My father returned safely early this afternoon.

My mother retrieved him at the airport, took him home, fed him oyster chowder and chicken breasts with noodles, brought him up date on what had happened during his absence (not much of anything happened, and there was not much of anything to impart) and put him to bed.

He was asleep by 5:00 p.m., settled in for a long night’s rest.

Tonight is the last night Joshua and I will stay with my mother. My father will return from Taipei tomorrow, and Josh and I will go back to our own place.

My father is scheduled to arrive in Minneapolis just past noon tomorrow. His outbound flight to Taipei involved a journey of almost twenty hours’ duration. His return flight to Minneapolis will be considerably shorter, assuming everything proceeds as scheduled: fifteen hours and thirty-five minutes. My father and his colleagues were routed through San Francisco on the outbound flights. The return flights will be routed through Tokyo. Happily, travel between Minneapolis and Taipei involves only one change of plane.

He will get some rest when he arrives home tomorrow, but he must go into the office on Thursday and Friday. My mother has kept this coming weekend free, so that my father need do nothing but rest.

It is possible that my parents will use their tickets to the Minnesota Orchestra this weekend. The orchestra will play Schubert’s Eighth and Mahler’s Ninth under Mark Wigglesworth. My mother asked Josh and me whether we wanted to use the tickets, and we told her to keep the tickets in the event my father wanted to hear the concert. My parents will probably decide at the last minute whether or not to go, depending entirely upon whether my father wants to stay home that night or venture out.

Josh and I have nothing planned for this weekend. The following weekend, we may go up to the lake for the first time this year. If we decide to go, we will probably ask my parents whether they want to go, too. The following weekend is Memorial Day weekend, and Josh and I will spend that weekend in Denver while my parents will spend that weekend in New York.

I cannot believe it, but summer is almost here.

While my father has been away, my mother and Josh and I have been listening to six discs of French music ranging from the Baroque period to the early 20th Century. These discs have given us a lot of pleasure.

Orchestral suites from Rameau’s “Nais” and “Le Temple De La Gloire”, performed by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, on the Harmonia Mundi label

Berlioz’s Prix De Rome Cantatas, performed by Michele Lagrange, Beatrice Uria-Monzon, Daniel Galvez-Vallejo, the Nord-Pas-De-Calais Chorus and the Lille National Philharmonic under Jean-Claude Casadesus, on the Naxos label

Gounod’s Saint Cecilia Mass, performed by Barbara Hendricks, Laurence Dale, Jean-Philippe Lafont, the ORTF Chorus and the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique De Radio France under Georges Pretre, on the Musical Heritage Society label

Piano music of Debussy, performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, on the Deutsche Grammophon label

Organ symphonies of Louis Vierne, performed by Michael Murray, on the Telarc label

“Paris 1920”, a disc of music by Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger, performed by the Orchestre De Paris under Semyon Bychkov, on the Philips label

The Harmonia Mundi disc of Jean-Philippe Rameau orchestral suites from “Nais” and “Le Temple De La Gloire” is a real disappointment. The disc features dull playing and even duller conducting.

For some reason, the U.S.—unlike France, Germany and Great Britain—cannot produce high-quality period-instrument ensembles. California-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the oldest period-instrument ensemble extent in the U.S., has been playing for over 25 years, and during this period it has witnessed the establishment and demise of several other period-instrument groups in other parts of the U.S.

Why has the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra survived when so many other U.S. period-instrument ensembles have foundered? I have no idea, because the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra is certainly not any good—it plays at the level of a barely-proficient amateur ensemble, nothing more, and it is far outpaced in terms of ensemble and musicianship by even the most second-rank of European groups.

Music schools in France, Germany and Britain devote much more attention to period-instrument performance than American music schools, which is probably why American ensembles are so dismal in this field.

I, for one, have no problem with this—and, further, I have no problem with conceding the entire field of period-instrument performance of Baroque music to European specialist ensembles. Such endeavors should hardly be the mission or province of musicians of a young, vibrant nation.

Nevertheless, performances by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra are so lame it borders on the ridiculous, if not the outright scandalous. Isn’t it long past time this feeble ensemble disbanded? And what does it say about the musical knowledge, taste and judgment of its local audience that this pathetic group continues to attract paying customers?

The orchestral suites from the two Rameau stage works are comprised of the overtures and selected dance movements. This is glorious music, hugely affective and hugely effective, marked by beguiling tunes, captivating rhythms and piquant instrumentations.

