Nothing Special

Groceries: €15

German was normal.....usual studying for Classical Symphony and semi-interesting class....today we finished up the 3rd, thank God.

After classical symphony I practiced a bit, and then went grocery shopping before returning for workshop, which was once again mercifully short because Russell has that gig thing. Anyway, Mike and Amanda did their duet, which was cool, and Matt and Caitlin did their duet from Don Pasquale, which was really, really good....who else sang?? Oh, the three ladies from Zauberflöte: Miriam, Ann, and Jess.....they sounded AWESOME. I really can't remember who else sang. After workshop I met for the first time with Allison AND the flutes....it was a fun little rehearsal, and I remembered why I enjoy playing chamber music so much....it was just tons of fun, even though I still kind of sucked at my part. After returning home I tooled around (wie immer!) and went to bed.

Crazy Monday!!! So Much Practicing.....

Ticket for Messiah: €4

Yeah....today was not terribly special.....after German Mike and I went over to the Musikverein to buy tickets for the Messiah....unfortunately they were already sold out of seats (and here I thought that they started selling tickets today!! i guess not.....) so we got Stehplatz, but it's not a big deal.....I mean, if there's anything I'll be able to stand through, it's the Messiah, because even though it's very long, I know the whole thing like the back of my hand, and things that you know are always easier to stand through because you're that much more engaged. Anyway, Mike was kind enough to treat me to the ticket...(thank you!) and I'm really really jazzed about seeing it......Harnoncourt is conducting it again, and I really like him!

After buying the tickets, Mike went down to the Mahler society and I hurried back to school to work at the library, which was interesting as always! After AA&A and Music History I headed over to Marianum to practice. It went quite well, and after mastering both the Prelude and Fugue in the Bach, I looked some of the hymns in the appendix and also at some of the hymns in the huge "Gotteslob" book that's used for services. I looked at Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht and tried to record it, but it wasn't going to well. And then, the weirdest thing happened: this guy walked in with a set of tympani and started asking me all these questions in German (he probably had no idea what the heck I was doing there...) so I decided that instead of trying to decipher what he was saying, I would just leave, so I did. As I was walking away from the school back to Gersthof to catch the Straßenbahn I remembered that I wanted to go the Schönbrunner Straße apartments to practice in the practice rooms...specifically the Bach piece for which I'm playing the piano (not very well, I might add....) So I took another novel way back....I took the 13A bus that stops right by Marianum to the U4 Schönbrunn stop and took the U4 to Pilgramgasse, from which I walked to the practice rooms. I was there for about 45 minutes going over the Bach....there are still some passages that I still just can't get into my fingers! I forgot why I both love and hate playing the piano......it just does not come naturally to me, which is both why I love it and detest it.

After practicing and not getting as far as I wanted (and witnessing an interesting emotional moment in the lobby....the pianists were in a group hug) I returned home, did some stuff and went to bed.

3-Advent-Market Tour

Gift: €16
Pretzel: €1.90

Christmas Spirit: Abundant.

So...in the face of two small essays (or Aufsätze) to write for German, what do I do? Sit at home and write them? Nope, I sleep in and then go to Christmas Markets!

First I went to the Museums Quarter to check my e-mail (I saw Mel there....how weird is that?) and was there for quite a while longer than I had anticipated. Afterwards I noticed signs pointing into the building and saying "Weihnachtsmarkt"....my interest thoroughly piqued, I went inside. Sure enough, it was a Christmas Market, but not in the traditional sense AT ALL......it was in the MQ, so it had to be post-modern objet d'arte of a sort of festive leaning, but mostly just expensive for the sake of being expensive....there were some absolutely GORGEOUS things, though....these fantastic lamps, and lots of teapots and Japanese tea sets, and all sorts of little cute objet......oh it was fun! There were so many people in a relatively small space, which wasn't as much fun.....but I'm so glad that I stumbled into it! Afterwards I headed off to the Rathaus on foot, since it's not too far away. My main objective there was to take pictures, which I did in abundance.....it's so awesome there, and it's unfortunate that I can't really get a shot that incorporates the grandness and sprawl of the stalls in the markets.....but they're just fantastic. After looking at all of the pretty stuff I caught the U2 back to Karlsplatz and took the U4 to Schönbrunn Palace to check out the Christmas market there.....

Schönbrunn is a fantastic place, and in the big square they set up a really great Christmas Market....there's a little stage (which was unfortunately occupied with a choir of old men who attempted to sing christmas carols.....it was OK if you weren't too close to the stage, or any of the central Punsch stalls, which for some reason were piping in the treacle emanating from the stage into speakers.....after a while I thought I wasn't going to escape it at all.....) a HUGE tree, and tons of stalls selling similar stuff than that in the Rathaus, but a little more organized and a little nicer overall. I only got one thing, which I think I'll gift to someone upon my return. (that's all I'll say, in case this person is reading my blog) After this, the third and last of today's Christmas Markets, I returned home and slowly but surely wrote both Aufsätze while watching a hilarious anime called "Candidate for Goddess" (which looked suspiciously like Xenosaga, BTW....) I then went up and watched South Park and ate lasagna with Becky. Good times!

New Photos!

Shots of the international bazaar, thanksgiving, and a few operas. And, I'm only 5 days behind in blogging! Keep in mind that the date of blog entries is always the date on which it *should* have been posted, so you might have to scroll down....they'll always be in order though, meaning I wouldn't post today's blog until I did yesterday's.....oh well.

"That's what I like to call: [tutti] Superfluous Precaution"

International Bazaar and Cav/Pag

Small Teapot from Iraq: €12
Bracelet and wooden giraffe from Kenya: €2.80
Chicken Pad Thai: €3
Baklava: €2
Dr. Pepper (from the American booth): €1
Two little birds from Poland: €4
Total Cost of Cav/Pag: €6.40

A truly international experience: Priceless!

I did better today....I got up at 1:00! Mike had told me about this international bazaar thing that they have annually at the Vienna International Center (between the Donau and the alte Donau, where the UN is)....he had mentioned that Michelle (our voice teacher) goes every year for the food, and so I thought it would be fun to take a stroll over there to see what it's about....boy howdy was it great! It was in this convention center, and basically the whole top floor was filled with stalls selling handcrafts and things from various countries (mostly asian, european, and some middle eastern) and I bought some trinkets there (see above). But downstairs was a HUGE area filled with food from every country in the world....I could not think of a major country that was not represented....in fact, I'm having trouble thinking of a country that wasn't represented at all! I had pad thai, which was FABULOUS......oh I miss asian food, especially all the thai places in LA.....I also got Baklava to take with me to the opera for Mike and I, and I went back to the USA booth (which, for the record, was selling all-beef hot dogs, BBQ potato chips, and specifically american soda, and was being patronized solely by American ex-pats) and I bought Dr. Pepper. Noticing the strange glance the woman was giving me as I so excitedly asked for my drink, I exclaimed sympathetically "do you know how long it's been since I've had a Dr. Pepper?" She smiled and gave it to me....I realized, meanwhile, that it really hadn't been that long....but it was strange to think that something like that, such a miniscule part of my life was still a part of it, and without it and the multitude of other tiny things, which by themselves mean nothing, have made a very different lifestyle for me here, and not just in the ways that are more tangible for me, such as the absence of family and old friends. Anyway, after getting all philosophical over the Dr. Pepper, I headed out (not without purchasing two cute little wooden bird ornament things....) and headed back home to drop off my stuff and meet Mike at Kettenbrückengasse for opera.

That night we saw Cavalleria Rusticana by Leoncavallo, and Pagliacci by Mascagni, two one-act operas which are often performed together (they're both short, and they have a similar theme: marital infidelity screwing everyone over)....Mike calls them "Cav/Pag," and so I've started calling 'em that. I have to say, even though Pagliacci is a bit more renowned, I enjoyed the music of the Leoncavallo much more. The casts were both good (different people in both operas...otherwise it would be confusing, I suppose) José Cura (from Stiffelio) was once again loud and louder, but perhaps a bit better as the title role in Pagliacci....when he got pissed, he REALLY got pissed...it also worked better dramatically in Pagliacci, because in Stiffelio he had to play an angry preacher, which just isn't quite as organic. After the opera I called Andrew and then went to bed!

Nabucco

Total Cost of Nabucco: €6.40

Vá, pensiero: Gorgeous!

