A couple of years ago, Miss Mussel was lured to a Halle Orchestra concert by a bit of Tchaikovsky. This is noteworthy in itself, as she almost always find his works to be overly sentimental, deathly dull affairs. The ticket…
Kenneth Sillito at Friday night’s concert: We’ve heard tonight the work of teenagers. Shostakovich wrote his octet at 19, Mendelssohn his at age 16. There is another fantastic piece for this combination also written by a teenager, Georges Enescu, the…
On her About page, Miss Mussel acknowledges the influence of Sir Donald Francis Tovey. The real truth is that he is the reason this blog got started in the first place. Well, that and writing about reverse mortgages really tends…
Scene: A grocery store in Southern Ontario OM: Excuse me, where do you keep the tahini? Adolescent Stock Boy: The tzatziki? OM: No, tahini. It’s a sesame street paste. ASB: Sesame Street? OM: Yes, sesame street. ASB: [obviously wondering if…
The Omniscient Mussel Theatre is proud to present a fabulous one act play provisionally entitled The Interview. Dramatis personae Distinguished Professor – a well known expert on Shostakovich and, as it turns out, semiotics. Somewhat Younger Professor – a quintessentially…
The Rambler is spot on. The US Border guards are the most “inappropriately incompetent, lazy, smugly authoritarian individuals” Miss Mussel has ever encountered too. She has also been through Heathrow. And Luton. The Niagara border patrol people are definitely on…
A lovely surprise in the OM mailbox today: a note from Jonathan Bellman relating his experience with the carillon. As stated in the About page, Miss Mussel is a bit of a carilloneuse herself although nowhere near what one would…