What are the Seven Lively Arts Anyway ? (6 cents)

I really don't know. But I assume that theater and music are two of them.

Today, the last day of Passover, I went to church twice. At noon, I went to the Church of the Epiphany for its Tuesday noontime concert, and saw three Levine School faculty members (floutist Rebecca Collaros, pianist Grace McFarlane and cellist, Vasily Popov) perform flawlessly. A treat.

Interestingly, their program, entitled "A World-Wind Affair with Strings Attached" was comprised of pieces with which I had no familiarity whatsoever. The only piece that was vaguely familiar was Chopin's Barcarolle, and I know I could not have identified it by listening.

I thought that the selections were mixed; this was the only downside. But I did hear something that I don't believe I had ever heard before, and would like to hear much more. It is called "Kaleidoscope" by Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa (1907-1995. I do not recognize the name. It is for flute, piccolo and piano, and contains a number of short rhythmic selections: march, musette, burlesque. You get the idea.

I enjoyed the Chopin (a lot of notes in that piece), and Debussy's Syrinx, a short flute solo. Madrigal by French composer Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941), another unknown to me, left me cold (i.e., didn't like it and didn't dislike it; the moment it was over, it slipped from my memory). The final piece, for three instruments, was Bohuslav Martinu's Trio for flute, cello and piano, which I thought the performers played about as well as it can be played. And I tried and tried to like it, and I just didn't. OK, so I should hear this again, too, and see if it was just its novelty that made it miss the mark with me.

This evening, we went to a first staged reading of a play called "The Quilt", written by Jason Ford, the son-in-law of friends. We did not know what to expect. It was part of a series of readings produced by the Playwright's Forum, and was held at St. John's Church in Bethesda.

It was quite good, and the post-reading discussion about good and weak points was also very interesting. The story line (in brief, and without giving away too much) is about a family who inherited a quilt which is sacred to a cult-like religious group. The cult members thought that the quilt had been lost and when they discovered its existence, they wanted it back. How they got it back, how the family was inevitably step by step roped into relationships with cult members, how tragedy struck, and how it ended. This is the play.

Having seen a number of readings over the past few years, this one ranks very high. Of course, whether it will ever again see the light of day, and how many drafts and re-drafts it will go through, is yet to be determined.