Well, the day started at around 2:00, when I woke up. I went over to IES and checked my e-mail, and afterwards went back home, and then went to meet Mike at the opera. I realized that I had forgotten the charger for my computer at IES, so I ran back there and then all the way back to the Karlsplatz stop to meet Mike. (I had forgotten that I was supposed to meet him at the Kettenbrückengasse stop, so I was heading back there when I ran into him in the Opernpassage) After waiting in line with him and Kate, we got our spots in Galerie. It was a damn good opera....and I remembered a surprising amount of the music, considering I saw it for the first and last time at the Met 2 years ago....everything was good. The singers were OK....except maybe for Purdy (our bumbling friend from L'elisir d'Amore) but he didn't have any arias or anything. Zacariah and the woman (what's her name??) were exceptionally good......Nabucco himself I wasn't too pleased with, but whatever. The chorus was, of course, amazing! They have so many great moments in the opera, the most famous of which is "Vá, pensiero." Well, after a fun night of opera (and not much else, mind you) I went home.

Thanksgiving!

Groceries: €10
Carmex: €3
Stehplatz for Messiah and Vienna Phil next month: €8
Stehplatz for Weihnachtsoratorium: €6
Seat for EOS-Quartet: €11

Return of the little expenditure prologue: Fantastic!

After German was the normal studying for Classical Symphony, and the class itself went pretty well. We talked about this piece by Beethoven called Wellington's Victory.....he pretended to be all surprised no one had heard of it, since it was exceedingly popular in Beethoven's day....it was a "battle piece" which apparently was a style which was in vogue at the time, and this particular one celebrated Adm. (?) Wellington's victory over Napoleon. We listened to it.....it's a rather ridiculous piece, to say the least.....it's classic Beethoven, but in addition there are cannons, muskets, separate military bands and trumpeters for both the French and British sides, and a half-musical, half-literal-sonic depiction of the forces meeting and fighting, and eventually of the French limping off to defeat and the English rejoicing in their victory with a fugue on a melodic cell taken from "God Save the King" which was utter hilarity. The whole thing was laugh-lout-loud funny, actually, and one of these days I'll have to buy a score and get a recording of the thing...it was so funny.

After class I hung around and did stuff....went home briefly and then met Mike back at the center to go to the Thanksgiving dinner. I have no idea where the place was, but IES rented buses to take us there. It was somewhere in the Wienerwald (Vienna woods) but I really couldn't tell you exactly where....it was a nice little restaurant off in the woods, decidedly Germanic in it's decor and....well, rustic doesn't come close to describing it.....when we first got there we all had mugs of Glühwein around the bonfire, and when we went inside there were little eastern-european salads awaited us. Mike and I wound up sitting at the grown-up table with Dr. Solvik, Ulrika, Olga (the Robert Morris chaperone) and her daughter and son-in-law, and John(?), one of the Robert Morris professors. It was just a bit like one's traditional Thanksgiving with a huge family.....except we wound up sitting with the far-flung relatives and had sort of strange semi-awkward conversation....anyway, the meal was really quite good: turkey and quasi-stuffing, peas, mashed potatoes, pickled beets (strange, but good) and Apfelstrudel with delicious vanilla ice cream for dessert. The only glaring omissions for me were sweet potatoes, real stuffing, rolls, and pumpkin pie. Other than that, it was echt Thanksgiving! I had the nice post-gorge sleep on the bus, which was glorious, and after calling my family I went to bed.

Vienna Phil at the Musikverein!

The day started off with AA&A tour of the Italian Renaissance stuff at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was fun. It is in, a lot of ways, noticeably better than the northern stuff of the same period, but that's just my taste, which has naturally been tuned toward the Italian. That was fun, and afterwards I went back home to do a tiny bit of grocery shopping before meeting Allison to go over the Bach. I ended up being a bit late, but it turned out OK because her class was also going on some tour that got out really late, so she didn't show up at the center until 2:30, which was OK since we really didn't need an hour to go over the Bach. After that was music history, which was fairly ordinary. After that I worked in the library with Christian until about 6:45, at which point I left early to stand in line for Stehplatz at the Musikverein. I had already purchased my ticket, but I wanted to make sure and get there early so that I would get a decent spot, either in the front on the rail or in the back so I could sit against the wall. I saw Dave there, so I waited in line with him. It turns out that Gerald had assigned his whole Music in Performance class to come to the concert, so there were about 15 IES kids there, which was more than I expected to see at the Musikverein on a Wednesday night. I chose to sit in the back for the first half at least, since I had borrowed a score of the Mozart from the library, and I figured I should sit down when I read it.

The concert was, needless to say, very, very good. First was a Villa-lobos symphony "En memória de Mozart." I don't really know why it was in memory of Mozart, but perhaps a little research would clarify that. I have to admit that it didn't really grab my attention....I sort of mentally dozed off in the middle. Second on the program was Mozart "Haffner" Symphony, which was very good. I liked having the score to read along with....I'll have to bring more scores to concerts....after the intermission they played Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, which was very very good! I'd never heard it before, but it was very cool. Afterwards, the concertmaster stood up and said something to the effect of thanking the conductor for his years of service and something about how it was his last concert with them, or something.......and they played a "thank you" piece....I have no idea what it was, but it sounded like a Strauß polka or something.....it was really cute.

Yay for the Schütz!

Well, at least Mike and I didn't have to do our dialogue in German today! We really weren't quite ready....and Birgit somehow completely forgot about them until the end of class! We only had time for two groups to present.....in the very beginning of class we sang a carol of St. Nikolaus' day, which is the 6th or the 7th, and I honestly can't remember....(how embarrassing!!) But it was tons of fun.....I 'got' to play the piano, but it was easy enough to read from the chart....anyway, it was tons of fun, and she promised we'd do it again!

Classical Symphony was OK.....better than last class, certainly......and I got a freakin' 98% on my midterm for the class! What a riot......well that test was genuinely very easy, so I'm not as surprised......

After class I went to the Billa to buy water and oranges for everyone for the Schütz rehearsal, and then went back to save a room and practice. Strangely enough, all the rooms were taken, what with Greta giving a coaching and Carla and Nick practicing in one room and Jill practicing in the other.....I convinced Jill out of the kindness of her heart to take one for the team and relinquish her room, and passed on Nick and Carla's assurance that they would only be using their room for another 5 or 10 minutes....so we rehearsed the Schütz over in the strange small room with the mirror and the piano that faces the wall, so they all had to clump over to one side of the room so that I could even see them....it was ein bisschen ghetto-lich, but OK in the long run. I thought I ran the rehearsal quite well and efficiently, considering I had a little less than 50 minutes with everyone before Miriam had to leave.....it's coming along very nicely, and they respond very well to the comments I give them. It's great. They're one of the more responsive groups I've worked with, which is really good for me, as it is a more accurate representation of the effectiveness of the things I do and say to them. For instance, the time I told Jim not to close to the 'r' of 'erbarm' to soon, and I explained it in a weird enough way that he started to roll the the first 'r'. Also, their dynamic variation is so much more appreciable when I conduct, and yet not always in the ways that I want it to be.....so I've had to think more about fine-tuning the way I verbalize and articulate with gesture the phrase structure and phrasing that I want. It's been quite helpful, especially because I know the piece so well and have such clear ideas about what I want in it. Anyway, the rehearsal went very, very well.

I had told them last week that we were going to do it at the workshop, but that didn't end up working out. Instead we did it this week, and since Becky was sick we went first. This was good, as it sort of cleared the air (at least for me) and also it's so completely different than anything else anyone's doing that it was nice to get it over with. Greta was nice enough to play the continuo part so that I could conduct, which was good, but I felt really bad for her because I wasn't quite as clear for her sake as I should have been, especially with all the tempo changes. I'll have to mark up my book with all of that stuff so that next time she'll have a clearer understanding of what to do, and I can concentrate a bit more on helping the singers. Anyway, they sounded pretty good, and Russell had some helpful comments. They were mostly for them, though, and not directly for me, and frankly I was hoping to be critiqued a little more....oh well. Next time I'm sure. No one in the peanut gallery critiqued me either, but whatever. The rest of the workshop was OK.....it'll be the last one to go until 7:30, though, since Russell has some show that he's doing every night for which he has to leave early, so they'll only go until 6:30 every week now.

After workshop I went home, watched South Park with Mike and Becky, and then met Amanda to get the Hagen Quartet tickets....she had bought tickets for us to see the Hagen Quartet at the Konzerthaus in December, but since she's leaving early she gave me both the tickets so I could go with someone else. (I'm think I'll to take Gretchen there in lieu of Fledermaus as a belated b-day present.) We gabbed for while and then she went home, and I went to bed.

Grades!