However, none of this comes across in the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s playing, which is dull as dishwater. The playing is positively comatose. There is no sense of French style anywhere, no French verve, no French fragrance, no French timbre and no French elegance. Rhythmically lifeless, the music-making is inexpressive and unenergetic. Given these shortcomings, the fact that the ensemble work is inexcusably shoddy is practically irrelevant. This disc is a non-starter. I am appalled that it was ever issued.

Much of the blame must be assigned to British conductor Nicholas McGegan. In a field crowded with marginal British talents serving as period-instrument leaders (John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, Roger Norrington, Trevor Pinnock, a group known as the “semi-conductors”), McGegan is generally considered to be the least talented of all. Why does this man still get work?

For the past couple of years, McGegan has appeared often in the Twin Cities, serving as one of the “associates” of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. A couple of months ago, the orchestra announced that it was ending its association with McGegan, effective at the end of the current concert season—to no one’s surprise, surely, because McGegan has hardly been a success here—and I was pleased to see that he had been given the shove so quickly, and without ado. There was simply no point in keeping him on.

The disc of Hector Berlioz Prix De Rome Cantatas is both fascinating and frustrating. First issued on the Harmonia Mundi label in 1996, and reissued by Naxos in 2003, the disc is the only recording ever issued of all four cantatas, although the two cantatas for female vocalist, “Herminie” and “La Mort De Cleopatre”, are very well-known and have been recorded many times.

Berlioz competed for the Prix De Rome for five consecutive years. He failed to pass the first round on his first try (a counterpoint examination), but he moved on to the second and final round in 1827, 1828, 1829 and 1830, the year in which he finally was awarded the prize. In order, his entries were “La Mort D’Orphee”, “Herminie”, “La Mort De Cleopatre” and “La Mort De Sardanapale”, all written to prescribed texts handed to the contestants 25 days before their compositions had to be submitted to the adjudication panels.

All four of the cantatas are of very high quality, and quite original for 1820’s France (a nation still under the musical domination of Luigi Cherubini). They display all of Berlioz’s hallmarks—interesting rhythmic and harmonic twists, imaginative settings of text, the widest possible range of emotion, and glorious orchestration—and it is instantly apparent that these cantatas are from the same period as Berlioz’s youthful “Symphonie Fantastique”.

The first cantata requires a tenor, female chorus and orchestra, the second a soprano and orchestra (although it is often sung by mezzo soprano), the third a mezzo soprano and orchestra, and the fourth a tenor, male chorus and orchestra. Only a fragment of the winning cantata, “The Death Of Sardanapalus”, survives.

The performances on the Naxos disc are not distinguished. They are capable, and pleasing, but not memorable. “Herminie” (soprano Michele Lagrange) and “The Death Of Cleopatra” (mezzo soprano Beatrice Uria-Monzon) receive the finest performances on the disc, but these two cantatas are widely available in even finer performances elsewhere, including at least one standard-setting set of performances of both works involving Janet Baker and Colin Davis on the Philips label.

This is only the second recording of “The Death Of Orpheus”, and the very first recording of the surviving fragment of “The Death Of Sardanapalus”, but these two cantatas are less well-served on the Naxos disc. This is because the tenor, Daniel Galvez-Vallejo, is very unimpressive. As captured by the microphone, Galvez-Vallejo’s voice is not pleasing—the voice is grainy, and registers are not knit together. He also does not make much of the music or text. He simply strains to sing notes. I would very much like to hear what Roberto Alagna could do with these works.

The orchestra, chorus and conductor are minimally competent, nothing more. The whole enterprise has the whiff of a radio-performance run-through (which I suspect it was). It is easy to understand why this disc did not survive long in the Harmonia Mundi catalog. It remains, however, the only disc ever issued containing all four Berlioz Prix De Rome cantatas. As such, it is invaluable, especially since it is now available at budget price.

Charles Gounod’s mass devoted to Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, was written in 1855 and premiered on November 22 of that year (Saint Cecilia’s Day) at the great church of Saint Eustache in Paris, three years before the composer completed writing “Faust”.

I have loved this work since the first time I heard it. It is tuneful and voluptuous, but also pious, befitting Gounod’s original intention to enter the priesthood.

Some people find Gounod’s Saint Cecilia Mass to be insufficiently serious. They object to its tuneful sequence of marches, dances and songs used to underlay the text of the Latin mass. Some commentator somewhere wrote that Gounod’s Saint Cecilia Mass was an incongruous mixture of operetta, Palestrina and salon music, all somehow sandwiched between occasional pages of Beethoven. If so, I love the combination.

