Another musical discovery in Manhattan last night-- while milling briefly around a Barnes and Noble waiting for Amy to show up, I decided to check out their collection of CDs by Horace Silver. I uncovered Rockin' with Rachmaninoff, a musical that Silver wrote about Duke Ellington giving Rachmaninoff a tour of heaven. It sounds bizarre, and it was, but also very good. Unfortunately, I don't think there are any revivials of it in the works.

Since I began listening obsessively to Nessun Dorma seven years ago, and spent four years in Chicago praying for Turandot to come to the Lyric Opera, it might be a little unfair to measure the Met's lovely production of Turandot against the cumulative weight of expectation. Even so, Franc Zeffereli's 1987 sets were magnificent, the ensemble was convincing, and the alternating of bright scenes and dark scenes was as dizzying as it should be. [Quibble #1: The canned trumpet music however, was not magnificent, merely strange. It would have been better to forgo it or else hire some bugilists and station them in the back of the theater.]

Quibble #2: Gruber/Turandot could definitely sing (although she was merely great, not spine-tingling) but she wasn't a very icy ice-queen during her first major appearance, the 3-riddles scene. When cloaked with diaphonous cloth and decorated with an improbable array of tassles, she would have done better to stand stock-still rather than to dance back and forth waving her dangly bits. All that said, once she shucked her outfit, she was more plausible, and by early Act III, when she was in a black version of the original get-up, she was the ice-queen she is supposed to be.

Quibble #3: Calaf. Calaf hit all of his notes, but when he ran through some of his crowd-pleasers like Nessun Dorma and Non Piangere Liu, it was a little too much like he was an opera tenor running routinely through a crowd-pleasing aria. There are two places in Nessun Dorma where Calaf simply has to be able to outsing the whole orchestra, to belt out a few crucial notes that give the audience chills. On the CD of Turandot I have, Pavarotti manages it, and he even managed it when I saw him on television at the Oscar some years ago. Is it unfair to measure Johan Botha against even an aged Pavarotti? Yes. But, still. . .

Which brings this post round to a more general question. Where are the superstar tenors in opera today? The lions are all going-- Pavarotti long past his day, Domingo making CDs of Tristan before it is time to stop, and so on. Who is left to make these roles not just great but spine-tingling?

But I cannot end this post without noting the other most wonderful thing about the Met's production of Turandot (aside from the gaudy Zefferli sets, and of course Puccini's music): Krassimira Stoyanova, who sang the part of the slave girl Liu. As a general matter, I prefer the hysterical hyperfeminist ice queen to the suicidal and headlong slave girl, but last night's Liu put Princess Turandot to shame.

UPDATE: Incidentally you'll be able to hear (but not, alas, to see) Turandot online for the January 29th Met Broadcast.

Charles Fried makes me so happy. I think I first started paying real attention to him when I read a U Chi L Rev article by him, shortly before Orin Kerr pointed out a speech at Harvard, which directed me to his newest book, Saying What The Law Is. Coursing through the Yale library I came across his Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution which I read on the way to and from New York this weekend (reviews of MoMA and Turandot are coming).

I am, of course, a Supreme Court geek, and I also have an affection for autobiography much more than straight biography, so it's no surprise that the book (an account of Fried's time as Solicitor General) appealled. Further, Fried writes with a fascinating combination of arrogance and humility-- the book was written when it looked like both affirmative action and Roe were doomed, so it is fun to cast Fried's analysis in light of Adarand, Grutter, Gratz, Casey, and Stenberg.

Still, Fried is less defnsive and more mixed in his analysis in himself and some of his choices than I would have expected-- books like this are the reason I read autobiographies.

2 Other bonuses for this book: 1, Fried deals extensively with the question of what kind of allegiance a Solicitor General owes to the Attorney General and the President, a topic I have gone back and forth with my girlfriend over. 2, The book is a welcome counterpoint to some of the bizarre savagery in Lincoln Caplan's The Tenth Justice.

It's sort of unfortunate I'm the first person in 12 years (and the 4th person ever) to have checked this book out from Yale.

[50 Book challenge]

UPDATE: Rereading my previous post about Fried's speech I did notice one odd thing. In the speech, Fried said he admired Justices Marshall, Jackson, Harlan (2), and Black. But in Order and Law he devotes quite a bit of space to setting Harlan and Black against one another, and explaining why Harlan's sensitive, tradition-based jurisprudence is so superior to Black's "anti-intellectual" version. Either I missed something, or his mind has changed.

I've taken to watching Charlie Trotter's food program on my local public access station - my 13 inch TV isn't hooked up to cable. Before I saw the show, I had put Trotter mentally into my list of over-hyped celebrity chefs, for no real reason. Having watched a few episodes, I have to admit that I was wrong. Charlie Trotter is obviously a master. Whether his skill extends to his restaurants is a question I can't answer without a visit.

Good as he is, however, I get the impression that Trotter is a distinctly odd man. Today, in a little spot between two recipes, Trotter was shown taking aside one of his cooks after a bad day. I expected him to administer the blistering reprimand we expect from our famously hot-headed chefs. Instead, Trotter stared soulfully into his subordinate's eyes, and said - "I want you to become your own ultimate leader. Can you do that for me?". Hey, if it works, it works.