"Winter, you're but a rogue..."---Charles d'Orleans. That's the epigram at the beginning of the third movement of Claude Debussy's suite for two pianos, "En Blanc et Noir," written in 1915 as thousands were dying not far away at the Western Front and the cancer that would kill Debussy himself three years later was beginning to take its toll. Many people know of Debussy's miraculous late works such as the three Sonatas (for cello, for violin, for flute-viola-harp) and the piano etudes; "En Blanc et Noir" is very much in the same vein but is much less often heard. Lynn and I will be playing it this Sunday afternoon, Sept. 3, at the first installment of the Cornelia Freeman Concert Series at University of South Carolina, which will continue throughout the next several weeks. Every time we rehearse the Debussy, we are astounded anew at its originality and sonic imagination. Also on the program: the Prokofieff Quintet for the unusual combination of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, bass; and works by Villa-Lobos and by Tayloe Harding, Dean of the USC School of Music.

(Photo above: The Eiffel Tower as seen from Passy Cemetery in Paris, December, 2005. Claude Debussy is buried at Passy.)

For the finale of our "dogs of August," we present our own beloved Ruby, here shown receiving a transmission from the mother ship orbiting Earth.

One of these days I'll blog about an art show earlier than its final week, but for now I guess I sometimes need the urgency of an impending closing date to get myself to a gallery or museum. Such was the case with the enormous Brian Rutenberg mid-career retrospective at the South Carolina State Museum. Even though I've been really aware of his work since his talk at the Nickelodeon last March and the show's been up all summer, it took me until today to see it.  

Shame on me. If you have not seen it, you simply must. It's up until Sept. 4. Rutenberg is richly deserving of this major museum showcase, and to see so many of his works in one large space (spanning the past 15 years) is to get a solid grasp of his style and the recurring themes he has explored in his career. The large oil canvases are the most obvious attention grabbers, but smaller paintings, drawings, monotypes and prints also merit deep examination.

For those not from around here, Rutenberg is a SC native from Myrtle Beach, based for many years in New York but for whom the landscapes and flora of his native state figure prominently in his artistic output. His art teeters on the edge of abstraction while still highly evocative of natural forms. Seeing his marvelous pencil studies of various trees puts the brightly colored, gnarly vine-like encumbrations of his large paintings like "Algonquin" into context. Make sure you go to the end of the Lipscomb Gallery space to view the video about Rutenberg's recent residency with the USC Art Department's Atelier program and the printmaking that was done under those auspices.

Allow yourself at least an hour to live with his work in the space. Better yet, go twice. He's doing remarkable and important work and the fact that he's as much a Glenn Gould freak as I am is even more to his credit. Hurry up and get to the State Museum before Labor Day!

Dog resting in front of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens, Greece, July 3, 2006. You can't see him or her too well here, but this is one of the estimated 150,000 stray dogs that roam the streets of Athens. It can be startling to come across a pack of eight or nine dogs just casually crossing a city street or emerging from behind some rocks on the Acropolis. It's also fascinating to see an independent, self-organized pack of dogs like that, and to think that is how our own dogs would arrange themselves in an urban environment if left to their own devices.

It is a serious issue for Athenians, though, and I've read that the city council has put in place a plan for sterilizing strays rather than putting them down. I was puzzled that so many of these freely roaming dogs seemed to have collars (no tags though). Upon inquiring, I was told that prior to the 2004 Olympics, rumors spread that more draconian measures would be taken to reduce the stray population in time for the Games. Dog-loving Athenians then apparently went around putting collars on as many of the dogs as they could, the thought being that a dog with a collar would not immediately be assumed to be a stray, thus being spared a death sentence. If that was the plan, it seems to have worked to perfection.

A photo taken at last year's Chateau d'Ainay Music Festival: from left to right, Francis Gouton, me, Brian Lewis, Tereza Stanislav, Festival Director Frances DeBroff, Eric Ruske, Alex Klein. I'll be on hiatus from blogging for a few days as I return there this week for the 2006 Festival, another round of intensive rehearsals, concerts, and gorging myself on homecooked French meals washed down by an endless supply of Beaujolais. Some other returnees this year, like Alex, but also some new faces, including Chicago Symphony principal flutist Mathieu Dufour and the excellent John Ellis Quartet playing the Friday night jazz concert. Here is a link to last year's festival, they evidently decided not to do an updated one for this year (the whole scene is pretty laid-back as this photo might indicate) but it gives you an idea of the atmosphere. And for a link to the Chateau itself, go here...Ainay-le-Vieil, the tiny village surrounding the Chateau, is extremely close to the very geographic center point of France.