Just came back from Belgium, where the Vlaams Opera invited me to do recitals. All went very well, nice public, nice acoustics (they have a special hall for chamber music concerts, unlike my last "opera" concert in La Fenice, that breathtaking opera house of Venice, where I actually played ON the stage of the opera, the same stage where Stravinsky premiered his "Rake's Progress" ...) . Some young people interviewed me for their magazine, and even asked me to fill up a questionnaire about my Top Ten favorites. Here is what I wrote :
My favorite Top Ten Movies
1. The Godfather I, II, III
2. Scent of a Woman (prefers the Al Pacino version)
3. Citizen Kane
4. And Justice for All
5. Dead Poet's Society
6. Cinema Paradiso
7. JFK
8. La Dolce Vita
9. Westside Story
10. Any films of Zhang Yimou, especially House of the Flying Daggers, Cursed Flowers, Hero .
My favorite Top Ten Symphonies
1. Shostakovich :Symphony no. 7 "Leningrad"
2. Beethoven : Symphony no. 7
3. Brahms : Symphony no. 4
4. Aaron Copland : Symphony no. 3
5. Sibelius : Symphony no. 5
6. Dvorak : Symphony no. 9 "From the New World"
7. David del Puerto : Symphony no. 2 "Nusantara"
8. Jesus Rueda : Symphony no. 3
9. R. Vaughan Williams : Symphony no. 4
10. Mozart : Symphony no. 40
My favorite Top Ten Pop Songs
1. Michael Jackson : Smooth Criminal
2. Michael Jackson : Thriller
3. Elton John : Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
4. Beatles : Come Together
5. Gary Barlow : Love won't wait , and also his latest "Patience"
6. Queen : Love of my Life
7. John Lennon : Imagine
8. Elton John : The Last Song
9. Queen : Bohemian Rhapsody
10. George Harrison : Within You, Without You
My favorite Top Ten Books
1. Complete Works & Sonnets of W. Shakespeare (OK, if I have to choose the top 3, it will be Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Richard III )
2. Complete Poems of Walt Whitman ( my favorite : The Sleepers, Hours continuing long)
3. Sun Tzu : The Art of War
4. Miguel Cervantes : Don Quixote
5. A.A. Milne : The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
6. Goenawan Mohamad : Sajak-sajak lengkap 61 - 2000
7. Ayu Utami : Saman
8. W.H. Auden : Collected Longer Poems ( my favorite : For the Time Being)
9. Alfred Lord Tennyson : Poems (especially In Memoriam)
10. Gabriel Garcia Marquez : Cien Anos de Soledad
My favorite Top Ten Operas :
1. Benjamin Britten : Peter Grimes
2. Benjamin Britten : Death in Venice
3. Igor Stravinsky : The Rake's Progress
4. Per Norgaard : Siddharta
5. Pietro Mascagni : Cavalleria Rusticana
6. Maurice Ravel : L'Enfant et les sortilèges
7. Oliver Knussen : Where the Wild Things Are & Higglety Pigglety Pop !
8. D. Shostakovich : The Nose
9. Georges Bizet : Carmen
10. Sir Michael Tippett: The Midsummer Marriage
My 10 most annoying persons :
1. George W. Bush
2. Tony Blair
3. Osama bin Laden
4. Donald Rumsfeld (oh well, he is sacked now, so he won't be too annoying anymore)
5. Karlheinz Stockhausen (a German lunatic who says he came from the planet Sirius and calls himself a composer )
6. Tom Cruise after being "married" to Katie Holmes and jumping on Oprah's sofa
7. Pierre Boulez (a Parisian conductor who likes to ban people's music while he would like to compose but couldn't ... for whatever reasons)
8. Anne Sophie Mutter (who now is looking for an over-80 male, single/widower and rich after the break up with Andre Previn who apparently lives longer than she imagined)
9. ETA, the Basque terrorists, .... and
10. me, myself, especially if I am writing music and got no inspiration
