paolo

America the Beautiful

Here are some of my favourite things about America: Win Butler. Big Sur. The drumming of Art Blakey. The Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago. My earliest memories, of splashing through the shallows of Cape Cod as a toddler. That list is quickly cobbled-together over a bleary Sunday morning coffee – but needless to…

Read More

The power of dramatic irony in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia

Dramatic irony is one of those storytelling techniques we all learn about in high school, and I haven’t thought about it much since then – except to enjoy it, when it’s used effectively, and even then, I don’t sit there and think, “This is a really great example of dramatic irony.” But I’ve been thinking…

Read More

Filling in for Quinn On the Coast

For the next week and a half I’ll be filling in for host Stephen Quinn on CBC Radio Vancouver’s afternoon drive show, On the Coast – an enormous privilege, and I’m terribly excited! I’ve been very busy of late. On top of On the Coast, I’ve been working on a number of projects. You’ll see more…

Read More

Cricket Mania

For years now, I’ve been experiencing the onset of a slow love affair with cricket. Maybe it’s because I love puzzles (especially the cryptic kind), and here in North America, cricket is usually shrouded in mystery.  It’s viewed as baseball’s exotic, off-kilter cousin whose rules are just a bit too cryptic to figure out, thank…

Read More

Our Constant Companion

It’s been six years since the tsunami devastated South & Southeast Asia, and just over a year since the massive earthquake in Haiti. There was a lot of coverage in January about how Haiti is faring, one year later, and hearing all about it has gotten me thinking again about being in Sri Lanka in…

Read More

Celebrating the Year of the Tiger

The Chinese New Year is next week, and the Year of the Tiger is coming to a close. I’ve been thinking a lot about tigers this week, because I spent the earlier part of it completely wrapped up in and riveted by John Vaillant’s superb book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival….

Read More

The enduring appeal of the Carmen archetype

This Saturday, on CBC Radio’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, I’ll be presenting a Canadian Opera Company production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, starring soprano Rinat Shaham. Carmen is an opera that’s impossible not to love. It’s not for nothing it’s one of the most popular operas of all time. And Carmen herself is a big…

Read More

Listening for Chopin’s Ghost in the soundwaves

I always like it when something opens up my ears in ways I hadn’t considered. That’s exactly what happened this week when I listened to a new piece by Gordon Monahan called A Piano Listening to Itself. Monahan’s been creating compositions for years that force us to think about how we listen – he’s swung…

Read More

The Cunning Little Vixen

When I was a kid, like many kids, the stories I loved best were the ones with talking animals, from Louis the swan in The Trumpet of the Swan, to the rabbits in Watership Down, to a certain frog named Kermit. There’s something undeniably magical about looking at the human world through the eyes of animals….

Read More

Signal to Noise

These days my tinnitus is pretty bad.  It’s a ringing in my ear that I notice most frequently at night, when all else is quiet.  It used to be just in my left ear, but lately my right ear has been acting up. Recently I wrote about how tinnitus has altered the way I think about…

Read More