My father detests the Gounod mass. He invariably describes it as “a sugary confection”. My mother enjoys it somewhat more, although she says that the individual components, pleasing as they are, do not amount to a satisfactory whole.

I prefer to take the work on its own terms, and to accept it as the sincere, lush, enjoyable work of devotion it is. It is very French, and very French Roman Catholic, and very Napoleon III, but within that realm it is entirely successful. I also find it to be a work of great power and beauty.

The work has been recorded a few times, but the only version I have heard is Pretre’s, recorded in 1983 and originally issued on EMI.

The Pretre recording is OK, although the orchestra is not very good. The chorus is somewhat better, and the soloists better still, although only soprano Barbara Hendricks is truly first-class. Nonetheless, this disc always gives me pleasure, and it was good to hear it again after five or six years.

I wish American orchestras and choruses would program the Gounod mass on occasion. I think audiences here would like it.

Josh hated it.

In Josh’s eyes, however, the Michelangeli disc of Claude Debussy piano music made up for anything sub-par in the other discs we listened to. Josh had never heard the Michelangeli Debussy disc before, and he found it to be overwhelming.

One of the classics of the gramophone, Michelangeli’s Debussy disc has been legendary from the day it was issued in 1971. It has never been out of print. Today, thirty-seven years after its initial release, it remains in the catalog at full price, despite the fact that it contains only 45 minutes of music. It is the most profitable piano disc ever issued by Deutsche Grammophon in the 110-year history of the company, having sold, literally, hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

Is this the greatest Debussy piano disc ever made? I can think of none finer.

Only three compositions are on the disc: Images I, Images II and the Children’s Corner Suite.

Michelangeli’s virtuosity is blinding. He may have been the most virtuosic of all 20th-Century pianists. The evenness of his runs in the opening movement of the Children’s Corner Suite, for example, is jaw-dropping. The power and control (and subtlety) he brings to the first movement of Images I are dumbfounding.

Michelangeli was much more than a virtuoso, however. He was also a great colorist, summoning an unparalleled array of color and texture and voicing from the keyboard. He had no rival in creating a unique and unlimited sound world from an instrument that, in other hands, sounds monochrome by comparison. Only Gieseking, another great Debussy pianist, had a comparable command and range of keyboard color.

Debussy was the most original of composers, especially in his writing for the keyboard. Debussy was so original that it was difficult for other composers to borrow from him. Other than his use of the whole-tone scale, borrowed by everyone from Scriabin to Puccini to Bartok, and his use of modal writing, borrowed by English composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Debussy’s music is so original that it does not easily lend itself to theft. Debussy’s harmonies are so unique, so “Debussian”—parallel chords, ninth chords, thirteenth chords, unprepared harmonic shifts—that no one else has been able to make use of these harmonic devices in a satisfactory, individual way (Karol Szymanowski probably came closest).

Drawing harmonic inspiration from Cesar Franck, an inspiration for exotic sounds from Jules Massenet, and an inspiration for clarity and brevity of expression from Emmanuel Chabrier, Debussy broke French music free from German hegemony and influence. French music has never been the same ever since.

Much as I love most Debussy orchestral works, I have always believed that Debussy wrote his very greatest music for the piano. Both sets of Images, along with the Preludes and the Etudes, are the very heart of his compositional output. In these works, Debussy changed piano writing forever, abandoning the Mozart-Haydn model on which most 19th-Century keyboard music was based, in favor of something new, different and wholly original. I could listen—and have listened—to Debussy’s mature piano music for hours on end.

The Michelangeli Debussy disc is one of those recordings that may be enjoyed repeatedly, if not endlessly, and never become stale. Josh loved his first encounters with this disc, and we played it again and again and again.

The Telarc disc contains Louis Vierne’s Organ Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, recorded on the Cavaille-Coll organ at the Abbey Church Of Saint Ouen in Rouen in Normandy.

Vierne, legally blind, was organist of the Cathedral Of Notre Dame in Paris for thirty-seven years. He died in 1937 at the Notre Dame organ’s keyboard at the conclusion of a recital, felled by a heart attack at age 67.

I have attended several Sunday afternoon organ recitals at the Cathedral Of Notre Dame, and at a recital I attended at Notre Dame in 2004 Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 3 was programmed. Parisians must like the music of Vierne: the Cathedral was full that afternoon, and the audience applauded for eight minutes at the conclusion of the work.

