Grand Finale, 13 November 2013

Tuesday, 13 November 2013

Heathrow Airport
London

Our European trip is concluded. We are en route home...in business class. I am pampered. Wes is too good to me. I appreciate it.

London was a whirlwind of outstanding things.

The River Cafe was warm, comfortable, expensive, sumptuous, delicious. Wild grouse quick roasted in a huge orange wood-fire oven.

Turbot steak, perfect, juicy with tender braised small fennel bulbs. Roast porcini and buttery pan-sautéed bruschetta drenched in merlot. We drank our own wine. A two-thousand-four Barolo. We brought it with us from La Morra. It's specific grapes were grown on our inn's hillside. The wine, to our surprise, had a white truffle aroma.

We heard the Takács String Quartet in two concerts. We heard them in the spacious, elegant, blue and white,  Georgian-era Assembly Hall in Bath where hang five brilliantly gleaming very oversize chandeliers.

I imagined them to be Waterford crystal.  And we heard the Takács in London's Wigmore Hall.  Superlatives aren't enough. An event like this is the reason one hears a group live instead of on a recording. The Takács are meticulously rehearsed, yet they play as if the music originates from deep within them and bubbles out like a natural spring and at times like a geyser. With great ease. Incisive rhythm. Ravishing tone. Thrilling and stunning. Words fail. Wes sat in the third row. It is not an exaggeration to say he was sitting among the musicians. The violist is an acquaintance. We were privileged to get to know her a bit over cocktails after the Wigmore concert. We met her in the Green Room. Wow! What a room. On it's four walls are photos autographed to the Wigmore by the legendary performers from one-hundred years ago. Of course they loved Wigmore. It's acoustics are perfect. Flattering in every way. Geri took us to stand on the stage. I gasped at the thought of playing on it. It is a serious platform for creating hand-wrought musical beauty. For musical rituals.  Behind and over the musicians heads is a quarter-sphere frescoed wall that serves to thrust the sound out to the listeners. And serves for the listeners as a something beautiful to rest their eyes upon.  Paraphrasing Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the room was designed so that anywhere her eyes would fall it would be upon something beautiful."

Wigmore Hall is like that.  Walking the violist back to her hotel, we passed Queen Anne Street where five years ago we met Charles Beare who waxed poetic over my viola made by Jacob Rayman in London in sixteen-fifty, and where I played a few notes on the famed "McDonald" Stradivari viola, but that was five years ago. Back to Wigmore, after the concert I was so excited, exhilarated, I could hardly sleep.  Months ago, I mentioned to Wes that the Takács program was tailor made, as if they had selected my favorites. We tried for tickets. SOLD OUT. Entirely sold out. Wes showed once again his ability to make dreams come true. He got two tickets by checking daily for returns and my dream came true. Command performance.

We saw Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Michael Grandage. We swooned.  The backdrop was a large luminous moon. It made everything seem an enchanted dream. The staging seemed inspired by Hair, the musical. Slightly hippy. The director and performers made the story absolutely clear from beginning to end.      David Walliams stole the show with his Bottom.  He was hammy, extroverted, over the top, charming and adorable. It is said he is a best-selling author of six children's books published by HarperCollins. And that he is admittedly bi-polar. He, like his cast mates, expressed much of his character without requiring a spoken word, so expressive was his physical depiction. And when they did speak their diction, their articulation, their projection was impeccable. Lots of consonants: tee's and pee's.

We went to see Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It was the opposite of the above. Though it was perfectly fine, it was not particularly funny and the live and real cigar smoke blown from the stage was affronting and annoying.  The cast seemed in two teams. One, American, with James Earl Jones. The other, British, with Vanessa Redgrave. The Americans, to my ear, to a man, lacked consonants. Not quite mumbling, but lacking in clarity.  Their acting was from the neck up. Bodies unexpressive of character, with an occasional hip-hop hand gesture inappropriate for their World War Two characters. The British were extremely articulate. I don't think diction is dependent upon country of origin, but in this instance it was. The director, Mark Rylance, was AWOL. He is in New York starring as Olivia in the Globe Theatre's all-male production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night which we will see during Thanksgiving weekend.

We visited the small city of Bath. Much of it dates to the Georgian era which refers to the one hundred and twenty six years when there were four King George's in a row. Seventeen-fourteen to eighteen-forty. The four King Georges loved music, literature, and architecture and manners and tea and letter writing and botanical paintings and all things aesthetic.  As I understand it, not so interested in governance, they performed makeovers on English villages. Built crescents or circles of residences. In Bath there is the Royal Crescent and the Circus.

The Royal Crescent is as it sounds, an arc, a continuous row of several dozen connected stone townhouses forming an arc overlooking a vast descending lawn with woods in the distance. The Circus is also a series of connected townhouses but it is comprised of four arcs which form a large circle. In the center is a lawn with a grove of trees. All these were constructed during the Georgian era. They are fairly simple in design, uncluttered, without excessive ornamentation.  Unpainted stone. Part of their beauty results from the rhythm created by their repetition. A friend said, "you should see them at night when all the lanterns on the townhouses are lit."  We walked amidst them on a cold drizzly, wet day. It was peaceful, calm and the stones of the pavement and of the townhouses glistened in the rain.

