This is Stefano Bertoncello's Blog (ステファノ・ベルトンチェッロ - トゥーグッドイアーズ − ブロガー、オーディオ＆ミュージック・コンサルタント) devoted to pacific topics like Music - live and reproduced - i.e. discs, audio, guitars and whatever musical: concerts, workshops, exhibitions, etc. Furthermore: travelling - as a mind-game and real globetrotting - and books, movies, photography... sharing all the above and everything which makes Life better and Earth a better place to stay, enjoying Life, in Peace. Proudly ads-free since 2007! Enjoy.💫
I love this picture.
PW is elegant, ironic and so proud.
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This album is an exact reproduction of the original master tape. In order to guarantee the best possible sound quality, no digital equipment or post-processing has been used. It is a hand-numbered limited edition of 250 copies.
Violinist and teacher; born 7 August 1905 in Teschen (Austria), died 6 August 1991 in Bern, Switzerland.
From the age of 15, Max Rostal was already having lessons with the foremost teacher of his time, Carl Flesch. After completing his studies with him, Rostal worked as a violinist in Vienna and Oslo before becoming his former teacher's assistant at the Hochschule für Musik Berlin in 1928. With a group of his students from Berlin including Maria Lidka, Rostal emigrated to the UK where he went on to be a successful and influential teacher and performer in London. He was professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London until moving to Bern, Switzerland in 1958.
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"Anything, if it remains the same for too long, will gradually exhaust its energy."
Haruki Murakami
When they finished writing The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers faced a problem. The protagonist was a scruffy, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed homeless man known simply as "The Dude."
He wasn't a traditional hero, and he barely cared about solving the mystery surrounding him. He just wanted his rug back, because it really tied the whole room together.
The Coen brothers had partly based him on a real-life friend, but now they needed an actor who could truly bring this strange, adrift character to life.
One name kept coming back: Jeff Bridges.
When Bridges read the script, he laughed out loud because he felt like the directors had secretly studied his own teenage years in California.
That relaxed pace was already there in him.
In fact, many of The Dude's outfits, like his rubber flip-flops and old T-shirts, came straight from Bridges' closet.
But here's what surprises most fans: Bridges remained completely sober during filming.
Even though the Dude smokes marijuana constantly, Bridges wanted total control over the pacing of his performance. He set the musical score, knowing that every single "friend" and long pause had to fall at the right time.
Before scenes, he had a ritual.
He'd ask Joel or Ethan Coen a simple question: "Do you think the Dude smoked one on the way here?" They usually said yes. Bridges would rub his eyes until they were red, then let himself go into the scene.
The part naturally suited him, but when the film came out in 1998, it was a complete flop.
Critics compared it unfavorably to Fargo, audiences were confused, and it made very little money before disappearing behind behemoths like Titanic. For a while, it seemed forgotten.
Then something strange happened. People kept quoting it, midnight screenings began to fill up, and fans began dressing in bathrobes. Festivals called Lebowski Fests emerged, and an entire philosophy called "Dudeism" grew around the character's laid-back way of surviving the chaos.
Even the harshest critics changed their minds and reevaluated their reviews, realizing how deeply the film had resonated with them.
Today, The Big Lebowski is considered one of the greatest cult films ever made. In a world obsessed with ambition, image, and speed, The Dude offered something rarer: slowness, kindness, and honesty.
We spend our entire lives working our asses off, chasing money and stressing over status symbols because society tells us that's how successful people do it.
But when the world goes crazy, ambitious people crumble, while slackers keep going. Perhaps the punchline of modern life is that the people who try the least are the only ones who have truly figured out how to be happy.
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I’ll slow down my WEB activity in the next days.
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I so much love this music… and the just issued vinyl version is so lively and shiny.
Unfortunately, ECM’s vinyl isn’t up to par with the ‘70s early pressings or with US WB’s, anymore: it’s noisy and crackling like a few years old record, but… music is so good you do forgive them!
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A marvelous disc!
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On this day in 1982, Bob Dylan was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. According to Randy Poe, the Hall's Executive Director, Dylan had one request: He wanted his picture taken with Dinah Shore.
