Tonight at the CSO: Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, the Rosenkavalier Suite, and Ravel’s La Valse. Martin Helmchen at the piano; David Afkham on the podium, standing in for Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, sidelined by an injury that “doesn’t yet allow for international travel.” I think CSO’s hall has its quirks: the acoustic quality vary seat by seat. My seat today had a fine view, but the layers came out muddled, and I lost the piano for much of the concerto. Afkham might have balanced it better. ...

The leading single of Ariana Grande’s 8th album comes out today (technically tmrw). It’s pleasantly instrumented and ornamented with luxury, sophisticated harmony. Timed to begin at the bridge — listen if you haven’t before. It’s kind of fancy. The 2nd verse got fancy adlibs. The bridge is surreal until it got break down by the chorus' plain melody, the repetitive "i, i, i...". It's not a bad song even as to AG's standard. I do hope though the upcoming album got more (good) surprises.

My Youtube personlizations are well trained that I am discovering interesting music scrolling through reels Legend has it the Trois morceaux [en Forme de Poire] was Satie’s tongue-in-cheek response to Debussy’s advice that he should “pay more attention to form” in his music. Conductor Vladimir Golschmann recalled Satie telling him that “All I did…was to write Pieces in the Form of a Pear. I brought them to Debussy, who asked, ‘Why such a title?’ Why? Simply, my dear friend, because you cannot criticize my Pieces in the shape of a pear. If they are en forme de poire they cannot be shapeless.” ...

We often talk about an t indentity, especially for pop singers. They want to be iconic. But ego and iconic are different. Because art progress is often “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (Elliot). More concretely When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. (Eliot) ...

Tchaikovsky has the most cute piano pieces that are the most authentic sketches of his artistic appeals. Listen to Richter playing Rêverie du soir (Reverie of the evening): Richter is a great Tchaikovsky & Rachmaninoff intepreter!!!

Some quotes from Herbert Read To Hell with Culture — he is somewhat too naively found of the pre-industrialization era where there is no machines and mass production. The fundamental truth about economics is that the methods and instruments of production, freely used and fairly used, are capable of giving every human being a decent standard of living… To Hell with Culture Still his thoughts are insightful: A culture begins with simple things—with the way the potter moulds the clay on his wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside. Culture has always developed as an infinitely slow but sure refinement and elaboration of simple things—refinement and elaboration of speech, refinement and elaboration of shapes, refinement and elaboration of proportions, with the original purity persisting right through. ...

Professor Sunderam gave a talk at Booth about Dynamic Competition for Sleepy Deposits at the banking workshop. It reminded me of how local small banks in China get people to open up account and do deposits. Local small banks’ major customers are grandmas — so banks would give rice, oil and/or eggs as gifts for opening up account or putting deposit. Then, grandmas would periodically “move” their deposits from bank to bank to get free gifts. They would even compare all banks and communicate to get the best deals. Somewhat isomorphic to PhD students searching for seminar food. Anyway… Professor Sunderam and the author team collaborated with Fiserv, a software solution provider for a lot of small-scale banks and credit unions. They got a total of deposit data from 58 million accounts at 920 banks/credit unions. ...

The concert originally featurs Pekka Kuusisto. Late March he can’t make it. Assistant Concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu stepped up, learnt the concerto in two months and performed it for the May 21 week concert. You can read more about the interesting story here from CSO. Fun fact: Kreisler wrote the concerto in 1927. For eight years or so, he claimed it had been written by Vivaldi. Read more about the performance here from Chicago Classical Review.

It’s the season of Yangmei (Chinese Bayberry). Source: Wikipedia Yangmei (Chinese bayberry) is a near-impossible fruit to move. It almost doesn’t have a skin. At room temperature, fruit rots in 2–3 days; plain cold storage at 0–2°C and 85–90% humidity buys only 9–10d. The full preservation toolkit known to the industry — pre-harvest calcium chloride sprays, a permitted 20–30 second dip in CaCl₂ / salicylic acid / sorbic acid, modified-atmosphere packaging with 12–15% CO₂, end-to-end cold-chain trucking — pushes shelf life to roughly two weeks, and only if every link holds. Worse, ripening peaks from late May through June, which is the rainy season in southern China. Humidity is the enemy. Mold is the killer. ...

A large, opaque resale market for frontier LLM APIs has emerged to serve users blocked from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google endpoints (somewhat like a VPN). Two independent papers in the past two months provide the first systematic evidence that a substantial fraction of these intermediaries silently substitute models, truncate context, or misreport billing. Apart from inflated price, the shadow market maybe more chaotic than ideal: for example, shadow-API providers would steal tokens by using fake educational accounts. The claim to provide expensive good models while quietly substituting for cheaper ones. ...