After German I went to the Musikverein to buy seats for Carmina Burana on the 5th of December. I had mentioned it to Mike, and he said that he wanted to go and gave me some money with which to buy the tickets. On my way out of the center I ran into Jess and she also wanted to go, so she gave me some money as well. When I got to the box office, though, I found out that all that they had left was stuff behind the stage in the organ balcony, so I got three seats there. I figured even if I can't see everything, I'm sure we'll hear well. Anyway, I barely returned in time for my shift at the library, after which I went right to AA&A. I got my midterm back......I got an A! I seriously thought I had done way worse, but I got an honest-to-goodness A! Well, so much for my worries about that class! The lecture was still a bit boring, but not as bad as last week. In Music History I also got my midterm back.....I got an A, which averaged out with my 78% on the listening quiz to give me a B+ in the class so far. I don't think I'll have a problem pushing that up to an A before the semester's over. Anyway, the class itself was OK....for some reason we had storytime with Uncle Morty as he read us this debate between Monteverdi and Artusi....frankly it seemed a bit silly to be spending SO much time on.....but I'm just me......right after class I had to run home and exchange my computer for my organ stuff before heading to Marianum to practice. That went very well.....I had a nice conversation with the cleaning lady (whose name I don't know....) who gave me an orange as I was leaving! (it was sooooo good! and now I won't get the scurvy!) The only bad news of the day was when I dropped my iPod on the bus and now it's basically broken......I think I may have fucked up the hard drive or something....I'm not sure. It shows the directory with the exclamation mark, but at least not the sad iPod screen. (I was at least glad to know that the "sad apple product" idiom to communicate absolute terror has persisted into this century) We'll see how that goes..........but as of now I don't have an iPod, which really sucks.

New Photos!

Funny how I'm so much better at updating pictures than blogs.....check tomorrow (hopefully) for the end of last week's set.

Stiffelio

Nothing interesting in the afternoon......in the afternoon I went to the Staatsoper to stand in line for Stiffelio. I met Mike there, and had a nice conversation with him and Caitlin, who was also in line with us. We also met up with Kate, who was ahead of us. Both of them strangely enough ended up standing in different sections from us: Caitlin in the Parterre and Kate in the Balkon. Anyway, the opera was OK.....nice early Verdi cheese, but frankly the plot was just a little strange. The music was nice and simple and pretty, and although Jess was surprised that I liked it as much I did, I just enjoyed on basically a completely superficial level......I know there wasn't a lot of significance in what was going on.....Jose Cura sang the title role, and he was OK.....as Mike said, he has two techniques: loud and louder. Hui He, who sang the role of....oh what's-her-name.....Stiffelio's wife.....anyway she was good. And the older baritone who played the father....he was very good. Everything was good.

La Juive

Saturday.....I tooled around until I headed off to the opera to see La Juive. I met Mike in line...we talked and gabbed and bitched for a while......When we got up to our spots in the Galerie, we saw Jess and Becky (my friends who live upstairs) and Emmy, whom Mike and I had met at the opera a week or so ago. Anyway, we went down to Anker to get pre-opera snackies, and then headed back up. It was interesting....except for the spotty reviews I had received from a few friends, I had no idea what to expect about the plot, the music, the production, anything. La Juive means "The Jewess," and is appropriately about a Jewish woman who is being courted by this guy named Samuel who turns out to actually be a prince or emporer or something. Now, this is a 19th-century French opera, and was set somewhere (I can't remember) where the Jews were being persecuted. (narrows it down, doesn't it?) Musically the opera was great.....I'd never heard of the composer (Malévy) but some of the music was just stunning. Eleázar's last aria was heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and all of the roles were exquisitely sung. Plotwise is was a bit strange....there's an interesting little twist which makes me unsure how I feel about the whole plot. It was interesting in that it manages not to put either the Jews or the Christians in a bad light, or make one look evil or anything....basically everyone gets fucked in the end, so the moral of the story is just "hate is bad." Rachel's father is a bit of a money-grubbing Jewish stereotype, but it wasn't awful (I think). What was interesting, however, was that in this production all the chorus members (who basically only sing about wanting to kill the jews etc.) were all wearing Lederhosen and the little hats with the big paint-brush-things......they were very clearly supposed to be alpine Germanic people, if not just downright Austrian. That sort of caught me off-guard, but whatever. The audience really loved it, though....it's been a while since I've heard such a long ovation for something there......well, that was that!

Organ Sound Clips

I'm still writing journal entries for the last few days....they'll be uploaded soon. Everything's going really well, though.....recently I used my laptop to record myself playing the organ at Marianum, and I uploaded them to my student webspace! This won't be very interesting for most of you (recordings of mediocre organists playing the easiest shit in the world aren't exactly in demand) but I thought it might be fun for y'all to hear the cool organ I get to play while I'm here! Anyway, just click on the subject line of this entry, or go to http://students.oxy.edu/rbolyard/ and control-click (or right-click) on "Bach1.aiff," "Buxtehude1.aiff," and "Franck1.aiff" and save them to disk. All of y'all should be able to play them....certainly the Mac folks among you will have no problem, as Quicktime will open it with no problem....I think Windows Media player or Realplayer might work.....if not just download Quicktime.....you really should anyway......OK well have fun, and I'll upload the rest of the blogs soon!

Punsch and Gay Movie Night!

First, I worked at the library for 4 hours. It was fantastic, let me tell you. Afterwards Gretchen and I went bag shopping so that I could buy a bag for school and stop mooching off of Nick. We went to a few different places, and I finally ended up buying a €30 laptop-briefcase thing at Libro which will serve my purposes nicely. After that I took a short nap before meeting Birgit and the rest of my German class in front of the Rathaus at the Christkindelmarkt, which was tons and tons of fun! We walked around, talking, enjoying all the stands full of delicious candies, pastries, goodies, and little Germanic Christmas-y trinkets and the like....using our class fund she treated us all to Punsch, which is delicious beyond all belief!! Apparently it's fruit tea with rum...I got the wild berry kind, and it was SOOOO good.....oh my goodness. Anyway, after the Punsch Gretchen, Mike, Dave and I continued walking around the market.....it was great! I got the most delicious Krapfen with chocolate-rum filling......oh it was just to die for! After the market fun, we decided to go back to my place and have gay movie night! (mostly because of the inappropriate comment I made to Dave about the fact that he hadn't seen Chicago) We started with Chicago, specifically so that Dave could see it, and he indeed enjoyed it. We were going to watch Bridget Jones's Diary afterwards, since Dave hadn't seen that either, but we decided to watch 9 to 5 instead. (Dave hadn't seen it either, and I was already Renée Zellwegger'ed out. (I know that's not how to spell her name, but I'm too damn lazy) That's all for Friday, I suppose.

Organ Lesson

German, Work, Classical Symphony started the day. I don't usually work that shift, but Mary Rose had been swiftly called to Milan because of Greta's illness, so me and someone else (Merve?) and I covered her Thursday morning shift. Because I was working, I didn't get as much studying done for Classical Symphony as I usually do, but I still felt decently prepared. I didn't expect us to start to talk about the finale (since we've only covered the 1st, and occasionally 2nd movements, of all the symphonies we've covered) and I certainly didn't expect him to get all huffissimo about the fact that we weren't adequately prepared.....he really bitched at us. It was an interesting situation....I mean, I've had teachers do that to me before, and usually I can approach from the angle of sincere remorse, as in situations where I don't have an excuse not to have completed the task assigned, or respond with a justified complaint about an unclear presentation or some other fault of the instructor that made me unable to complete the task assigned.....albeit the latter hasn't happened since my Baur period (and before that, certainly the Mr. Sherrodd days were replete with those circumstances....) but still it struck me that I could not formulate a thesis for either side.....I felt as though as I was adequately prepared, but I couldn't answer the questions that he was posing.....I don't know. In any case, that was that, and after class Mike and I went to the Musikverein to buy tickets for Messiah, only to find out that (similar to the Opera) they only start selling tickets three weeks before the day of the concert. So, I'll have to go back on Monday the 29th to buy tickets.....oh I'm so excited! It's Harnoncourt conducting the Messiah, and that's almost dream come true right there....plus I hope to get a nice, expensive, good seat, which will also be fun! Oh! It's just so exciting!

After that I tooled around IES some more and then went home to get my organ stuff. I then went out to Marianum for my organ lesson, which was OK. I had made some improvement, so it wasn't pointless or anything, but it's still slow going. After Gottfried left I recorded myself using the iBook's internal mic, which didn't turn out that bad (see other blog entry for link, etc.) The strangest thing happened to me on the subway ride back home from Marianum.....the arrogant guy who had tried to steal my standing spot for Rheingold so many weeks ago was on the U2.....and not only that, but he sat right across from me. I don't think he remembered who I was, but I sure as hell remembered him.....it was kind of awkward, to tell you the truth. What a small city! Anyway, after getting home Becky and I watched South Park, and then I went to bed.