Poe: “Decades later, I can still recall the look of shock on Dinah Shore’s face as she came around the corner of the partition and saw Bob Dylan standing there?”
It was David Amram, one of Dylan's tablemates, who asked Dylan "why on earth he wanted his picture taken with Dinah Shore." Amram did not detect a hint of humor in Dylan's response.
Amram: "He looked at me and he said—dead serious—'So my mother will finally think I'm somebody.'"
A nineteen-year-old student at a music high school in Latina, Italy, discovers twenty errors in the score distributed by the Ministry of Education during the second final exam.
Not just minor typos: misplaced alterations, incorrect chords, entire bars divergent from the original, and a score that appears to have been pulled from MuseScore, a platform where anyone publishes amateur transcriptions without any philological verification.
The student writes an open letter to Minister Valditara, shares it on social media, and provides precise and timely evidence. The Ministry's response is unwavering and unequivocal: some inaccuracies, yes, but the evidence is valid.
Meanwhile, the offending file is quietly replaced on the institutional portal with the corrected version, as if nothing had happened.
This is the country where students are expected to be rigorous, precise, and responsible, and then they are dumped with a flawed score plucked from the internet. This is the country where those who make mistakes don't resign, don't apologize, don't blush: they barricade themselves behind the validity of the procedure and wait for the dust to settle.
Institutional arrogance is never more ferocious than when it disguises itself as magnanimity. Umberto Eco had already seen it all: the moment the words of a wise man and those of an incompetent are put on the same level, democracy doesn't win, entropy wins. That boy from Latina knows more than the person who signed that document. And this, in 2026, is already news.
I admit I’m a nostalgic, romantic old fart… BUT, I cannot deny that a 25+ years old transport/DAC combo - quite expensive in its hey days - still makes sense today, as my (twogood) ears seldom lie!
I much more rely on and prefer a vintage top model than the ubiquitous, awful blue-LEDs’ Chinese rebranded majority of currently available disk players.
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I own and use some nice, vintage CD players (Studer A730, Esoteric D2/P2, Madrigal Proceed, Denon and Parasound SACD) but these Meridians’ have a raison d’etre with their precise, natural, surprisingly lifelike sound presentation.
Detailed but not tilted on too shimmering highs, extremely dynamic but relaxed, at Meridian they knew their business, indeed: something also Jean Hiraga noticed when he visited me in 2013 and wrote a review about my (old) system for his “Stereo Prestige” magazine…
He was a fan of the newer and newer digital gears, but, was honestly and admittedly impressed by the beauty of Meridian’s sound and he clearly stated in his review.
Preserving these venerable gears, including some routine check-up, is a music-lover mission and happily so.
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Boxed sets of the Freddy Bannister festivals at Knebworth. This one concentrates on the Beefheart appearance in support of Pink Floyd in 1975 and the Zappa appearance in support of The Tubes in 1978.
The set includes:
If you’re interested in a copy please contact Wendy Bannister at Henrietta.j.bannister@btinternet.com
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Saw on YouTube and it’s a labor of love.
… and Ruth Underwood’s tears at the end of the movie made me emphasize a lot… same as with Ensemble Modern rehearsing for The Yellow Shark album… and the concert in Munchen… and in Prague… and… and…
He was a genius, period… and a brave man, indeed.
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From the founder of CAN, an amazing record,.. classical music for 3rd millennium and a recording 2die4!
On vinyl and CD…
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PJ Harvey announces 'Voyager', her first new music following the release of ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying' in 2023. Listen, watch and pre-order the limited edition 7" vinyl https://pjharvey.lnk.to/voyagerFA.
Recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence, 'Voyager' takes its name from the NASA probes launched in 1977, still travelling through interstellar space nearly 50 years on.
Polly says, "The song had already started life as part of my work towards my new album, so when Professor Brian Cox invited me to write a piece for his new show, I sent him the voice memo of this song to see if it resonated. It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth.
I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could? This was an inspiring route to take to develop the song.
I'm very happy with the end result, and it's wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful 'pale blue dot'."
Listen to Polly's voice note https://pjharvey.lnk.to/voyager.webFA
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