In Brief: 9/11 Edition

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

• 
  This week's issue of The New Yorker, dedicated to thoughts on the September 11 anniversary, is essential reading for today, and I have been ruminating over each of the articles since the magazine arrived in the mail. In particular, George Packer's piece about what should have happened after the attacks, which did not happen, and about what did happen is a must-read. Yet another reason for you to subscribe to the magazine if you do not already. [The New Yorker]


• Also -- I reserve personal judgment, since I have not visited the new World Trade Center myself, but my gut feeling is that Paul Goldberger has it right. [The New Yorker]


• Matthew Guerrieri examines the impulse to commemorate a tragedy like the September 11 attacks in music, something that is happening all day today around Washington and New York. The Latin quotation of his title, from The Aeneid, has been often quoted and commented on, cited by Montaigne and Johnson and others: it means, more or less, "Scant breath of their fame barely drifts down to us." Far more eloquently, Frederick Ahl, in his new English translation in Virgilian hexameter, renders it, "We, though, feel hardly the slenderest breath of a rumor from those days." [Soho the Dog]


• If, on the other hand, you feel like commemorating those who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks, you could watch the performances from Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York. [Medici.tv]


• Or the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra playing Mahler's fifth symphony in a September 11 concert from the Berlin Philharmonie. [ARTE Live Web]


• In online listening this week, Jean-Yves Thibaudet (playing -- what else? -- the Ravel G major concerto) with the Philadelphia Orchestra from the Salle Pleyel; Ensemble La Fenice performing music from the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route at the Festival Baroque de Sablé; Murray Perahia with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at the Prague Spring Festival; Le Parlement de Musique performing a complete solemn Vespers service made up of music by Nicola Porpora, at the Festival Sinfonia en Périgord; the world premiere of Oscar Bianchi's opera Grâce à mes yeux from the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence; the Zemlinsky Quartet at the Festival de Musique de l’Orangerie de Sceaux; the Ensemble Mare Nostrum performing Alessandro Stradella's La Forza delle Stelle at the Abbaye de Saint Michel en Thiérache; and more. [France Musique]