer, now home to the world’s largest flower market. Before that, flower growers sold fresh-cut flowers directly to wholesalers or middlemen. Prices were opaque and growers had weak bargaining power....