Groceries and Xenakis

We stayed at home yesterday, studying our Italian, and ventured out for groceries in the late afternoon. Some food items are amazingly varied and excellent, like pasta and preserved meats, but others are harder to find, especially vegetables. The outdoor fruit and vegetable stands tend to have better produce; on the other hand, we can't pick over the vegetables the way we do at Market Basket - that is frowned upon here. We take what the clerk gives us, with mixed results. The red wine seems to be uniformly great, though.

At 6:30, we went to a concert that seems to be part of a series, celebrating Iannis Xenakis, the mid-late 20th century composer, mathematician, and architect. The music was interesting and well performed by mostly young musicians. Xenakis seems forbidding to a lot of people who think he is cold and 'mathematical.' But I think of him as an artist with a great many different impulses and a composer who favors grand gestures and drama. He also wrote music specifically for children to perform, like "A Helene" for 2-part girls' choir, which was on the program that we heard. I think that composers should write music for all ages and levels of skill, and I admire Xenakis for doing so. The only downside of the concert (for me) was the two lectures on Xenakis and Messiaen, declaimed in machine-gun-style Italian that I couldn't hope to follow, even though I was familiar with the terms and content. Still, a nice concert.

Here is a link to the program: 
www.oratoriosanfilipponeri.com/fontanamixxenakis/