In Brief: St. Luke's Summer

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Steve Smith has a fascinating commentary and photo journal of his trip to Vietnam. Wow. "Vietnam's legendary snake wine: bottles filled with a reportedly vile 100 proof concoction of alcohol, in which was suspended the intact carcasses of serpents, scorpions, birds and what not in positions of martial conflict." You must see the picture to believe it. [Night after Night]


• I am spending a lot of time listening to András Schiff's live Beethoven sonata cycle on disc (review forthcoming). Marc Geelhoed interviewed Paul Lewis, who is also making a complete recording at the moment. I need to get my hands on those discs. [Time Out Chicago]


• Just what the hell is going on at the Corcoran, anyway? I mean besides the excellent concert series. Kriston Capps looks into the current state of the museum's leadership. [Washington City Paper]


• A college student calling himself Feldmahler had put together a remarkable and vastly useful Web site called the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). The idea, a brilliant and long overdue one, was to host scanned copies of music in older editions now in the public domain. You may have noticed that lately I had been including links to scores in that database in my reviews, for reader perusal. This week, when I went to the site, there was a message relating the sad news that the editor had received two Cease and Desist Letters from Universal Edition, demanding that some of the scanned scores be removed. As it stands right now, the editor has had to shut down the entire site. Please write Feldmahler (imslp@imslp.org) a note of support if you want the site to continue in another guise. [IMSLP and Boing Boing]


• The man who critiqued bloggers for sloppy journalistic practices, Stormin' Norman Lebrecht, has had Penguin Books, the publisher of his latest book, agree in a legal settlement to "recall his latest book, destroy it, say 'Sorry' and promise not to do it again — all over a few pages discussing Naxos Records and its founder, Klaus Heymann." Ahem — perhaps Lebrecht should have checked his facts. [New York Times]