Another new decade, another milestone gala for Stephen the Incomparable. Any year but this, Take Me To the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration would have lit up Carnegie Hall, Radio City, or one of the grandest Broadway palaces. But no, in our work-at-home, touch-me-not Age of the Coronavirus, the show unfolded in cyberspace on April 26. There it will remain in perpetuity, available to stream free on demand. The party's not over.

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The book I can't help thinking about right now is The Decameron. Penned by Giovanni Boccaccio at the dawn of the Renaissance, in street Italian rather than learned Latin, this doorstop tome incorporates 100 tales, or novelle, taken from a bewildering variety of far-flung sources, some dating back over a thousand years. Going forward, The Decameron would become a source in its own right. As retold by Boccaccio, the stories inspired greater and lesser lights for centuries, among them Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats.

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First Contact and the havoc that follows, viewed from a perch of postapocalyptic desolation: such, in a nutshell, is the bitter substance of Sweet Land, the latest project of The Industry, the MacArthur "genius" impresario-director Yuval Sharon's Los Angeles-based think tank for operatic R&D. Premiered on February 29, the production closed halfway through a scheduled four-weekend run, a casualty of Covid-19. Yet there's good news here. Already Sweet Land has risen from the ashes on vimeo,($14.99).

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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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