Voice Lesson

The day started with the AA&A tour of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It was a good tour...we looked at all their German and Flemish Renaissance art, which was interesting.....it certainly is way different than all the Italian art that I associate with the Renaissance (rightly so)....we spent the last 20 minutes or so on Breugel alone......oh Breugel! How adorable! What's the third leg for? Nobody knows. Why are all the children playing strange and twisted games? (like the girls playing jacks with human vertebræ, or the kids measuring the size of their poop?) In any case, it was fun, despite Gretchen constantly bringing up that Italian art of the period is so much better....of course it is! But I want to learn about art of this region and culture, even if it's not as good.....

After the tour I had to go to Doblinger to get a piece by Purcell for my voice lesson, so I split off from everyone else going back to IES and decided I would try to cut through the 1st district from the Hofburg. Well, that sort of....failed, to put it mildly....rather than taking a more direct route to Doblinger, I ended up getting lost and doing the most circuitous route in the world....it was fun to see parts of the 1st district through which I usually don't get to walk, and at least the weather was nice enough that i could enjoy my surroundings, but it was still frustrating. I got there and of course they didn't have it!!! That is to say, they only had it in the high key. Just before I was going to spend good money on a useless book so that I could transpose it in Sibelius, I realized that I could just find it on the internet (perhaps) or at worst a MIDI file which I could fix. In any case, I finally found a really cool website called schubertline.com, which is a site out of the UK where you can buy essentially printing privileges to Scorch files (Sibelius' file format for web viewing) of all sorts of Lied and art song and arias....it looks like a great resource for singers! Anyway, I went through this whole rigamarole to get it working, only to find that I couldn't print it to a PDF (of course) and I couldn't install Scorch on the lab computers (which are hooked up to a printer) so basically I had to take screenshots (thank God for Cmd-Shft-4 on OS X!!!) and then transcribe the whole thing into Sibelius. Needless to say there wasn't enough time before my voice lesson to do that, so I just explained the situation in brief to Michelle upon my arrival. She looked a little bit miffed, but I can't really tell. Anyway, I had a mediocre voice lesson....even though I had actually practiced (a rare occurrence for me) I just wasn't mentally awake enough to make significant improvement. I don't know....it wasn't bad, but I realized that I was holding myself back and it was frustrating.

After my voice lesson I went to the Gourmet Spar that's close to Michelle's place and decided to buy good salami and bread and cheese with which to make good salami sandwiches...I then returned home to fix myself dinner....the sandwich I made was OK......but afterwards I made myself 3 little tuna sandwiches on Semmeln, which are the little Austrian rolls......those were freakin' awesome! I love the tast of tuna on Semmeln.......anyway, after calling the 'rents at 11:00 I headed to bed, the end of another exciting day!

Not much, I'll tell you that!

Yeah.....so I studied for classical symphony in the morning after German, and it was OK.....at least I could talk intelligently about the first movement of Eroica, which is what we're talking about now. Basically the rest of the class is all about Beethoven.....what is it with classes that I take turning into classes about Beethoven?!!?? Anyway, after that I just sort of chilled around IES, because I hold told the Schütz people that if they wanted to run through stuff I would be available. Of course no one showed up, and I just sort of twiddled my thumbs for a couple of hours. (I'm not bitter at all....I actually needed some good thumb-twiddling time) The Performance Workshop was OK....we didn't end up singing the Schütz because everyone who's going to Milan for the exchange thing had do sing the stuff they're going to do over there....plus the Bach went, and by the time all that happened, Russell had to end class early to get to a concert he was doing that night. It was nice, because the workshop was mercifully short, but we didn't get to do the Schütz.......whatever. After that I had a nice restful evening at home, managed to get an iota of cleaning done, and went to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour.

Comments

So, I was silly....no wonder no one's been commenting! I turned off the option to only allow comments from registered users (which I frankly didn't even know existed) so now you can just comment anonymously. Sorry about the confusion! (and sorry I sorta yelled at y'all ^_^)

L'elisir d'Amore

A normal Monday, once again....AA&A was interesting...I got my journal back with good comments, etc., and we breezed through the Renaissance. Nothing else of much interest happened at school.....

At around 4:30 I met Kate and we went down to the Staatsoper to see L'elisir d'Amore, by Donizetti. It was freakin' empty.....no one was there! We were literally the first people in line waiting to go into the Parterre section....consequently we got dead center first row, which was awesome! The opera itself was pretty good.....I definitely had mixed feelings about the tenor....his sound, although pretty, always sounded a bit forced.....anyway, the salesman/charletan guy was played by the same person who had played Bartolo in Barber of Seville, and he was, once again, fantastic. I liked the soprano....everyone else was OK. The orchestra was, I think, once again mostly subs, but the Donizetti bel canto stuff is so easy to play...they sounded fine. It was cute......like whipped cream, Jess remarked later.....not much substance, but a fun little romp of sorts. I was also nice and short.....no long soliloquies (OK, there were soliloquies, but short ones) and it was very funny. Not as funny as Barber of Seville, of course, but still funny. That's all I have to say about Monday, really......

New Photos!

New photos of Elijah, Dornröschen and other things.....

Feel free to comment on my blog, by the way....I keep looking at it to see if anyone's commenting, and no one ever does....you don't have to be with blogger or anything.....just leave a little note if you particularly liked something or want to know more about something......it'll make me that much happier to know that people actually read this darn thing! ^_^ just kidding! I love you all!

Dornröschen

I awoke very late.....but with enough time to compose myself and get some stuff done before Gretchen came over at 2:30 to got to the opera with me. We were going to see Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty...the ballet by Tchaikovsky) and we were planning on meeting Kate there. Kate had been to church that morning at the Augustinerkirche, and had been kind of paranoid about getting a good spot at the opera....for some reason she thought that there was going to be a shitload of people there....well, there wasn't, and when Gretchen and I got there at 3:00 to meet Kate she wasn't there, and neither was anyone else! There were two people in line, and Gretchen and I decided that there was no point in waiting around outside in the cold and wind considering that we could just go get coffee and come back and not have an appreciably worse spot. We also figured that Kate had made a similar decision, and that we would most likely meet up with her when she decided to come back. So, Gretchen and I went across the street to Aida for coffee and cake and nice conversation, and then sauntered back over to the line. We met up with Kate there and gabbed for a while, mostly complaining about the cold. We eventually struck up a conversation with the woman behind us in line, who was very nice. At 4:30 they finally opened the doors, and we went inside into the nice and comfortable warmth. The conversation had meanwhile taken a political turn, so I started to back off from it a bit....eventually it became a huge conversation about politics, and eventually about religion, so Gretchen and I eventually stopped talking and let Kate and Annika (I honestly don't know how to spell her name) talk amongst themselves. I just felt really uncomfortable talking about it for some reason....as though I was constantly having to keep the conversation from getting ugly, even though we all were (basically) in agreement, if not about every little thing. I don't know. Anyway, after 3 hours of waiting in line we went inside and got places in the second row of parterre close to the center. It was really nice!

The ballet itself was OK....the orchestra was perhaps better in Swan Lake, but not by much.....it was once again almost entirely subs from what I could see, and the conductor did a good job holding them together, but didn't really do much else, I felt. The dancers were OK....it was nice to have Gretchen standing next to me telling me about all the technical things and if they were doing them well or not. (she dances ballet, and is really quite knowledgeable about it....certainly more than I am!) Sufficed to say that there were lots of technical imperfections (she confirmed my suspicion that the walking should not have been so loud, for instance, and that the choreography seemed not to be technically demanding to the dancers at all) All in all though everything looked really pretty, and the costumes and sets were certainly lovely as all get-out. They really spared no expense on the costumes, especially, except perhaps for Carabasse's dress, which looked suspiciously like the Queen of the Night's costume in their production of The Magic Flute. Perhaps I'm just making it up, though.....I mean, what are the odds that they'd recycle a costume like that for an entirely different person! I knew that certain themes from the Disney movie of Sleeping Beauty were taken from this ballet, but I had no idea that every single theme in the movie was in the ballet! The one I really got a kick out of was the Maleficent theme (if you don't remember....watch the movie again....it's a fantastic movie, and I can't exactly hum the theme for you!) I expected it to be on of Carabasse's themes (since she's the evil færie) but for the first three acts I never heard it. Just as I was beginning to entertain the notion that the Sherman Brothers had actually written an original theme for the movie, I heard it in the 3rd act. Now, in the ballet version, the 3rd act basically is a little coda to the plot (by which I mean NOTHING HAPPENS....not that anything ever REALLY happens in ballet.....but nothing even pretends to happen), wherein Aurora and the Prince get married and all these fairy tale characters come to their wedding, like Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) and the Wolf, Aladdin, some bluebirds or something, and Puss in Boots. And what do you know if the scary Maleficent music was nothing more than the Puss in Boots dance! It was hilariously choreographed, too.....it was a pas de deux with both dancers in large cat helmet-mask things, and of course big red boots on Puss in Boots. On every diminished tremelo chord (do-doo-doo...baaaaaa [while I tremble my hands in the air]) they would turn to each other and fight with their claws really fast, like one does when sort of making fun of a cat. (I don't think I've ever seen a cat do that....they're usually a bit more economical with their strokes, if I'm not mistaken, rather than just randomly flailing for no reason) It was hilarious!! I managed to get some nice curtain call shots, including one before the curtain to catch the ridiculous gold glitter that fell during the finale. It was definitely tons of fun!

