Frisian is a beautiful language to English speakers’ ears, as is evident from the work and performance of its most renowned contemporary poet, the late Tsjebbe Hettinga. Here is a performance by the poet of one of his most beloved compositions, It Faderpaard, as it appears on YouTube. Few, if any of us, will be able to understand the text of It Faderpaard, but the hypnotic sound of his recital is well worth the listen. Read along with the text, as well.

Composer Marco Rosano returns with an electronic baroque collection of sacred pieces. It has just been released on May 24, 2024.

I have long loved this contemporary composer’s take on baroque sacred music. His Stabat Mater, O Quam Tristis and Requiem have been on my playlists for a while now. (It took me a good part of that while to figure out that these pieces were not very idiosyncratic pieces from 300 years ago.) Now he has reworked this music in an electronic environment, and the results are wonderfully original and provocative.

The people of Romania, whether ethnic Romanians or members of other constituent groups: Roma, Hungarians, Germans, etc. have lived through historic changes during the past thirty years. Here they are at the beginning of that journeys, in these photographs that date back to the mid 1990s.

I left my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in September, 1992 for my great Romanian adventure. It was a last minute job offer and in a hectic whirl I got rid of everything: some things for the garbageman, a huge stack of LPs on the sidewalk for passersby to peruse, shopping bags of personal items given to various people who, in those days, sat on blankets on the sidewalk in the East Village selling used items. It was worth it, because for the next three years I would live in a society that I could have never imagined. And I came back enriched: maybe not so much financially, but culturally and creatively. My stay in that fascinating country during those fateful years just after the fall of dictatorship resulted in an archive of thousands of photographs, stories to tell, and a novel, The Shriek and the Rattle of Trains.

With the publication of her memoir, Wie Alle, Nur Anders, in 2021, Nora Eckert brought some Berlin extravagance to Germany’s comparatively conservative society. She arrived in Berlin in 1973 to work at Chez Romy Haag, Europe’s most famous transvestite night club at that time, and has gone on to become a well known opera critic. Through the years she has observed, studied and commented on her life and the life of the city around her as she transitioned from one gender to the other in the unique city of Berlin. She has collected those thoughts in this provocative and fascinating book. The book is, for now, only available in German. There is a Spanish translation planned. Will an English translation follow?

On the third anniversary of that infamous day when Notre Dame burned, Antonia Alexandra Klimenko, a long time resident of the city of Paris, shared the following poem.

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