We are surprised to see Member Baz up so late! One of our chief worries in offering up our snatches so tardily was that we had deprived him of the opportunity to score points by identifying our number 378, since it seemed to lie so neatly "within his field".

We have just been looking at Mr Grew's tremendously impressive and carefully kept 'Repertoire Records' sticky thread. Without wishing to detract from the overall highly positive impression we are troubled and feel able to keep silent no longer about the unclosed square bracket in the citation for Puzzle 258. We are also somewhat bothered by the non-capitalisation of the initial 's' of the word 'suite' on its several (and might we say in the spirit of Mr Grew's guidelines for the test thread regrettable) occurrences. Somehow we find this particularly troubling in the phrase '2nd Cinderella suite', where the presence of an ordinal numeral adjective (qualifying as it does 'suite' rather than 'Cinderella'!) seems to make the lack of capitalisation all the more noticeable and disturbing.

While we are at it we suppose we may say also that we have never before seen the word 'fresco' given a plural of 7 rather than 8 letters, even though we are sure that some lexicographical authority sanctions such a procedure (there is always one is there not?).

We would like to end by wishing Members (aware as we are that most of them tucked up under their continental quilts are already sound asleep) sweet dreams. As our grandmother would have cautioned them: 'Mind the bed bugs don't bite.'

We do not possess a dictionary of the English language but note that Wikipedia lists both plurals.

There is no great regularity here is there? Tomatoes and potatoes but bongos and concertos. If anything concerto seems closest to fresco in ancestry.

We note that the Italians themselves seem to prefer the word affresco. So surely the true pedant would in any case say affreschi and have done with it? Martinů's work can in any case simply be designated Fresky Piera della Francesca [pro velký orchestr, H. 352] e basta!

It was playing OK when I tried it - it's a piece of English music for the virginals (a Gavotte I'd say) but I haven't yet worked out who it's by.

The problem with all the above files is that they are .wavs - and take AGES to download (indeed the last one is 9MB).

Baz

EDIT: the virginal piece is 382, not 381 (my error).

Lapped again!



Tommo

No guesses yet at nos. 379 and 380??

I would have thought Mr Fragment was well-placed to get one or both of them ...

I shall wait until there has been at least one guess for each before giving any clues.

Not really. I'd already worked out before your most recent clues that the composer was András Szöllősy, but I don't have his work-list and I don't know what he wrote in 1974 based on Petrassi's Concerto for Strings.

Perhaps the above is enough to "let someone else have it".

It would be highly disingenuous to "blame" Mr Inquisitor for having led me astray. If I had bothered to listen to Poulenc's Capriccio before posting my message (instead of after doing so, as I did) I should never have deemed the acquisition of a few points to be worth more than my reputation (such as it may or may not be).

That said, the matter of "serialism" needs addressing briefly. We only have the words you gave us from the inestimable wit and skullduggery of the one-and-only No-man LeTwit who apparently mentions for this piece an "imaginative serialism". Unfortunately, thinking my ears a far more reliable judge than anything Mr LeTwit could possibly write, I automatically ignore anything I read from him as irrelevant by default. Indeed, having just listened again to the snatch, I cannot claim to have identified anything "serial" about it at all.

Baz