Elias Saturday

Well, I woke up at 12:00.....noon, in case that's surprising. And thank God that I did, seeing as how I had work at 1:00. Well, I worked from 1 until 3, when the building closed (an hour earlier than normal, because Anthony had a concert) and Gretchen took me to a cute cafe not far from IES called Kleines Cafe, which was indeed very small (as the name implies). It was cute, though, and I got my usual Melánge with tons of sugar, and I helped Gretchen with her music history paper. It was about why Beethoven was dangerous....a silly prompt, if you ask me, but I think that I gave her some valuable avenues to explore. Afterwards I went to Hofer, which unbeknownst to me closes at 6:30, and not 7:30 like normal markets. I got there at....oh about 6:28, so me and this old lady were the only people in the store, which was kind of freaky from my perspective (I'm used to Hofer being INSANELY crowded) and I think it kind of ticked off the employees....and those Hofer girls aren't really very nice on a good day. (the only nice person I've encountered at Hofer is the cute manager guy.....Hr. Schmidt? or something? I don't remember.....) Anyway, I got the few things that I needed quickly and ran back home, where CA Dave, Nick, Brad, and JB were fixing dinner. I unfortunately could not partake of the mexican feast that they were preparing, since I had to leave at 8:00 to go to Stephansdom to see Elias. (remember, the €40 ticket? the stupid clerk who didn't know what I was talking about when I said that I wanted a ticket for Elias?)

It was good. Not life-shatteringly brilliant, but quite good. (It was the Stephansdom premiere of the piece, which surprised me) I knew I had overpaid for my ticket, but had I spent much less I would not have been able to see the orchestra at all, save on the silly little flatscreen TVs they have on every other column, on which they were showing the 'stage' for everyone else in the cathedral. I was in the first row of the "C" section, which is to the left of the altar, and the orchestra and choir was over on the right side of the altar (if you're looking at it from the pews) by the organ. The soloists were in a row between the choir and the orchestra, except for Elijah himself, who was on this little lectern/soap box thing closer to the center. The part of Elijah, by the way, was sung by Adrian Eröd, who played Figaro at the Barber of Seville I saw on Wednesday at the Staatsoper. I must say that I'm really in awe of him now, because he gave an equally stellar performance in both roles, which I might say are close to polar opposites, both musically and theatrically. Not to say that Elijah requires a lot of theatrics, nor indeed did he do too much with it....but he kept the sentiment and was able to portray a lot more emotions through his interpretation then I've heard before. I mean, I've only seen it live once before, but I have two recordings of it, both of which leave me unsatisfied for different reasons. All in all, this performance was not the satisfying end-all-be-all performance against which I would measure all future performances of the piece.....almost everything else I've seen here has served that role, at least in terms of live performances. (I still like my Bernstein recording of the Mozart Requiem better then silly Augistinerkirche, but it probably the best live performance of the work that I've heard.) Don't get me wrong...it was a good performance, and I'm glad that I spent the money so that I could have seen and heard it as well as I did. The soloists were really, really amazing, especially in the soli sections (the angel choruses and something else....) they all had great voices and their ensemble was also very, very nice. The choir was pretty darn good....the tenors were occasionally a bit blasty and the altos came in early one and a half times (you had to be there) but I think that might have been the conductor's fault. And speaking of the conductor.....yeah, I wasn't his biggest fan. His technique was a bit too large and flowly all of the time, and that's certainly the sound he got in the über-reverberant Stephansdom. A lot of times the tempi seemed meddled by the reverberation, and he wasn't doing much to help that. Also, a lot of the tempi (especially in the first part, with which I'm more intimately familiar) were strange, and some of them seemed just plain wrong. The last chorus where the people cry to Ba'al (I propose we spell it that way, because I like "Ba'ahl" that way better than "Bail"....although maybe I should just spell it Baäl....anyway.....) was just too slow....it was like molasses! Now, I understand maybe taking things slower in a large hall, but other things before had been way too fast....I just didn't understand it. In some places it downright ruined the dramatic effect of the music for me, but maybe I'm just too partial to the tempi I have in my mind. In any case, the soloists were amazing, the choir was good, the orchestra was good, and the conductor could have been better, but the experience of hearing music there is just amazing.....when the organ comes in in the tutti sections, you can feel it in your pew and in your feet.....you get the whole range from earth-shatteringly loud to barely-audible whisper, and both are stunning in their effect, especially against the backdrop of the gothic church and the HUGE baroque altar. It was a great concert, and I'm so thankful I was able to experience it.

After the concert I went home, watched part of "Wall Street" with my roommates, played Riven for a while (I know, I know....but it's fun!) and went to bed.

Lazy Friday

Oh, how many of my entries have had that title? Countless, I'm sure....anyway, I went to IES in the morning, just to check my e-mail and goof off and stuff....I ended up going to Doblinger (again! I know it's bad) to get a score for Mass in B minor for Jess, since she's doing her paper on it and we had talked about sharing the cost of purchasing the score so she could use it for the paper and I could keep it afterwards. (I'd obviously pay for most of it...) Well, when I got back to IES I saw her, and what do you know it she hadn't been to Doblinger 30 minutes before I was and bought a score herself! Well, I'll probably still keep my score, 'cause it's a good little study score, and it wasn't that expensive. I then went home and tooled around, watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my roommates and CA Dave (yes, that's California Dave, which is what we call him, and on second thought from now on I won't specify "my roommates and him" because he's practically my roommate already.....) and later Mike came over and we had our own little movie night with 9 to 5 (which he'd never seen!! he loved it....of course!) and A Mighty Wind, in addition to lots and lots of food. (It was kind of insane how much food I ate....) Afterwards I went to bed (I won't hesitate to say it was way later than it should have been)

The Schütz, Take 2

Thursday started off with German, as usual. After German I went to the Billa on Stephansplatz to buy water and candy treats to give to everyone at the Schütz rehearsal. On my way out I noticed a huge crowd of people (well, I noticed them on my in, too, but I didn't go over to see what was going on)....apparently some dance school or something was doing a presentation...I don't know, but there were 6 or 7 couples doing waltzes accompanied by cheesy J. Strauss recordings on this stage in the middle of Stephansplatz, and there must have been a couple thousand people there, at least, watching them. After a while these men with huge white cardboard boxes started going out from the stage, and then it really got crazy.....people were rushing toward them like they were giving away free donuts or something.....which, as a matter of fact, was exactly what they were doing! They were handing out free Krapfen, which are delicious jam-filled donuts!! Needless to say I shoved my way through the crowd (which, by the way, had completely abandoned the Austrian huge-bubble-of-personal-space custom) and got my free Krapfen before heading back to IES to reserve the practice room for the Schütz rehearsal. I stopped at reception and picked up my package(s) from home, which contained such delights as two HUGE bags of Doritos, pounds and pounds of jellybeans, and socks! A big shout-out to the 'rents for that....thank you so much!!! Everyone was very jealous, especially of the Doritos, which you can't get here. I mean, I didn't eat Doritos constantly or anything, but it was like a little taste of home.....anyway, I waited around, practiced my part a bit and made some necessary copies. As the vocalists got there I gave them each their bottle of Voslauer Ohne water and a pencil, and with everyone in good spirits we started the rehearsal. It went fairly well, for a first combined rehearsal....there were some unforeseen problems, but pretty much everything got strung together nicely. I told them that we should do part of it in the workshop on Tuesday, and they agreed that that would be good. I have yet to decide which movements we'll do, but I think it'll work out. After that fun time, I hung around for a while, mostly debating what to do about the recital that night....let me explain:

There's (apparently) two student recitals each semester for the performance workshop.....I thought that there was only one, at the end of the term....whatever. The first was today, which I found out from Michelle at our lesson last week, and assumed that since I hadn't heard anything about it, that I wasn't going to be singing. Well, anyway, on Tuesday night Russell basically told Allison and I that we were going to do the Jägerlied....which, although I guess it was up to par musically, I just wasn't ready to PERFORM it on Thursday....plus, I would have felt bad asking Mary Rose (our pianist) to do it with such short notice......and on top of it all, I had an organ lesson that night which I wasn't eager to cancel (since I've had to cancel a few times before)....anyway, we talked to Russell, and he agreed that we should just wait for the end-of-term concert to do it. *whew* that's the end of that tale....

