"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some years ago I remember watching the 1974 film The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford. There is a scene where Redford and another actor are walking around a swimming pool and one of them says something like, “It was a summer.” Or it might have even been, “It was a great summer.”

There is something about the fading of summer that always makes me melancholy and it instantly, every day, transports me to summers past. Because I am an old man of 77 those summers past seem to be in the great past and never in the recent past.

Many of those summers past flicker back in forth in Buenos Aires. I remember plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and my mother and our housekeeper Mercedes would be out in the garden banging pans in a vain effort to keep them at bay.

I remember a “plague” of white butterflies that happened only once and no pans were removed from the kitchen.

I remember summers in the Pampa on a horse galloping after South American ostriches.

I remember forty degree Christmas Eves in that Southern Hemisphere, trying to keep awake at midnight Mass as I knew that presents would be under our Christmas tree when we returned home.

I remember the pleasant chirping of cicadas (cigarras) and the neighbor's noisy rooster at my siestas.  Through the blinds I would notice the flickering movement of Mercedes hanging clothes to dry.

I remember the many fireflies of summer that I never see here in British Columbia.

I remember Tío Fernando (my cousin Wency’s uncle but not mine) who would take me to the Tigre River Delta to swim in the brown silt arms of the Río Paraná.

I remember going with Wency, my Uncle Tony, Tía Sarita and my mother on that Studebaker truck between Goya in the Province of Corrientes to the Estancia (ranch) Santa Teresita late at night and the Milky Way so bright I could see my hands and that swath of light from one end of the horizon to the other.

I remember the smell of damp Pampa soil after a summer thunderstorm. Those thunderstorms were ever so loud and I miss them here in Vancouver.

The concept of summer in Spanish is helped by the fact that we have a transitive  verb form of summer, “veranear” which means to spend summer in a place that Is not the place you live. Another form is “veraneo” which can mean a summer resort, Mar del Plata un lindo lugar de veraneo. Not so nice is a veraniego person who is just plain lazy.

A Summer in a summer's day  - Emily Dickinson

Hosta plantaginea & Rosa 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain' 8 August 2019

The August Lily is not a lily. Hosta plantaginea (a species hosta) is closely related to the family of the asparagus. It is called the August Lily as unlike other hostas it blooms in August and not in June or in September like Hosta tardiflora.

Hosta plantaginea has three features that separates it from most other hostas. Its white flowers are very fragrant. It thrives in full sun (if properly watered) and best of all in a large garden (not ours) those white flowers are almost fluorescent in early evening light.

Our one Hosta plantaginea is in our laneway garden right under Rosa ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’. This rose is a 19^th century hybrid perpetual (false advertising) that blooms once but the sporadically in late summer. The blooms are beautiful and the old-rose scent is strong. 

But this rose has a nasty habit of getting that ugly rose disease called black spot. Since strong fungicides (black spot is a fungus) are banned in BC there is little one can do to reduce black spot. Nobody from any important garden society is going to come at this late summer time to opine on our garden so I ignore the black spot. I know well that I have had this rose for 12 years and it has always bloomed.

Today I decided to scan both the rose and the hosta flower. I went further and scanned a rose leaf. I was pleasantly surprised that the black spot is sort of interesting. And best of all it is evident that my Epson Perfection V700 Photo is much more powerful than the school microscopes of my youth.

 

Curtis Daily

More info on the concert

I have a particular connection to this work. The standup bass player, Curtis Daily is my friend and whenever he is in town I go to any performance that has him firmly in command of the lower register of the orchestra.

Of Purcell’s work he has informed me that Handel listened to a lot of this man’s output and did what Handel did besides copying himself, he copied a lot of Purcell. Purcell sounds like Handel because Handel sounds like Purcell!

In my new vein of going (because I am allowed and in this case Weimann gave me a green light) to rehearsals I get to see and listen to stuff that is mostly not known or ignored in actual performances like tonight’s.

This is illuminating as besides finding out that musicians put on their pants one leg at a time I know they knit, play with their smart phones and read good literature such as Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami. 

The rehearsal yesterday at the lovely UBC Chapel of the Epiphany featured a most unusual configuration. The singers sat in chairs facing Weimann which must have been strange as no musical director would ever hear the singers in that way. And this photographer was able to go to the back of the orchestra and watch Weimann direct, something that nobody will see in tonight’s concert.

I listened to a fractured potpourri of tonight’s performance. Of the Purcell I particularly was in awe of movement 11 The Fife and all the Harmony of War with tenor Samuel Boden , who was terrific! (I believe he rehearses his parts while working out.) 

The other movement I heard was Chorus (the 13th and last): "Hail! Bright Cecilia, hail to thee" with tenor Boden, Bass-Baritone Matthew Brooks and Alex Potter and bass-baritone Matthew Brook singing With Rapture of Delight dost see Thy Favourite Art. Special to this was accompanying (alto-ripieno) Vancouver countertenor Nicholas Burns. This  movement was beautiful and simply showed that lots of stuff happened before Bach came into the baroque scene and why Musical Director Matthew White had other composers in this year’s EMV Bach Festival. 

The rehearsal to me seemed inspired but then we do know that St. Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians!

Curtis Daily pointed out to me that because Matthew White was a fine countertenor in his time he knows how to find the best singers around to bring into our city. I did not get a chance to listen to the sopranos, including Suzy LeBlanc but will look forward to that tonight.

Because for years I worked as a magazine photographer I decided that today’s blog entry would start with Curtis Daily’s bass being retrieved from overnight storage  and then finally being loaded into his Prius. The bass was in the chapel basement and because it was cold there the bass had to be brought up half an hour before the rehearsal to warm it up or it would have been difficult to keep it tuned.