That afternoon and evening were memorable for me. I remained at the Cathedral after that particular organ recital in order to attend the early evening Sunday Mass. During that service, either one of the thuribles malfunctioned or one of the altar participants got carried away and put too many hot coals into his thurible, causing the incense to catch fire. Whatever the cause, the giant Cathedral filled with smoke, and the Mass had to be halted as half a dozen priests hurriedly tried to deal with all the smoke belching from the thurible. Finally, one of the priests removed the offending thurible from the Cathedral and the service continued, although worshippers were coughing themselves silly because smoke still filled the vast space.

Vierne is one of the central figures of French organ music, both as composer and performer. Vierne was a pupil of Franck and Charles Marie Widor. In turn, he taught Marcel Dupre, Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Durufle, Olivier Messiaen and Jean Langlais, among others. Several renowned specialists in organ music have written that Vierne was the most important composer of music for organ since Bach.

Myself, I do not hear greatness in Vierne’s music. Franck’s harmonies were more interesting than Vierne’s, and Franck’s music more profound. Widor had a greater melodic gift than Vierne, and Widor’s music has more overt energy and thrust. Vierne’s music, to me, operates at a much lower level of inspiration than that of his two teachers. It is well-crafted but bland, lacking memorability and genuine depth of expression.

I also believe that Vierne lacked an individual voice, always the sine qua non for a great composer. One may argue that Franck and Widor lacked individual voices, too, but those two composers were paragons of individuality compared to Vierne. For me, a little of Vierne’s music goes a long way.

Organists appreciate Vierne’s music because it is so well-written for the instrument, but the musical public outside of France seems never to have exhibited much interest in Vierne’s music. All glowing assessments of Vierne’s music I have come across were written by fellow organists.

I suppose the performances on this disc are exemplary, because Michael Murray was a student of Dupre. Murray has always struck me as an extrovert, even flashy, musician—totally at sea in the music of Bach, for instance—but there are no signs of undue flashiness on Murray’s part on the Telarc disc. These are serious performances of serious music.

It is the music itself that does not maintain my attention. About seven minutes into each Vierne work, my interest starts to wane.

My mother thinks somewhat more highly of Vierne’s music than I do, but Vierne is hardly one of her favorite composers. For Josh, the beautiful organ sonorities were nice for a few minutes, after which he lost all interest in the music. Repeated listening did not make the music more attractive or meaningful for him.

“Paris 1920” is one of the discs Semyon Bychkov recorded during his unsuccessful tenure with the Orchestre De Paris. The disc is comprised of scores to two ballets, Francis Poulenc’s “Les Biches” (the popular suite from the ballet, not the complete ballet score) and Darius Milhaud’s “Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit”, to which Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement Symphonique No. 1, “Pacific 231”, is tacked on as a makeweight.

These scores are delightful, but the performances are not. The orchestral playing is not good—the ensemble “swims”—and the sound quality of the Orchestre De Paris is not pleasing. Further, Bychkov has no feel for this repertory. Just about every performance and every recording of these works I have encountered have been much, much better than the indifferent, unstylish, uninflected performances offered here.

For persons familiar with this repertory, the disc is a waste of time.

It looks like my father will remain in Taipei until a week from tomorrow, unless something changes. We have been keeping in close contact with him by email ever since his flight arrived in Taipei late Sunday afternoon Minneapolis time, and he has told us that he thinks he must remain in Taipei until next Wednesday.

This means that Joshua and I will remain with my mother longer than we had planned.

My brother from Denver has decided to join us this weekend. He will fly in Thursday night, and fly back to Denver first thing Monday morning. This will give him a nice, long weekend at home. We very much look forward to seeing him.

I just hope my mother feeds us!

Tomorrow night my father must make an unexpected trip to Taipei. Apparently there is trouble in the Taipei office—it sounds like someone’s going to get fired—and he and two colleagues must make a hastily-scheduled trip to the Far East.

The departure from MSP is late tomorrow night, and the flight will take 19 hours and 35 minutes, if the flights are on schedule, which will put my father and his colleagues into Taipei at 6:00 a.m. local time Monday morning.

It sounds like an awful trek, and at least I am pleased that my father and his colleagues will travel first class. Perhaps they will be able to get some rest in the first-class cabin during the trans-Pacific portion of the journey.

Tomorrow, Joshua and I will go over to my parents’ house to help my Mom get my Dad’s things ready for the trip, and we will help take him to the airport tomorrow night. He hopes to be able to arrive back home next Saturday, if everything goes as planned.

