What is it that Sibelius is holding in his left hand? (It looks like a cigarette, or maybe a pencil, in his right.) A hair brush? A shower massage? Have fun with it.
Don’t let the Italian surname fool you; my mother’s people came from Ireland. My own sensibilities tend more toward the Northern climes than to the Mediterranean.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we anticipate St. Patrick’s Day, with music from, and in celebration of, the Emerald Isle. We’ll hear works by Irish composers John Larchet, Philip Hammond, Howard Ferguson and A.J. Potter, and works on Celtic themes by Percy Grainger, Sir Arnold Bax and John Foulds.
I hope you’ll join me for “The Sharing of the Green,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll enjoy it later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.
Today is International Pi Day (3.14, get it?). In fact, it is the only Pi Day this century to be 3-14-15, the first five digits of Pi, often represented by the Greek letter “p” (“π”), the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159 – though you could take it a good deal further, since the number is wholly irrational and refuses to fall into a repeating pattern.
Naturally, Princeton eats this stuff up. (It is Pi, afer all.) The borough is celebrating with a full day of events.
Albert Einstein, longtime Princeton resident, was born on this date in 1879. “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits,” he said. Is he saying, then, that Pi is stupid?
Not so Mr. Spock, who in this episode of “Star Trek,” defeats an evil computer by asking it to calculate to the end of Pi. That Spock is such a trickster. (R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy.)
All together now, as we sing the Albert Einstein Pi Day song!
The tyranny of Pi:
Face it, YouTube is crazy for Pi:
Scariest Pi song?
What does Pi actually sound like?
This way madness lies. Clearly, the possibilities are endless.
Now that moderate temperatures and Daylight Saving Time have lulled us into a sense of security, it’s okay for local symphony orchestras to trot out the Nordic composers.
On Saturday, Sinfonietta Nova will present music by the great Danes, Carl Nielsen and Niels Wilhelm Gade (on a concert which will also include works by Pablo de Sarasate and William Boyce), and on Sunday, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra will perform music by Jean Sibelius (on a concert which will also include works by Robert Schumann, Jules Massenet and Sebastian Currier).
Sinfonietta Nova will appear at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Princeton Junction (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.); the Princeton Symphony will perform at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium (Sunday at 4 p.m.).
Put on your Bermuda shorts and read all about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times:
