The lawn first. Ravinia’s main stage has just come out of a $70 million renovation. Mow the Hunter Pavilion, with a wider stage and a ziggurat-patterned acoustic shell. It looks like money really well spent. So does the merch — 24 dollars for a mug is a lot of admiration. Sibelius’s first movement has those long exposed lines where the violin hangs alone in the air, and the air was already full, among cicadas in the tree — very relentless, arhythmic, and unbothered with the music. ...

The Goldbergs end where they began — the Aria returns verbatim after thirty variations. In the 1981 Gould, the returning Aria sounds lonelier than the opening one. It seems nothing changed. You did.

Schiff is the thinking pianist’s pianist — no showmanship, every phrase deliberate. His 2017 live recording at the Pierre Boulez Saal is the Goldbergs given back to Bach: legato, transparent, unmannered.

Radu Lupu (1945–2022) was famously reclusive — few recordings, almost no interviews, a public career conducted as if publicity were a mild embarrassment. He won the Leeds, the Van Cliburn, and the George Enescu competitions in the late 1960s and then largely refused to behave like someone who had. At the keyboard he never pushed a phrase toward you. His recording of Schubert’s final piano sonata, D.960 — the opening movement’s long, suspended melody arrives without urgency, as if he simply found it there and decided not to disturb it. ...

At twenty-two, Gould persuaded Columbia Records to let an unknown Canadian record Bach for his debut. The result was fast, angular, and completely sure of itself — ornaments cut like percussion, canons that snap, thirty variations in under forty minutes, and Gould humming audibly throughout the whole thing.

Gould recorded this in September 1981, three weeks before he died at fifty. The 1981 Goldbergs are slow, breathing, inhabited — where the 1955 was argument, this is something closer to acceptance.

I watched the Odessey today and 3 hours feels so long, especially with the LOUD sound in the cinema. How do they even made it that loud? It’s the first Nolan movie that disappointed me. There are so many aspects of it being bad that I find it hard to logically critique the movie. Tempo is not good (bad script), emotion and content is not good, characters feels unmotivated, clueless and plain; set is not realistic, editing and engineering is not good, acting of some actors is really blant, etcetc. But overall the worst problem is, as Time-Bridge-3007 writes in their Reddit review The Odyssey is anti-art: ...

It’s kinda cool: The Economist’s new Big Max Index article The value of a currency should reflect its purchasing power, its command over goods and services. (Gustav Cassel) …we collect prices on just one: the Big Mac. It is available almost everywhere, and tastes much the same. Source: The Economists. https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/07/30/the-big-mac-index-at-40 Read it here: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/07/30/the-big-mac-index-at-40.

A massive amount of Bach’s music and manuscript survived because his musical estate was divided and meticulously safeguarded by his musically trained sons—especially Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. his musical estate was divided among his sons. C.P.E. Bach, in particular, meticulously cataloged, preserved, and performed his father’s works, ensuring they survived long enough for Felix Mendelssohn to spark the “Bach Revival” in 1829. SepiaGlyphs, Quora https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-notable-benefits-for-musicians-like-Bach-to-have-so-many-children-especially-in-terms-of-legacy-and-musical-influence Listen to his Violin Partita No. 3 and feel how modern soloist reinterpret and give the writing life: ...

Customers’ Multihoming Behavior in Ride-Hailing: Empirical Evidence from Uber and Lyft Chitla, Sandeep and Jagabathula, Srikanth and Mitrofanov, Dmitry and Cohen, Maxime C. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4591826 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4591826 The author collected data from 1.4M rides, 162k riders, NYC, 2018 through aelf-selected third-party panel. Uber consists of 65.7% of rides. Over a full year, 56.7% of riders used only Uber, 26.7% only Lyft, 16.6% used both at least once. The paper used subsample of the multihoming riders to estimate a structural choice model with Bayesian price/wait-time learning and a search-cost-driven consideration stage. The finding: only 16.6% of riders ever used both platforms, and even they checked both apps just 43.4% of the time — inertia and brand affinity, not price or wait time, dominate the choice. ...