While my father is away, Josh and I will stay with my mother so she has some company as well as some help caring for the dog.

The dog is a high maintenance dog—he thrives on lots of attention from as many people as possible. Josh and I will be on hand to lend assistance, checking his homework and making sure he gets to soccer practice on time, as well as to his bassoon lessons, which are going remarkably well. (However, his bassoon reeds are costing my parents a fortune, because he goes through them at a frightening pace! Couldn’t he have picked a brass instrument?)

Tonight my mother came into town and we all ate an early dinner downtown and afterward attended a Minnesota Orchestra concert. It was a nice way to prepare my father for Taipei (a city he loathes) and to give him a send-off of sorts.

Neville Marriner was the conductor, and the program consisted of Elgar’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

The Elgar did not work because the soloist, concertmistress Jorja Fleezanis, lacked the personality and virtuosity necessary for its grand rhetorical gestures. She also lacked the emotional depth necessary to convey fully its heart-breaking sadness. I love the Elgar Violin Concerto, but its demands require both a great virtuoso and a great musician. Fleezanis, capable as she is, is neither. Her performance was woefully reminiscent of a faculty recital. It was a major mistake for the orchestra to assign such a complicated, demanding work to her—she possessed not a single one of the work’s varied requirements.

Fleezanis is married to Michael Steinberg, former program annotator for the Boston Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. Fleezanis and Steinberg used to live in Edina, but now they live in downtown Minneapolis.

It was good to hear the Brahms Fourth Symphony, even with Marriner on the podium. Marriner is not much of a Brahms conductor—he tends toward the swift and the light in Brahms—but the work is such perfection, one of the great masterpieces of the form, that the music cannot help but hold the listener’s attention, no matter the quality of the performance or the quality of the interpretation.

Brahms’s Fourth is one of my father’s very favorite pieces of music (and one of mine, too), and it was somehow fitting that he could hear a live performance of the work the evening before embarking on a long and painful business trip.

On Wednesday night, Josh and I and my parents went to Saint Paul to hear baritone Bryn Terfel in recital. Malcolm Martineau was the pianist.

Terfel has a voice of the greatest beauty and richness and power. He probably has the finest baritone instrument before the public today.

I’m not convinced that the quality of Terfel’s artistry matches the quality of his voice, but he nonetheless is an important artist.

The program was a peculiar one. It was filled with English songs, none of which were of high quality.

The first half of the recital was devoted to four songs by John Ireland, one song by Peter Warlock, three songs by Frederick Keel, two songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and four songs by Roger Quilter. These numbers all veered far too close to “ditty” territory, and hearing fourteen of them in a row was a real chore. I cannot imagine who or what convinced Terfel that these numbers were worthy of export beyond the British Isles, especially in large quantity.

The second half of the recital consisted of one Handel aria, one Mozart concert aria, four Schubert lieder, three Faure chansons, and six more British songs, in this case traditional Celtic songs (which genuinely were ditties, and pretty awful ones at that).

Perhaps Terfel felt that he had to “sell” the British songs to an American audience, because he hammed it up no end in the British numbers. He was so over-the-top—alternately cooing and roaring, rolling his r’s to a ridiculous degree, making faces—that I wanted to run up on stage and slap him.

The Handel, Mozart, Schubert and Faure, in contrast, were completely under-characterized. Terfel was too strait-laced in these items, as if he feared bringing too much musicianship or too much personality to genuine masterworks.

It was a bizarre recital, all in all. Nothing really worked. Terfel clearly needs to work with a coach to fine-tune his recital repertory, to work on his presentation, and to amend his platform manner, but I suspect that Terfel is not prone to take advice or direction from anyone anymore.

Josh and my parents hated the recital even more than I did. While Terfel was cooing and roaring, Josh and I my parents were groaning. While Terfel was rolling his r’s, Josh and my parents were rolling their eyes. While Terfel was making faces, Josh and my parents were making faces, too: grimaces.

I have always thought that one of Terfel’s problems is that he is not particularly intelligent. God gave him perhaps the best baritone voice of the last hundred years, but at the same time God short-changed him noticeably in the intelligence department.

Every time I listen to Terfel, on record or off, I always feel like I am listening to a voice without a brain behind it. Terfel possesses a certain general level of musicianship, to be sure, but there is nothing individual or penetrating about his work. Behind the beautiful voice, there is . . .vacancy.

