Another posting in the Kharkiv Opera genre — as in my 3/9 posting “The dandelion caper”, where I described the genre as “a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times” (from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”). That day’s pleasure was the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us; today I bring you a mixture of pleasure, playfulness, and joy, along with some weirdness, but with an alarming sting in its tail. All from the music that played during my sleep time the night before last (7:30 pm to 4:15 am, with brief waking moments roughly every hour during the night for a whizz — hey, my kidney disease has been brought to a standstill for the moment, and my whizz regimen is the price I pay for that), so that I had ten moments of nighttime music, from the final “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (yes, I can drop off to sleep during the “Ode to Joy”, with its cascade of musical climaxes), to waking with Dvořák songs for violin.
In between there was an extraordinary grab-bag of musical works, listed below, followed by comments on two of the items.