So, anyway, here I am on Thursday, still with my organ lesson at 6:00. I find out, also on Tuesday, that the recital had been moved back from 7:00 to 6:00, which (I realized) meant that I could not attend it at all.....I started feeling really guilty about it, because I realized that so many of my friends were performing (I seriously thought that maybe 4 or 5 people were going to play....) so I was trying to figure out what I should do. Long story short: I decided to only have a 40-minute organ lesson and not stay and practice afterward, like I usually like to do, and hurry back to IES after the lesson to catch maybe the last half of the recital. At least that way I'd hear some people, and in the process not seem like such a douche.

I went down to Marianum, and after a nice little chat with the cleaning lady (who's very, very nice and speaks nice and slowly to me....it's really cute!) went to the Chapel for my lesson. Gottfried was fine with the 40-minute idea (I was sure that he wouldn't mind...) and actually it turned out to be our best lesson, maybe because I knew I didn't really have enough time, and so I was just more 'on' during the lesson. It was also the first time that we've interacted really almost entirely in German, which was fun as well. After the lesson I put on my one techno track on my iPod, and made like Lola and RAN to the Straßenbahn to catch the soonest one back to the city center. I made it back to IES in nary 25 minutes, but the recital was far more than half-over....I saw Nick and Carla in the trio, and I saw Caitlin sing her Bellini (which was beautiful) and Natalie and Claire's Prokofiev which I hear them practicing so often. After the recital there was a reception with fun conversation and delicious tea sandwiches and g'spritzt, which was tons of fun. After making weekend plans with people and generally mingling, I went home to rest from my tiring day.

Tuesday and Barbiere Wednesday!

Well, it snowed for the first time today!! It wasn't a nice, romantic snow, though.....it was a disgusting half-rain/half-snow that just made everything disgusting and mucky......but once I got to IES it was neat to look out the window and see snow falling! German was interesting...at least now we're learning new stuff. (I mean stuff that Pelzer didn't even mention....) I got an A- on my test, so there we go! After German I went out to lunch with Mike, Gretchen, and Ann....we went to Nordsee, which was molto fantastico......I just love fried fish, you know? After a delightful lunch and friendly conversation I returned to IES and went to work at the library....which was interesting, as always! (not really, but whatever...) Performance Workshop was OK....it was mostly the people who were going to sing on Thursday night's recital sang....Caitlin sang her aria from Bellini's Il Montagi e Capuleti, or whatever (Romeo and Juliet) again, which was very, very good.....Mike sang his Massenet, and Allison sang her Olympia again.....after the break we spent the other hour and a half listening to Russell tell us about auditioning in Europe and sharing audition experiences and tips. It was interesting, I suppose, but I wasn't very interested at the time.....that was it for Tuesday.

Wednesday I woke up rather late, had breakfast, and then went back to sleep until 12:30, when I left for school at 1:00. I realized on the way to school that AA&A had been re-scheduled for right in the middle of my shift, and I realized that I had a difficult decision in front of me: boring lecture, or €10? After weighing my options on the U-bahn, I realized that I could always look at someone's notes from the lecture (especially since this would have been the first AA&A class I would have missed) but I can't get €10 from anyone so easily....so I went to work. It would have been better, I suppose, if Dr. O hadn't seen me at work and asked me to bring her books down to the library after class, but I just sneaked into her classroom as people were leaving after class, and went up to her desk, got the books from her, and went back to work. After checking my e-mail and fooling around at the center, I went home briefly and debated whether or not to go to Barber of Seville at the Staatsoper that night...I was tired enough that I wasn't feeling up to standing, but I realized that this was my last chance to see it, I decided to go. Boy was I glad that I went!! It was sooooo good! I mean, that opera makes you smile anyway, 'cause it's just a funny show, but the staging, the acting, the SINGING.....everything was incredible. The conductor was great...this old Italian guy whose name I can't remember who had obviously conducted this 5 billion times....the orchestra sounded great, probably because most of it isn't technically challenging in any extreme way. The count was good, Bartolo was great, Rosina was pretty good, and of course Figaro stole the show.....this was the first time I'd seen it, however, when the Count was on par with Figaro, both theatrically and vocally. Usually I end up liking Figaro way more (he's just a funnier character, I suppose) but I liked them both equally. Marcellina was also very good....she doesn't have a huge role, but vocally she kept up a good mix of the sort of nasal/whiny-servant tone while still sounding really good.....I can't explain it. There was just a hint of that sort of whiny woe-is-me type sound (typical in the Viennese dialect, might I add)....I don't know....it really added to her character, though. Anyway, I'm really, really glad that I went, and kind of pissed off that I didn't go sooner so I could have seen it more than once. (for some reason almost everyone in standing room was a tourist....hardly any Viennese showed up, and almost none of the Stammgäste, or regulars, of the standing room.....it was kind of funny when this one girl, who I've seen a couple of times now, was having a rather loud conversation with her friend about the awkward sex she and her boyfriend were having.....maybe she thought she was safe because she assumes nobody spoke English, but quite a few of the people in the four rows between her and me, who could hear and understand every word, got a kick out of it, I'm sure) All in all, a fantastic day!

New Photos!

Ballet, Opera, Random stuff (as always) and magnificent costume party!

Lazy Monday

Groceries: €10.12

That's about it: yeah.....


Well, I slept right up until about 12:49, when I realized that the non-compulsory AA&A tour was at 1:00....so I decided it was a lost cause. A few minutes later Hannes knocked on the door needing some technical help with trying to print a text document......it was .wps, is that WordPefect? He thought it was a Microsoft product he had been using (on Matt's computer upstairs) but he could have been wrong...anyway I had a bitch of a time trying to open it and sort through the gobbildy-gook, but we managed to piece it together. After that I went to IES to check my e-mail, etc....the wireless network went down while I was there, and Frau Fischer decided to put me on the case. (somehow I got this reputation among the IES faculty that I'm some sort of computer genius.....every time anyone needs something with a computer right away they find me....it's bizzare. I've done the strangest little odd jobs for people....but I digress) I finally solved the problem by unplugging the hub and plugging it back in again. Yay.

After that I took a needlessly long walk to the subway to go home, whereupon I stopped at Billa to pick up bread and sausage and a few other things. After I got home and cooked dinner, Becky came by to watch South Park, which we did. After she left I got a bit of work done cleaning and so on, until JB finished his studying and asked me if he could watch more South Park. So, we watched another couple of episodes before he went to bed, which is where I am now headed!

Sorry again for the long absence....in case of such a delay, I'll just do what I did here, and make separate entries for each day instead of a long-ass one for multiple days, which can be hard to comb through, I know.

Sunday

Ice cream at Egypt Man: €4

Having a day all to myself: Priceless

I did nothing. Just about nothing. After a long time of loafing I went on a walk/public transit excursion throughout the city, and came back home with some ice cream I got at Egypt Man. I tried to make hot fudge for it, but it didn't work. Oh well, next time. After that experiment I went up and watched Lord of the Rings 1 in Apt. 12. Then I came back and called Andrew, which made me happy. That's really all that I did......it was a nice, restful day.

Götterdämmerung and HILARIOUS Costumes (oh, and the German midterm)

Total price for Götterdämmerung: €8.40
Rotsturm at the Heuriger: €3

Seeing Duné (sp?) in drag: Priceless

First things first: German midterm. Ridiculously easy. I mean, it was so easy partially because I've been speaking a lot more German lately, and I've come to that point where a lot of things that aren't grammatically correct don't 'sound right'. (I think Hofstadter mentions something in GEB....something about AI chess programs and "chunking"....but I digress) So, a lot of the adjective ending stuff and certainly the vocab came much easier. Mike and I were the first ones done, having finished in about 40 minutes, and after finishing the test I headed straight for the library. I knew that everyone at IES had their German midterm at 10:00 that morning, and I also knew that I was the first one done with probably one of the easier midterms, so I went straight for the library, banking on the fact that whoever was working would not be done with their midterm, and I could staff the library until they got there. As I suspected, no-one showed up until about 11:30, when Reb came down from her midterm. I clocked in an hour, patting myself on the back for just earning €5, and headed home.

