However talented, musicians who walk away from a budding career can expect no second chance.

In her native Kazan, in the Russian republic of Tatar­stan, the concert pianist and pedagogue Damira Feldman, familiarly Mira, flew through the conservatory with high honors. But when she moved to Israel as a young wife and mother, friends said not to look back.

"Everyone who emigrates to Israel is a lawyer or a musician," they told her. "Take anything practical."

Wise words. She had mouths to feed.

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Hannover, in the German state of Lower Saxony, lies on the 52nd northern parallel, way up there with Lake Baikal and Alaska's Kiska Island, still a whisker south of the Scandinavian capitals. By May, the days start seeming endless there. Readers of these posts may recall how stoked I was last year to discover and participate in the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Ingo Metzmacher's cutting-edge performing-arts festival in and around the palace that was once the haunt of that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, torchbearer of the Enlightenment, widely acknowledged as the last Universal Genius.

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Isn't the real sport in juried art shows second- guessing the jury? Hence, the grand tradition of the "Salon des Refusés," or showcase for rejects, going back to 1863, when the tony but hidebound official Paris Salon, sponsored by the French government and the Academy of Fine Arts, shut out the progressive likes of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet.

What, I wonder, might a gathering of rejects look like on Maui in the year 2020?

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This recap runs from the first Sunday in October 2019 to the fourth Sunday of the new decade—four months averaging a fraction over one show each, rather than the regulation two. For that and other reasons, I've been experimenting with the playlists to get more new releases on the air—which can entail jumping to more speculative conclusions on sketchier evidence. So, I put my faith in satori, the flash of Zen enlightenment I recently learned the word for while watching "Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time" (ありがとうございました, Ken Jennings-sama).

Overall, the quality has been astonishing, with very few disappointments. But if it's just peaks you want rather than the tour d'horizon, here's are some places to start:

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Happy New Year! Can this be my first post since October 3, 2019? It can be, and it is. It's a rainy day in paradise, so I guess I've got my work cut out.

But not because I've been idle. In the meantime, there have been seven features in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the latest of which was published this morning. It's a review of "The Woodworker's Journey: Concept to Creation," a superlative show now on view at the Schafer International Gallery in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center.

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