Barry Humphries Reviews

"It was a night when three stars 'slipped out' and a trio of icons took to the stage - all in the person of Barry Humphries... Behind this outrageous trinity was the best little chamber orchestra in the world, the ACO, under the deft hand and bow of Humphries' old friend Richard Tognetti... This was an evening when possums young and old went home happy." Mt Druitt Standard

"Humphries, a beguiling raconteur, revisited the musical enthusiasms of his youth, notably those classical composers who flirted with jazz in whose scores the young Barry heard an irresistible combination of the sophisticated and the illicit." Sydney Morning Herald

"Tognetti's arrangement of two movements from Ravel's Violin Sonata No 2 was much more imaginative: glittering, percussive sonorities evoking Grainger's haunting orchestrations of Debussy and Ravel... Fans of Humphries will adore the show: it is brilliantly funny." The Australian

"You get a rather tangy musical stew when you mix the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Richard Tognetti, pianist Dejan Lazic and the incomparable Barry Humphries, in all his guises, and together they were responsible for a memorable night of theatre." Daily Telegraph

"Barry Humphries and his personalities are a wonder of cultural nostalgia." Trespass Magazine

"Guest Pianist Dejan Lazic... had a star quality of his own, shining in his performance of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which he played with panache and precision..." Australian Stage Online

See these reviews in full at www.aco.com.au/humphries-reviews

Rehearsals

DEBUSSY STRING QUARTET

1893

In our next tour we are performing Debussy’s String Quartet in arrangement for strings along with many other remarkable works in our upcoming series featuring Christian Lindberg as trombonist and composer (see entry for him).

There still lives a woman who was born in the same year Debussy wrote his string quartet. American Edna Parker is reported to now be the oldest person in the world born 20 of April, 1893. Incidentally, she lives in the same retirement village as Sandy Allen, the tallest woman in the world.

I've pointed out to Barry Humphries that Sandy and Edna are alive in the same retirement complex.

Also in 1893 (from Wikipedia which appears to work in much the same way as the PPC prison gangs, much like an ant colony):

Rudolf Diesel receives a patent for the diesel engine.

# May 1 - The 1893 World's Fair, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition, opens to the public in Chicago, USA. The first United States commemorative postage stamps were issued for the Exposition. The most memorable cultural events were the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The hard times and utopian dreams that characterized the era were immortalized in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

# May 5 - Panic of 1893: Crash on the New York Stock Exchange starts a depression. Prior to the Great Depression, a huge wave of investing in the stock market had taken place, which created artificially high prices of stock. This process was driven by the fact that shares were being used as a collateral for loans in order to buy more stocks (ie. buying stocks on margins). When the economy showed signs of slowing and share prices plummeted, this caused an extensive domino effect. As investments lost their face value and the loans on them "went bad," many financial institutions collapsed, triggering a monetary crisis. This analysis has been sharply disputed by noted monetarist economists such as Milton Friedman (dubbing the Great Depression the Great Contraction) who wrote that the Great Depression would have been merely a "garden-variety recession" if it weren't for the response of the Federal Reserve to the following runs on the banks and that most investments were made unsound by the effects of a massive deflation, the increase in real interest rates and decline of real personal and business incomes.