Delos Diary

In an attempt to have at least one more diary entry before the end of year 2003, I have been scanning every possible source of news, hoping to find an item or two of interest to our website browsers. Post-Christmas news is sparse, although announcement that Canada's Calgary Philharmonic has commissioned big-screen images from multimedia artist Kenneth Doren to accompany its Russian music evenings on January 16-17 stopped me for a moment or two. The program, which includes Liadov's Baba Yaga and The Enchanted Lake and the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, would seem a natural for visual embellishment. Today's audiences are so addicted to TV images that some, at least, must feel deprived if they can only focus in on a static group of live musicians sawing away. The pictures by Victor Hartmann which originally inspired Mussorgsky are, in my opinion, singularly mediocre. If not for Mussorgsky's music, Hartmann's pictures would be long forgotten. It should be interesting to see what artist Kenneth Doren comes up with in Calgary.