I met Mike at his place for a quick lunch of pasta before camping out for standing room tickets for Götterdämmerung. We sat next to these nice Americans: Emmy and Natasha, who were studying here for...something, I didn't catch what. Emmy is a percussionist from Seattle who loves the opera (perhaps she'll become a director someday! she should, with all the good ideas that she has), and we had some great conversations with her. As for the opera....good! I mean, everyone who could have died died. It was incredible. I mean, I expected Siegfried and Brünnhilde to die, but I mean EVERYONE died.....the brother and sister, Alberich's son (I suppose Alberich was already dead) all the Gods, everyone. Incredible. The music was good, too....I probably enjoyed the music the most in this one out of all the four. The orchestra pulled it together, unlike in Die Walküre, when they were just sort of terrible. And Brünnhilde! Amazing! Incredible! Siegfried was OK....he's VERY short, and came off a bit to spunky and precocious, not big and strong and heroic. The impresario (or whatever) came out after the second intermission and said something about something about Siegfried in the third act and we appreciate your understanding......I thought maybe they had replaced him, but he sang in the third act! Of course, once he died, they replaced him with this RIDICULOUS body double who was maybe a head taller than him, much skinnier, and had this ridiculous beard which the other Siegfried most certainly did not have....he also had the worst corpse make-up on I've ever seen....but other than that, the production was very good. Certainly the best of the four.

After the opera Mike and I went back to his place and he changed into his costume for the costume party down at Hietzing. (I did not wear a costume, as I could not think up anything good) For more specific costume details, check out the pictures on Smugmug. The party was really fun, lots of cool people there in cool costumes. Since there was a bit of a SNAFU with the cover charge (i.e. people came and drank and didn't pay, so the Hietzing residents had to foot the extra €40 themselves....), Mike and I got our own drinks from the bar. I had a glass of Rotsturm which was very, very good, and unfortunately might be the last Sturm I'll have, as it's on it's way out of season. Soon we'll get the Eis- and Glühwein, though, and I'm excited about that! Anyway, we stayed there as the party wended it's way to a close, at which time we took the night bus back to our respective domiciles. (we had to wait out in the cold a long time, after running when we saw the bus at the stop only to have it drive off as I had my finger on the button to open the door....what a pisser!)

Sushi- & Study-time

Groceries: €12
Sushi: €10

Eating some good raw fish with nori and rice: Priceless

After working for 4 hours in the library, I met Gretchen to go down to Hietzing and have sushi at this cute place she had recently discovered. First, though, we went to Hofer and I got some groceries. She had never been before, and she was decently nonplussed, as I would expect anyone to be. Hofer's great for chep stuff, but overall it's not a very exciting place. Then we dropped our stuff of at my apartment and went to the sushi restaurant. It was very small, seating maybe about 20 people, and was virtually empty when we arrived. It was funny to have the cute constantly-bowing Japanese waitress speak to you in ultra-polite German....I guess I'm just so used to hearing the tried-and-true occasionally-misused and always incorrectly-pronounced phrases in English. Anyway, I got 16 tuna rolls and Gretchen got a plate of sashimi, and we split each down the middle. Everything was quite delicious, and it ended up being just about €10 for each of us, which isn't a terrible price for good sushi. Anyway, after that we went back to my place to pick up our stuff and then went to Mike's apartment to meet him and Miriam for some study time. We had our German midterm on Saturday, and we figured we might as well study just a bit....well, once we showed up not much studying took place, but we stayed up and chewed the fat for a LONG time.....I don't even remember exactly what time I actually left Mike's place....probably about 1:30.

Lessons and (Carols? no, Schütz...)

Voice Lesson: €50 (free after reimbursement next week!)
Organ Lesson: €25 (also free)

Singing some Schütz: Priceless


First, Schwanensee last night! It was OK....totally traditional ballet, which was good and bad, I guess. I decided to stand in the Balkon for the first time, because I've gotten mixed reviews about standing there since the overhang cuts off some of your view, and you're forced to stand way over to the side....frankly, I liked it....it was way less crowded, and I was there early enough that I got a spot that was barely obstructed at all...and even though I was off to the side, I was way closer to the stage than I would have been at the same angle in the galerie, and I liked being close enough to really distinguish faces and such....anyway, the music was OK, and beside the two people who tripped and fell, the dancing was executed very well. I just I just never realized before how intrinsically limited the movements of ballet are....or at least they were in this choreography. (which, if I understood the German, was adapted from the very original choreography from the debut in St. Petersburg) So after a while....it just got a bit boring! And I hate saying that, because all cultured people enjoy the ballet, it seems.....but I think that this was just not an amazing choreography, or at least one not good enough to win me into the fold. The music was good though, and the last scene with the flood was done very, very well.

Anyway, today was a big day for music-making! Before my voice lesson at 11:00 I went to IES to make copies of the Mozart concert aria I was going to sing at my lesson. Luckily, Birgit was there and copied it for me with her code/key/whatever. (she was copying "Leichte Stücke für Gitarre," so it was probably OK for her to let me copy my stuff....) In any case, my voice lesson, was OK, nothing out of the ordinary. My progress is good, but obviously isn't exponential or anything like that. After my lesson I rushed back to school for back-to-back rehearsals with the Schütz group. To recap, I got together a group of 6 of the vocalists to do the Musikalische Exequien (the piece the Glee Club did two Springs ago), and today was our first rehearsal! The men rehearsed first....Dave didn't show up....apparently he had a "brain fart," but it'll be fine, because not only is it WAY easier for me to try and play two parts than three, and the bass part in this kind of music is SO easy to hear, especially with the keyboard part playing it almost exactly. The rehearsals each went very well, and I think that the singers like the piece. They'll really like it once they hear it all together, though...I'm so excited for next Thursday's combined rehearsals!!

After the Schütz rehearsals I had a bit of free time, and then I headed off to Marianum for my organ lesson. Again, it was good, no major progress had been made since my last lesson (probably because I didn't practice in the interim) but the lesson itself was good. We started this piece that David wanted me to start working on: Berceuse, by Vierne. It's a strange piece, and it's especially strange because I really only have 1 or 2 registration options for it, as opposed to the 3 that it requires (plus a swell box for the diminuendos....I'm happily ignoring all of them!) I stayed behind, as usual, to practice, and on my way out I walked right in the middle (literally) of a fencing match in the hallway. It took me quite offguarde [sic] to see these random people fencing in the hallway of a school at 7:30 at night, but what are you going to do? (I was personally rooting for the black guy, but the white guy seems pretty good too....) After that strange experience I went home and did nothing of particular interest before going to bed.

Midterms!

I'm currently in line to see Schwannensee, and I thought I might as well write a journal entry for yesterday. I got up at about 9:30 and headed over to school to finish/print my papers for Classical Symphony, and study for the midterm at 11. The midterm turned out to be ridiculously easy, which is good, and I studied all the right things. We basically just had to write about these two scores which we'd never seen before...identify the genre, talk about how they exhibit classical style (or not) etc. It was fairly easy....certainly way easier than it could have been. After the test I returned home and took a nap, after which I went to the MQ to check my mail and stuff. I returned home, wrote the long-ass journal entry I posted this morning, and studied. I was up until about 3, at which point I went to bed.

This morning I woke up at around the same time, 9:30, for my 12:00 midterm. I watched the election coverage on CNN for a while, and then I went to school. I took the AA&A midterm, which luckily was ridiculously easy, because otherwise I would not have done very well, I fear. After that midterm I had nary a couple of hours to study for the music history midterm, which was way harder than I expected. Actually, the reason it was hard is because he didn't concentrate on the piddly things that I studied...instead he asked us questions that are more broad that I should know the answer to, such as "what is the history of the motet?" and not, like, "what is a discant clasula?" Anyway, I think I did OK on that. After that I was very tired and sort of drained, but I still decided with resolve that I would see Schwanensee tonight. So here I am!

Concert Streak Days 2, 3, and 4: Fidelio, Don Carlos, and Israel in Egypt

Saturday:
Fidelio: €9
Coffee and Obstplunder: €4

Sunday:
Tithe: €2.50
Don Carlos: €9

Monday:
Month Ticket for the U-bahn: €45
Ticket for Israel in Egypt: €40 (and worth every penny!)

Once again, too long! Well, Saturday began with Friday night upstairs with the boys, when I found out that they were doing Israel in Egypt at the Musikverein...I almost wet my pants, for seriously. It's my favorite oratorio ever, and it's never ever performed (especially in the states, where we never do oratorio except the gosh-darn Messiah) Well, I walked down to the Musikverein on Saturday before work, but of course both the Konzertkassa and Jeunesse were closed. I did also notice on the playbill of the month that it was playing Monday and Tuesday, which the Musikverein bulletin did not mention because Tuesday night's performance is through Jeunesse, so I guess they don't list that in their thing.....it's such a strange system.....anyway, I promised myself to get tickets first thing Monday morning and went to work, and was there from 10 until 4...after that I met Mike and Mark at the opera to see Fidelio. Mark is Mike's roommate from Northwestern who's studying at IES Milan and popped up to Vienna this weekend to see Mikey-poo, as he calls him. We happened to meet up with some other IES kids while there, and we all stood up in the Gallerie together. The opera was interesting. I enjoyed the music way more than I had expected, but frankly "Goodnight Moon" had a more interesting plot. OK, that's a bit of an overstatement, but nothing much happened in the 2.5 hour+ opera. The whole third act could be boiled down to "Florestan is released by the good guy, while the bad guy is punished." Of course, this all took about 45 minutes. The third act also came after a 15-minute orchestral interlude....basically a second overture. What it was doing in the middle of the opera I haven't the foggiest, but whatever. We love Beethoven! It was Seiji Ozawa's first performance (I think) since he came back from Japan touring with the opera, and I think that's why such a huge crowd was there.....I've never seen them go more nuts during an ovation, and it was more for the orchestra than the singers. (although the woman who played Leonore/Fidelio was not only an amazing vocalist, but a phenomenal actress) In any case, after the opera, we went back to Mike's place and hung out for a while, then I went home and talked to Andrew for hours, which was great!

