sundry items

From the Noise Ministry: Sumi Jo talks Mozart on The Strand. 

Also, Arte's got a Beethoven 9 with Matthias Goerne, Sally Matthews, Steve Davislim and Karen Cargill, who was pretty excellent in the Mahler 3 rehearsal I caught at Tanglewood summer before last (and here with Runnicles/BBCSSO), and whose Met debut will be the last Waltraute of this year's run of Götterdämmerung, whereupon maybe they will figure out that she can hack it and give her more fun stuff to do.

From the Ministry of Histrionics: sterling yet in England, Donmar Warehouse Richard II reviews here, here, and here.

From the Ministry of Ranting, Office of Buzz-Mumbling, commentary on Amazon's bold new app for market monopolization here and here.  As a former bricks n' mortar record store employee who had at least one former customer apologize to me about my job "but, you know, Amazon just had better prices", my only question is what's taken them so long?  But consider, o Christmas shoppers, what Amazon is doing is not just beating the competition but actively moving to obliterate it, even as they sell their proprietary e-reader and make direct deals to cut out publishers altogether. My job fell to a variety of market forces, but all that means is it's a lot harder to find some stuff Former Customer could once have relied on us to have.  We shrug. We live. She gets to find something else to listen to.  But seriously, not to be paranoid or anything, but all the above taken in the aggregate, do you really want the likes of Jeff Bezos determining what's worth reading and how you read it, and keeping a record of it all the while?  Kinda looks like fascism to me.