The return of Claudio and other short stories

I just put this picture of the world's most precious cat on my desktop. Mornings don't get better than this!
When I was around seventeen/eighteen years old, I discovered Monteverdi's madrigals for mixed choir. I fell so in love with these pieces that I didn't listen to anything else for months on end. I got recordings of the second, third, fourth and fifth books of the madrigals - they are a real library of all sorts of human emotions which strike a chord now just as much as they must have done four hundred years ago. While going through my cd collection in the last days, I have once again started to listen to this music. It brings a lot of memories with it - like a night when I could hardly sleep and I waited hours until the house was awake so I could listen to one of my favourite ones without waking anyone up.

The Finnish coast from Austrian Airlines flight 348 HEL-VIE 5.6.2006
No doubt about it - conducting a choir is not very different from holding a mass psychology session. To be able to appear confident and at ease while mentally holding several plates spinning in the air (metaphor) is nopiece of cake. But one gets better at it with experience, and the important thing is to be able to behave naturally. Today I had to tell a woman I couldn't let her join the choir, and this is never a ball. In general, I'm very happy with how the rehearsal went and actually feel better about going to Estonia with them on the weekend, although I can also honestly say I conducted a whole piece tonight with my thoughts on something completely different. What else could I do afterwards except tell them it sounded great.

No fear of hights. Sulkava 25.8.2006
It's always nice to see Damascus on the news, even if it's for the wrong reasons entirely. But how often do you really hear good news from the Middle East? Anyway, I recognised some places from pictures of the foiled US embassy attack on the BBC and CNN. They are actually very close to where our home there is.

I realise the pictures in this entry are not relevant to the text, but they look good anyway.