Sunday morning I was able to get up early thanks to the extra hour of sleep I got from Daylight Savings Time, and I went to Stephansdom nice and early to see their program of early music. They did Palestrina, Schütz, Byrd, Tallis, and some other people. It was really really great. The choir was really good, and I really liked the conductor's interpretation, especially of the Palestrina and the Schütz (which was SO cute! auf daß al-le; alle-alle-alle!). The service itself was okay, I understood less of the German in the homily than I had at Augistinerkirche, but whatever. The people definitely seemed friendlier, maybe because they weren't going to a church which had basically whored itself out to the concert-going tourist crowd, as had the Augistinerkirche has done. I go back pretty soon to see Elias there, which should be fun. I threw down €40 for that concert, which in retrospect was probably a bit too much....whatever. I'll enjoy sitting in the front row, I'm sure! After church I went home, dicked around for a while, then went back to the opera to meet Mike and Mark there for Don Carlos. I wasn't terrificly enthused about it, but since I've made it my goal to see everything there I thought I might as well see it with friends. Mike had already seen it, and obviously liked it enough to go again. I actually really enjoyed it! It was a new production, so the staging was a bit....strange, but everything fit together nicely. This production was actually the debut of the five-act French version which was supposed to be the original premiere, but it ended up being premiered in Milan first, and by the time they did it in Paris they had to cut it. So not only was this production in French (which made it quite different, I'm sure, than the Italian version by that nature alone) but it was hecka long and had a ballet in the middle (as all self-respecting French operas must) However, instead of a ballet, they did a dream sequence of one of the main characters who's in love with Don Carlos. (I mean that in both senses of that phrase....there are a few main characters who are in love with Don Carlos) Basically it was pantomime (no dialogue or singing during the ballet music!) and it was this woman dreaming about her and Carlos in married life á la typical 1950's sitcom. (keep in mind the rest of the opera, although sparsely decorated, was clearly period) It was hi-larious! Not only did it go along with the music, but it was interesting to see everyone's character being portrayed in an entirely different (and completely farcical) plot.....it was great. Afterwards many people bood, which I though was kind of shitty....I mean, come on, it was original, and it worked really well. Also, it made the high drama and tension of the end so much more effective, because afterwards you realized that the production had captured such a wide range of emotions. Anyway, during the intermission they set up steps and a platform through the pit that connected the house to the stage, and the auto-da-fé sequence took place as sort of a Hollywood-premiere-red-carpet-style procession through the foyet of the opera house and onto the stage, where the HUMONGOUS chorus was dressed in modern dress and having a good time. It was an interesting confluence of temporal parameters, since the leads were no longer wearing their simple black with fluffy 18th century Spanish collar, but tuxes and ball gowns and stuff. At some point (I missed what was happening dramatically) Carlos and his cronies started spreading these little photo-pamphlet things to the people on stage, and simultaneously people went through the audience distributing them. At a certain point, though, the people stopped passing them out and threw them from the balconies, creating a confetti rain over the Parkett. (it reminded me of that show "Five Guys Named Moe" that we saw at that theater.....what was it called?? The Doolittle? Was that it? or was that her name? or both? I can't remember.....) Anyway the production was amazing, and even some stodgy Viennese people didn't like it, I thought it was the most effective modern opera staging I've ever seen.

After the opera we went back to my place to pick up food, and then went to Mike's place to fix a late dinner. Park and Gretchen met us there, and after a short dinner we went out to this gay café near Mike's apartment. It was a pretty nice place, and although I didn't get anything, I tried the red wine, which was good. Mark ended up meeting this German guy from Köln and exchanging phone numbers. (now if he's ever in Köln, or if this guy is ever in Milan, they'll know someone......or something.....) I went home shortly after that and went to bed.

Monday began with Amanda coming at about 9 am to pick up her stuff....she brought me the cutest little ornament thing from Italy...it was so thoughtful! We talked for a while, and then I went to the Musikverein to get tickets for Israel in Egypt. What I didn't count on was the fact that it was a holiday, and therefore the Kassa was closed until an hour before the concert. I went home, took a nap, and then went back to the Kassa at 6:00 and, finding nobody there waiting for it to open, decided to walk around and try to find the Konzerthaus, which I knew was one stop down on the U4. I walked around for 20 minutes, finally found it, and then went back to the Musikverein. When I got there at 6:32 there was a huge line of maybe about 45 people waiting to get tickets. My heart sunk a bit, and I scolded myself for not just staying and waiting for it to open. As I moved up the line, I saw a man asking if anyone wanted one ticket. I called him over and asked him where it was, and he showed it to me. It was in the 9th row of the Orchestra level, right in the center. It was a €56 ticket, and he wanted €40. Thinking this fair, I bought it from him. He also gave me a printout he had made for his wife (whom the ticket was originally for) of the libretto translated into German, which was fun even though the oratorio was in English. Thanking him, I rushed back home to change into nicer clothes and made it back by around 7:15, at which time I took my seat.

And what a seat it was! Very rarely have I sat that close...it was amazing. The concert itself was just amazing....although there were tiny little interpretative things I didn't like, for instance his constant punching of syllables like "he gave them hailstones for rain" with little sense of arc or line, mostly everything was great. The orchestra was FANTASTIC, and I realized that I need to learn more about bowing practices for early/baroque music....they were doing a lot of re-takes for the dotted rhythm, which made a big difference in their sound. The strings as a whole sounded just fantastic, and managed to pull off a surprisingly unified sound. It was also probably the largest orchestra of period instruments I've seen, but I liked the effect a lot. The winds sounded great (I love the baroque oboe sound) and the brass gave a cool effect. The timpani was a bit loud, but I think that's in keeping with the style. The choir was incredible, despite a couple of really egregious mistakes in their English diction. W's and soft TH's tend to be problematic, I guess. In the "he rebukéd the red sea," they instantly changed from a bright, strident, proclamatory sound to a soft, spinny, pulled-back sound for "and it was driéd up." The contrast was completely unanimous, and it was an awesome effect. There were a couple of places when the lack of line really got on my nerves, like "and the locusts came in a thunder" which I'd rather hear as a long flowing line over the fast tremelo-like runs in the strings; he instead chose to punch each syllable, so the effect wasn't as breathtaking as it could have been. (usually when I hear that movement I get REALLY verklempt.....) The soloists were really good, except for the tenor. I don't know what was up with him. He had more vibrato than the whole choir put together, and he had TERRIBLE diction. "Nou zere araz a niu king offe Eegypt, vhich new not Jiosef," for example. Despite my good knowledge of the piece inside and out, it took all my energy to understand what he was saying. The sopranos were great, and the countertenor was amazing! The bass duet was OK....they kept breathing a measure early, and I was constantly afraid they were going to come in early....it was weird. They also grimaced A LOT, which was really distracting. For the soprano solo at the end, where she sings "Sing ye to the LORD for he hath triumphéd gloriously" acapella and then the entire chorus and tutti orchestra respond with a ff proclamation of "The LORD shall reign forever and ever," they had the soprano soloist on the organ balcony thing, which was an amazingly powerful effect....it was as if she was really in front of the people leading them through the desert and singing, just as Miriam ("the prophetess, the sister of Aaron") had done. Well, the concert was amazing, and I feel like I learned a lot about the piece and about different ways to articulate and phrase the music. I'll never forget that night.......

After the concert I went down to Hietzing to say Hi to Gretchen on her birthday, and then went home and was up until about 4:00 writing my papers for Classical Symphony. And that's the end of THAT chapter!

I'm still alive

I'm at the MQ checking my e-mail (and talking to Marie on AIM! ^_^) but for those of you who are waiting for another post, a four-day-inclusive entry is being written and will be uploaded tomorrow morning, so don't worry! I'm still alive and having a marvelous time. Now to get out of the cold!

New Photos!

More Pictures....did I post here the last time I uploaded new photos? I don't think so......well, you'll find at least one new gallery of photos. ^_^ Enjoy!