I neglected to mention that my awesome-cool husband bought me a Ravenclaw house mug yesterday.

Mine! Mine! Muah-hah-hah-hah!

(The husband, and the mug. Neener, neener!)

I know you were all on tenterhooks, so I�ll end your agony: the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has announced their new conductor. It�s Peter Oundjian, the retired first violinist of the Tokyo Quartet who was forced to give up playing a few years ago because of hand problems. (Okay, I don�t know about you, but that�s a nightmare for a musician. Kind of like me worrying about losing my sight, being that I love reading and writing so much. When Oundjian announced his retirement from the Tokyo Quartet I was devastated.) The TSO has been operating under guest conductors for a couple of years ever since Jukka-Pekka Saraste left, so this announcement means that they have an artistic director again who can guide the orchestra under a single vision.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it�s because our own Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal is in the same position. Charles Dutoit resigned last year and the OSM has sort of stumbled a bit without a leader. However, hope springs eternal, and rumours are flying that Kent Nagano is at the top of the search committee�s list. At the moment Nagano is the music director of Berlin’s Deutsches Symphony-Orchester Berlin as well as the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. (Not that he�ll have to give those up; heck, Dutoit was the principal conductor of a handful of international orchestras. Racks up the air miles, but hey.)

I love synchronicity.

Yesterday DaTaStReAmS showed up in my random BlogSnob table. Today, Ginger Girl showed up in Bill’s.

Or maybe it’s surreality.

I know that Future Shop is The Den of Evil, but damn, their CD prices are persuasive. When I stopped by on Sunday, I picked up the Chicago soundtrack for $14.99 (compare $18.99 at HMV) and the Treasure Planet CD for $9.99 (no matter what the HMV price might be, this is cheaper by a mile!). I checked the price of Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk and found it to be $17.99 as opposed to $23.99, so yes, I know where I’ll be picking it up. If I’m purchasing at a chain, I’d rather purchase at the chain which will take the least amount of my hard-won dollars, thanks.

As good as the Chicago soundtrack is, I’m slightly disappointed. The recording levels are a touch uneven, particularly in the Cell Block Tango. The entire introduction to the song is almost unintelligable, as are some of the monologues, which were loud and clear in the film. And of course, one runs into the problem of lacking visuals, so the songs don’t pack quite the same punch in certain places – We Both Reached for the Gun loses a certain something when you don’t see Richard Gere’s voice issuing from Renee Zellweger’s brightly painted lips in a ventriloquist act. My last regret is that for some reason the soundtrack doesn’t include the tap-dance sequence.

Apart from that, it’s good solid singing of good solid songs, and I’m glad my mother invited me along to see the film with her over the Christmas break.

Speaking of my mother, it’s her birthday! Happy Birthday, Mum!

If you’re a Secret Diaries fan, Cassandra has a new one posted on her livejournal: The Very Secret Diary of Theoden actually went up on Christmas, and I read it but I forgot to post it for you. Didn’t remember until I checked it out today to see if a new one was up yet. Er.

My luck with books has been so-so for the past few months. Last week I finished the pile of books I got for Christmas, so I sorted through my many shelves of books to see if I could find something that (a) I hadn’t read, (b) I had abandoned, or (c) really wanted to re-read. I pulled out Shadows Over Lyra and said, Woo, a whole three books I haven’t read! I had picked up this three-in-one omnibus edition of some Lyra novels by Patricia C Wrede six years ago and couldn’t get past the second chapter, so I put it away. Perfect, I thought!

Well, I got further than the second chapter, but wow, is it ever boring, and I think it’s about to be re-shelved. I think I might need to find another home for it. Before I do, I might try skipping to the second book in the omnibus, and then the third. Maybe it’s just the first novel that’s bland and derivative and has boring characters. (I can hope, can’t I?) I’m a bit confused, because I love Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, all her short stories that I’ve read, and her epistolary novel co-written with Caroline Stevermer.

Other books I’ve given up on: Carole Nelson Douglas’ Chapel Noir, which is a novel about two women investigating a series of grisly Parisian murders that echo the little Ripper affair in Britain the previous year. When my favourite character (who has narrated the previous four novels in this series) was kidnapped, and I realised that she wasn’t coming back in this book, I really lost interest. Another book to put back on the shelf. It’s been sitting on my bedside table, where books I’m getting tired of sometimes go so that I can fall asleep (I won’t get caught up in the action and read ’till two, you see), but being a grisly murder investigation, it’s really not the type of thing that’s conducive to relaxing, you know?

I’ve been valiantly trying to read Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King for t!, but the writing style really leaves me so completely neutral. It’s a retelling of the Arthurian story in a style that imagines what actual Celtic history might have been like at the time – none of this flowery knights in plate armour stuff. It’s about war chiefs and mud and politics, and while it’s a nice change from the usual, I’m just not interested in reading yet another Matter of Britain right now. Nor have I been for the past five or six months, which is how long I’ve taken to read half the book.

I’ve have a bunch of books on order since the beginning of December – for example, the new Robin Hobb, the Charles de Lint Newford collection that came out in November, and the new Robert Jordan (which claims to be an end, but my sources indicate that the claim is ludicrous). (My view on reading Jordan at this point: I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (Macbeth III.v.) I’m also re-reading Ceri’s novel. And I did another scan through my bookshelves and found Broken Blade, the third book of an Ann Marston trilogy that I put down half-read four years ago, having lost my reading momentum when she decided to change from third-person to first-person narration after the first two novels, which jarred me at the time. And my mother sent me home with a set of mystery novels by Dianne Day which look good, so maybe I’ll tackle those next.

Reading’s just been sort of fnyeh lately. You know?

In complete contrast to my last post:

It was orchestra last night, and we’ve begun auditioning new conductors. There are two finalists for the position: the temporary conductor who led the orchestra for our last concert (who is one of our violists, and who has guest-conducted with us before); and another prominent West Island musician who has led various choirs, concerts, bands, Savoy productions, etcetera.

The formula? Each auditionee conducts the second movement of the Mendelssohn symphony that we played at the last concert; another movement of the same symphony, which we’ve played through but not worked on; and introduces a new piece of music for the orchestra to sight-read.

Last night, the surprise music our applicant conductor brought in was the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which just happens to be one of my favourite pieces of music ever.

I was bouncing off walls when I got in the car at the end of the evening. I had played Don Giovanni. And it had sounded pretty darned spectacular for sight-reading and a half-hour of working on it. It’s an energetic overture with plenty of drama, challenging in its precision but not overly discouraging in the technical aspect.

I enjoyed the evening immensely. The conductor had charm, great musical sense, and had us sounding terrific by the end of the evening. I wonder how much of that was an unconscious desire on our part to impress him, though, and more focus being given to a new face, familiarity breeding contempt, and all that. From experience, I know that our temporary conductor is just as talented, but in a different way. The entire orchestra grades these applicants and submits recommendations, and it’s going to be a tough choice.

We’ll see what transpires next week, when our temporary conductor officially auditions.