“Deh vieni, non tardar” is Susanna’s aria near the end of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. It’s Act IV, night, the garden. Susanna is dressed in the Countess’s clothes to trap the philandering Count Almaviva, and — she knows Figaro is hiding in the bushes watching, convinced she’s about to cheat on him. So she sings this: oh come, don’t delay, my beautiful joy… A melting serenade apparently to a secret lover. Figaro burns. But the whole thing is a wink — the “lover” she’s actually calling is Figaro, and the aria is a real love song disguised as a fake one. Mozart lets the audience hear the sincerity that the character on stage wouldn’t allowed to. ...

Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 80) was written as an incidental music (aka BGM). In 1898 the actress Patrick Campbell staged Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama in London and asked Fauré to write for it. He was short on time, so he handed the orchestration of the small theatre band to his student Charles Koechlin, and only later sat down to orchestrate the concert suite himself. (Debussy, Schoenberg and Sibelius all wrote music for the same play. The play was popular.) ...

This is an encore of a performance with the New Jersey Symphony in May 2016. I think it’s by far the cleanest recording I’ve ever heard online. Hadelich plays too clean, sometimes it makes you feel it’s easy: The orchestra members' faces are full of awe it's such a pleasure to watch. Nováček’s perpetuum mobile gives a similar vibe with the 5th caprice: This is Henryk Szeryng. Perlman also has a great recording for this piece.

I come across a new interesting study in the Journal of Operations Management: "There Is More to Crowdshipping Than Money: Understanding How Operational Characteristics Influence Driver Behaviors" > By Nicolò Masorgo, David D. Dobrzykowski, Christopher S. Tang, and Brian S. Fugate. from an article in Ripple: Surge pricing is broken, but there’s a smarter way to match gig workers with consumers By Christopher S. Tang, David Dobrzykowski and Nicolo Masorgo, The Conversation ...

Today is the department’s phd econometrics core exam. Wish me luck! You can also make your own meme at https://imgflip.com

The market structure is complicated. Incentives are intertwined and I can’t just “feel” the equilibrium out. Nevertheless, maybe it’s fair to ask the question: What is the price of anarchy when transaction fees are nonzero? The following video doesn’t have the direct answer but is a good place to get thinking started

Born on this day in 1860, Gustav Mahler spent his life searching for the music that could contain everything – joy, grief, nature, eternity. (Berlin Phil)

Harlequinade is a very rare ballet but its variations are frequently seen in ballet competitions. It’s terribly age inappropriate but too often danced by young (and talented) ballerinas. See dancetabs for a very good review “American Ballet Theatre – Harlequinade (premiere) – New York”) Nevertheless, here’s a version by Crystal Huang — her footwork and musicality are impeccable. She portraits a graceful, adorable Columbine. I would generally hope for Columbine to be more flirtful. But Crystal’s version is near perfect: and I think for now the best version on the internet: ...

Interactive walkthrough of the four-step martingale decomposition of an additive functional, with a CLT check.

This was one of my favourite during Empirical Analysis III course. ...