Every time I hear Terfel, I say to myself, “This is the voice Hans Hotter should have been granted.”

Joshua and I did not do much this weekend, but we had a very relaxing and restful couple of days, which both of us very much needed.

On Friday night, Josh and I stayed in town after work and met my parents for an early dinner, after which we all walked over to Orchestra Hall to hear the Minnesota Orchestra play Rossini, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Hindemith under Music Director Osmo Vanska (or Aksnav Omso, as Josh calls him).

The orchestra’s playing was pretty rough in the first half of the program. The Overture to “The Barber Of Seville” sounded as if it had received no rehearsal whatsoever, and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto that followed sounded as if it had received one quick run-through with soloist Baiba Skride, a young Latvian violinist who received her music education in Germany. The first half of the program was a total loss, showing no one—orchestra musicians, conductor, soloist—on good form.

The second half of the program was much, much better. “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” sounded as if it had been very carefully rehearsed—the playing was marvelous, the balance near-perfect, attacks and releases unanimous. The “Mathis Der Maler” Symphony that concluded the program obviously had received the lion’s share of rehearsal time, because the playing was confident and bold in a work that receives few performances in the U.S.

The “Mathis Der Maler” is what drew Josh and me to the concert, and we were pleased to hear this magnificent work. It received an excellent reading, marred only by some opaqueness in the string ensemble and muddy orchestral textures at climaxes. Vanska downplayed the spirituality inherent in the work, but his conducting of “Mathis Der Maler” suggested to me that he should program more Hindemith in Minneapolis. A logical next step would be for him to program Hindemith’s Symphony In E Flat, a marvelous modernist masterpiece without the spiritual dimension of “Mathis”. I think the Symphony In E Flat would be right up Vanksa’s alley.

On Saturday, Josh and I ran errands all morning. In the afternoon, we went over to my parents’ house to do yard work. The dog was happy to see us—he had a great afternoon, romping around the yard, keeping a close eye on everything that was going on. We stayed for dinner, and my mother fed us homemade vegetable cream soup, followed by a seafood soufflé, followed by chicken breasts and pasta in a cream sauce, accompanied by steamed carrots and broccoli. For dessert, we had fresh raspberries.

Josh and I did not do much of anything today. After church, we picked up my parents’ dog and brought him home with us, because my parents had to attend a function at my mother’s relatives. We took the dog to the park this afternoon, and ran him around and played games with him for almost three hours. He loved it.

Tonight we gave my parents dinner when they stopped by to retrieve the dog. We gave the dog his Sunday night baked chicken, naturally, but the rest of us had a tomato-cucumber salad, steamed salmon and seasoned rice, corn and lima beans, and an apple-cranberry salad.

It will be back to work tomorrow for another long week.

At least on Wednesday night Josh and I will have a break, because we will go to Saint Paul to hear Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel in recital. Josh has never heard Terfel, and it may be my last time to hear him, because Terfel has been significantly cutting back his engagements.

The taxes are done.

What a draining exercise!

Joshua and I worked on our taxes most of the weekend, and the process positively exhausted us.

The nation needs to abandon the graduated income tax (or what for practical purposes may be deemed the investment tax, because it is from capital investment that the bulk of federal tax revenues derive) and institute a flat consumption tax akin to a nationwide sales tax. Such a system would reward, not penalize, saving and would encourage, not discourage, capital investment.

Joshua and I did go downtown on Saturday to attend a performance of “Rabbit Hole” at Jungle Theater. We were pleased we took a break from taxes, but we were not pleased by the play itself. David Lindsay-Abaire’s play, addressing the effects of the death of a child on a married couple, was little more than daytime drama, filled with clichés that surely were stale generations ago. The Jungle Theater production did the play no favors.

The only items we have on our schedule are this coming weekend, when Josh and I will accompany my parents to a Minnesota Orchestra concert of music by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Hindemith, and early next week, when we will accompany my parents to a recital by Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel.

The only reason Josh and I will attend a Minnesota Orchestra concert this coming weekend is to hear the seldom-programmed “Mathis Der Maler” Symphony, one of my very favorite pieces of music.

I think we may go hear the Minnesota Orchestra again the following weekend, when Neville Marriner, a former Music Director of the orchestra, will return to conduct music of Elgar and Brahms. Marriner is not one of my favorite conductors—he is too “English”—but this will probably be one of our last chances to see and hear Marriner in person, given his advanced age, and Josh has never attended a concert conducted by Marriner. We look forward to it.