July 2019 One of the tourist hotspots in the Coffee Triangle is the town of Filandia, situated about 30 km (19 miles) from Pereira and nearly equidistant from Armenia, the capital of Quindío, the department in which Filandia lies. It's an easy get from either city. If you search the Internet for information on Filandia you'll get the impression that it's a traditional coffee town holding on to its traditions and its past as [...]
June 2019 Pereira, the capital of Colombia's Coffee Triangle, doesn't hit rockstar level in any tourist information I've come across. It gets very good reviews from a small subset of the expat retirement crowd because of its temperate climate, wide range of good services and lower cost of living than Medellin, which is both the retirement and the tourist hotspot of the country. The impressions to be garnered from the web are, however, spotty [...]
June 2019 At long last I'm in Colombia's Coffee Triangle, the Eje Cafetero, for a couple months of exploring. My base for the trip is the capital of the region, Pereira. I made it easy on myself for the first few days by holing up in a fancy hotel in what is the equivalent of NYC's Central Park area, called here Circunvalar. It's surprising to find such a discrepancy between text and reality in [...]
June 2019 When we think of German composers the first thought that comes to mind is rarely about pleasure for the sake of pleasure itself. We expect them to scale some sort of heights, be it those of contrapuntal rigor (as in J.S. You Know Who), sprawling mythos (we're lookin' at you, Herr Wagner) or archetypical heroism (e.g., Beethoven on the barricades shaking his fist and yelling about something or other). German musical history does [...]
June 2019 You can't get near English Baroque music without having foreigners come out of the woodwork right and left. There's Mr. Handel at the top of the heap, of course, and Johann Christian Bach, and Francesco Geminiani, and ... and ... It's time to rev up those Anglophile engines and turn the spotlight on some remarkable native sons of that green and pleasant land who also had their way with a tune. I certainly [...]