Besides finishing our puzzle Nick and I went to three operas while I was visiting him in Vienna. Two of them had just been composed this year - yes, art music by living composers! Our favorite was Medea by Aribert Reimann. Great text, great staging, great music! And the opera house was packed for the performance we saw. Then we also went to a Verdi opera, Simon Boccanegra, which turned out to be rather disappointing. Oh and we also started another puzzle.
The first weekend I was there we went for a 8 mile hike in the Wienerwald - an area close to Vienna that features picturesque small towns, sizeable hills, but actually not that much forest. Mason came along, continually running ahead of us on the trail and then sprinting back once he felt too far away. Parts of the trail we had chosen took us along roadsides, which was a little frustrating. The high point of the hike was the Peilstein rock formation on top of a large hill. We met a few guys who were climbing with ropes and gear there and we did just a little bit of bouldering on the rocks ourselves.
A few days before I left we went to the Wiener Eistraum (ice-dream). As a kid I did a lot of roller skating (I'm sure you remember it well, mom and dad) and I suppose that these skills just transferred to ice skating without me being conscious of it. I had therefore arrived at the conclusion that ice skating is a natural kind of movement that most people can pick up quickly. Several pieces of evidence presented themselves against this idea. Nick didn't think that he would be able to ice skate, because when he was a kid he couldn't even stand still on roller skates. But no, I told him, standing on ice skates is like standing in regular shoes, and skating is just as easy as walking. He definitely could not ice skate. But he tried really hard for about an hour to do it, and I'm convinced that by the end he had actually improved noticeably. I am proud to say that Nick can at least walk on non-ice surfaces in the skates - that's something, isn't it? So after awhile Nick decided to just sit down and so I skated for a few hours by myself.
I ended up having a great time because the setup was so wonderful: the Eistraum consists of two skating rinks and four lengthy paths. The paths were pretty fun, except that there were often slow and unpredictable children on them blocking my way. These children were the second piece of evidence against my ice skating theory, because they were falling over left and right on the ice. It was obvious that kids have to learn to skate. I actually fell one time while I was skating alone. I was trying to go fast and my legs were getting tired, and so as I picked up my left foot while skating through one of the rinks the toe of the skate got briefly stuck in the ice. So I stumbled for what seemed like awhile, and then I decided to just take myself down while I had enough control to do it safely. I decided to slide on my stomach because I was wearing lots of clothes and this would likely protect my hands. As I slid along the ice I started laughing at myself and a couple passing by me gave me odd looks.One of the main reasons the thought of protecting my hands crossed my mind in that moment was because I was scheduled to play a concert at the US ambassador to France's residence the day after my return to Paris. This was a stressful concert for me because I had no piano. I either practiced in the music library for limited amounts of time or rehearsed with the vocalist in a very nice space at a Parisian university. Then I spent the two weeks before the concert in Paris, which meant the vocalist and I had to do final rehearsals two weeks early, and then quickly regroup the day of the concert.
I played fairly well - there were 10 songs and it really depended on the song. It's hard after not performing publicly for over a year to go out and stay poised throughout a concert. The ambassador's house in Paris is quite lavish - the fixed architectural decor was in a neo-Baroque style while the furniture was more modern but still uppity. The ambassador is frankly a total jerk, which I already knew because he had appeared briefly at a Fulbright event earlier in the year. He for some reason didn't say anything to me when he met with us musicians and then he actually left the room where we performed during my performance (other people who were there think they saw him leaving with an important looking man, perhaps another ambassador). Several of the other Fulbright scholars came to the concert; I wasn't expecting them and it was very nice to see them. We went out for a drink together afterward and were eventually asked to leave a bar because we were being too loud. What?
No comments:
Post a Comment