Posted on August 4, 2026 by psu The lists will continue until the writing brain improves! This started out as a missive about why we don’t give as much love to Haydn as we ought to. But while thinking about it I found a few other random musical bits to mention while I was here. So here we go. Haydn I talked about Haydn a bit at this time last year , but only covered the later symphonies as…
Posted on July 30, 2026 by psu My writing brain has not been engaging with the world recently. I think the long rant about LLMs made it want to hide and take a nap forever. So let’s make a food list. The last 25 years have seen the quantity and quality of the Asian food in and around Pittsburgh increase at a happy and steady rate. So here are some favorite places to go as of the summer of 2026.…
Posted on June 30, 2026 by psu Here we go. Various records for 2026. Part 1. 2026-07-03 Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets, Borodin Quartet. This is the second of three or four times they recorded it, but the easiest to get. https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9445216–shostakovich-complete-quartets 2026-07-02 Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets: Volume 1, Eder Quartet…
Posted on April 9, 2026 by psu This is a recipe I meant to bring over from the old site but I forgot to do it until now. I copied it over and improved it a bit…and so gave it a new date of now instead of 2005. The recipe is for turkey. I think it’s good because I made it once for a friend who doesn’t like turkey, and he ate a pound of it. For years after his wife at the time made the recipe with…
Posted on March 17, 2026 by psu As promised this past weekend the Pittsburgh Symphony played the second in their series of 90 minute symphony pieces: the Mahler 2 (e.g. Mahler’s Symphony number 2, nicknamed “Resurrection”). You did your homework right? As with the Bruckner 8 before I picked up two tickets, one from my normal subscription where the seats on are on the floor, and another to be able…
Posted on March 14, 2026 by psu This post is going to be filled with a lot of grumpy words about “AI”, a word I will only ever write in single (or double, or triple) scare quotes. Before we start though I should put my bias front and center: I’ve never been interested in this stuff. I’ve had no interest in this since I started learning how to program computers in the early 1980s. Of all the…
Posted on February 26, 2026 by psu A couple of years ago the PSO promised me that they would play the Bruckner Symphony Number 8 in concert, and then ended up changing their minds and playing the Beethoven 9 instead. This year they made it up to me by again putting the Bruckner into the season as both a live performance and a recording session. As soon as I found out I bought both my normal…
Posted on January 25, 2026 by psu For most of my camera life I have comfortably ignored cameras made by Sony. Sony never made film cameras, so in that world there was nothing to ignore. Sony made mostly forgettable digital point and shoot cameras that some are irrationally attached to because they used floppy disks for stoage. Imagine digital photos small enough to fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk.…
Posted on January 20, 2026 by psu Yes I know jiaozi are not pot stickers, but I’m stuck with the title I picked … too many years ago, so we’re mixing the names here. We recently had the opportunity to make the famous dumplings ( jiaozi ) with my mom in the room and learned yet another small set of details to integrate into the recipe. So, with this in mind I decided to redo this page yet again to…
Posted on December 31, 2025 by psu For reasons it’s been a long second half of the year, and I have no pithy listicle of clichéd end of year thoughts to post today. Although I guess I will say that you should work to appreciate the people you have around you, and tell them so. This is both a trite cliché and absolutely correct. What I do have to end the year here is the rest of my “Record of the…
Posted on November 22, 2025 by psu One of my earliest Classical Music memories was my dad sitting down with me one evening and making the bold claim that there was Classical Music that was not overly long, pretentious and tedious. That is, there were numbers that immediately grabbed you by the throat and made you pay attention until they were over. My seven or eight year old face probably…
Posted on September 15, 2025 by psu A thing we have done for going on the last 25 to 30 years is go to music concerts at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, the one attached to the Carnegie Museums and Library in the Oakland part of town. Lots of non-local name collisions there. There are a lot of parking options for these buildings, but in a pinch the closest lot is the one behind the museums…
Posted on July 9, 2025 by psu I started posting links to records that I listen to on social media. I’ve done this before, but then never kept track of what I already posted or didn’t. So now I’m going to use this site to do that in batches. Here are 1-100, in reverse order since this is a blog and so everything is always reverse order. 2025-07-09 Bach Brandenburg Concertos. Apollo’s Fire.…
Posted on July 5, 2025 by psu Today I’m going to survey records that I’ve been listening to and enjoying. The concentration this time will be on the symphonies from the “Classical” period of Classical music: Mozart and Haydn . I’ve also been back in my Mahler hole a bit, but we’ll get to that later. Links are mostly to the Presto Music web site, which is the best current classical music merchant…
Posted on June 30, 2025 by psu Someone at my work first turned me on to the Carolina Chocolate Drops , but I didn’t quite lock in to the point of it all until we saw the group live at the Pittsburgh Arts Festival in maybe 2012. Live on stage you suddenly realize what is going on, and how Rhiannon Giddens has that voice . So over the years I have followed her and her music albums around and managed…
Posted on May 31, 2025 by psu In the past I have remarked, perhaps repeatedly, about how bad CDs are as a physical artifact of a musical recording. I will quote myself: CDs, as I have remarked before, are a terrible product for that. CDs carry music just fine, but everything else about them and their packaging is a soul-less black hole that is completely devoid of any artistic or emotional…
Posted on May 24, 2025 by psu We were at DISH the other night and they had their Mango Cake on the menu. This is a light layer cake with little pieces of mango and cream between the layers. And then more cream on top. This cake is so astounding that I don’t even mind the dried shaved coconut they put on top. And I usually hate that shit. I have pictures of this cake going back to my earliest use…
Posted on April 6, 2025 by psu Around 20 years go I started on a never ending journey of trying to catalog, or at least rationally store, the CDs that I have in my house. I concentrated on CDs because that’s actually fairly tractable: you can rip them into iTunes/Apple Music and then give them a unique serial number . With LPs you can’t really do this, so I didn’t even bother trying. About ten…
Posted on March 22, 2025 by psu Miles Davis and John Coltrane played and recorded in the same group roughly between the years of 1955 and 1961. There were the legendary sessions for Prestige that resulted in the four “verbin’” albums ( Steamin’ , Workin’ , Relaxin’ , Cookin’ ) and the equally legendary period at Columbia that resulted in Round About Midnight , Milestones , Kind of Blue , and…
Posted on March 14, 2025 by psu This article contains “spoilers” for future Ulysses text nerds. So beware. Late last year I finally finished “reading” (half reading, half listening) a giant book by Alex Ross from 2020 on the cultural influence of Richard Wagner from the 19th Century until now. Mostly what I got out of that book was a feeling of “Are the artist fans of Richard Wagner OK?” … because…