In life as in his opinions, Jamie James went his own way, which in part explains why his life ended, suddenly and far too soon, on the island of Bali rather than on Jane Street in Greenwich Village, where he landed fresh out of Williams College and made his home for the next twenty years.

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Aloha, friends! Two exciting pieces of news to share with you today.

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"You can't turn back the clock and shouldn't try," says Will Crutchfield, who in his precocious youth walked away from a likely promotion to chief music critic of the New York Times to pursue dicier adventures as a musicologist-conductor of decidedly antiquarian leanings. Over the past two decades, his summer series Bel Canto at Caramoor, in Westchester County, resurrected 19th-century Italian masterpieces, many of them unjustly neglected. From the ashes of that admirable initiative, Crutchfield has now created Teatro Nuovo.

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As regular readers of these posts know, I host a twice-monthly, 90-minute radio show at KMNO, Manao Radio 91.7 FM, an all-volunteer station in Wailuku. CATCH OF THE DAY focuses on new releases (and re-releases). Although the playlists skew classical, there are lots of surprises, punctuated by off-the-cuff, highly subjective commentary. My time slot is noon to 1:30 pm (Hawaiian time) the first and last Sundays of the month. Recaps of the shows appear, sometimes with considerable delay right here.

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An afterthought. As noted in my remarks on Creating "Der Rosenkavalier, Harry Graf Kessler was said to have known "everyone." Two he seems not to have known, however, despite extensive French connections, were Louis Artus (1870-1960), librettist of the forgotten Ingénu libertin (1907), and Claude Terrasse (1867-1923), the composer.

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