Beholding a book like Lin Arison’s Feast for the Senses: A Musical Odyssey in Umbria (Chronicle Books) brings to mind the Renaissance: A Medici prince, let’s say, with a vision and a train of musicians moves from castle to castle, feast to feast, meeting and inviting along artists and artisans, recording the journey in paintings, with scribes standing by to take note and serve the prince to assemble his proud Book of Hours.
In the modern version, author and philantropist Lin Arison of Miami journeys to Umbria (between Tuscany and Rome) with San Francisco’s famous conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, his partner Joshua Robinson, and several of the young musical talents of the New World Symphony — the orchestral academy which Lin Arison and her late husband Ted Arison co-founded with Tilson Thomas in 1986. The journey, Read the rest of this entry »
BLACK SWAN, the brilliant controversial movie by Darren Aronofsky, reviewed with contradictory interpretations as the cover story of 
If you missed Paris the Luminous Years on PBS and (and missed the snow falling live on Gertrude’s Montparnasse in my last Stein post), there is a there there to console you: Paris Was A Woman, the charming (if not always accurate) documentary by Greta Schiller. It is now available on Netflix.
Special issue of 
A question to end the first decade of the second millenium: What do Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Janet Flanner, Nathalie Barney, Hemingway, Myrna Loy, Margaret Anderson, Stravinsky, Chagall, Jean Rys, Braque, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Jane Heap, Ezra Pound, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Apollinaire, Diego Rivera, Djuna Barnes, Max Jacob, Isidora Duncan have in common?
My review of San Francisco Opera’s Werther by Massenet compares the production with a classic: Peter Weigl’s film version of the opera with the great Brigitte Fassbaender and equally powerful Peter Dvorsky from 1986. Don’t miss the film clip at the end!