We heard a retired concert pianist speak, Alfred Brendel. He is also a poet, scholar, painter, author and thinker. I have read his books. I admire his probing mind. I repeatedly listen to his recordings finding in them a logic, an orderliness, that soothes me. He spoke for an hour in the previously mentioned Bath Assembly Room.  He is in his early eighties, lives in London and his hearing is weak. He is well spoken and has a Germanic inflection in his English. Shortly before retiring, he recorded Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano with his son. Months ago, I heard a bit of it on the radio.  To my ear, I hear the piano-father lovingly coaxing the best out of the cello-son. I asked him to autograph his recent book, An A to Z for Pianists.  As he signed, I asked him what literature he'd take to a deserted island.  Without hesitation, he raised his head, looked me in the eyes and said, "Shakespeare. And Lichtenberg's Aphorisms."

In Bath, during the late afternoon, we visited the Abbey.  Inside, music was playing. A small chorus and orchestra. Handel's oratorio, Jeputha. Something to do with a father who in payment for a benefit he's received takes a vow to slay the first person he sees, which tragically is his daughter.  Father and Daughter were singing when we entered the Abbey. The music was ethereal, gentle, emotional, regretful, foreboding. The Abbey's interior is a magnificent display of elegant details. Long rows of fluted gothic columns on both sides of the room rise to the ceiling where the flutes blossom into fans. Looking up,

the ceiling has a compelling visual rhythm from how the fans splay out and where they meet in the center. The most architecturally beautiful ceiling I've ever seen. The abbey is very old.  Parts of it vary in age from five-hundred to eight-hundred to twelve-hundred years old.  The small highly regarded chorus is called Sixteen. Their orchestra had two violists. One of them looked familiar. Could it be? From thirty-three years ago at Banff Centre's summer music program? Yes, it is an old acquaintance. We did not know each other well and he may not remember me at all, but I'll leave him a note. The Abbey was closing and I could not speak to him directly. Fast forward twenty-four hours...we heard from him the next day and spent our final London evening with him and his partner. They have an exceptionally nice place and are great hosts. We had an excellent time with them.

I travel to learn about the people of the world. How they co-existed, solved problems, what they created, what were their difficulties, what made them happy, what were their challenges, what evidence did they leave behind. I tend to dwell on the past. But when there are live performances as there were this week in London and earlier in Paris I become very emotional. When I walk into an ancient cave—Font de Gaume—where nineteen-thousand years ago people, by torchlight, made drawings of animals on the walls—two deer touching their noses together—I can't help but imagine them as you or me or anyone present day that wants to be remembered and leaves a
mark of some kind. Musicians do it with sound. And maybe knowing it is only of the moment, not a trace left behind, they go at it with a special ardor.  "Listen! What beauty resides inside of us! Listen!"

I have a viola made in the year sixteen-fifty in London. Specifically the area south of the London Bridge called Southwark.  Near the Tabard Inn where Chaucer thought up the Canterbury Tales. Near the Marshalsea debtors prison where little Charles Dickens's father was held. Near Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and near Saint Saviour's Church where Shakespeare used to go to cry over his brother's grave. My viola maker, Jacob Rayman "dwelt in Bell Yard" and we went to find Bell Yard. Streets have been slightly rearranged through the centuries, but armed with enough old maps we were able to locate within one-hundred feet where he "dwelt." Though the present day buildings are old, very little remains from sixteen-fifty, but little by little the picture of the history of this viola is coming into focus. The wife of it's owner in nineteen-hundred was an actress that put the teenage John Gielgud in his first plays.  That same owner did not join his string quartet's cellist on the Titanic.  I love the hunt. Magnifying glass in hand. Sherlock Holmes hat. Snooping for the clues. Connecting the dots. We roamed Southwark today. Slipped thru the slender alleyways. Popped into small community gardens, libraries. I told anyone who'd listen what I was researching, about the viola. Several people became excited. They want to see the viola. They want me to come play it on it's home turf. Nothing to do with music. It involves local pride. One of their own citizens. The viola is his cave drawing. It survived him. Proof he was here. That he once lived, worked, loved, died in Southwark. Will I return with it? Yes.

It was a perfect end to a perfect trip. I told Wes/Casey last night, you are like a genie in a bottle. I only have to imagine a desire and you make it come true.

At this moment, we are en route to Kalamazoo, Michigan to visit the two genies that made this all possible, Kit and Joan Hough, Wes's parents. They are a cornucopia overflowing with goodness. In not too many hours we will be with them to celebrate Wesley's, aka Casey's birthday and that will be the truly perfect ending to our perfect trip.

Marlow and Wes
Tuesday, 13 November 2013
Heathrow Airport
London

(I did not take any of the photographs in this e-mail. Photo credits are available on request.)

Excursion to Bath Spa - Nov. 9

The Takacs Quartet performed in Bath Spa on Saturday morning so we arranged to make a day trip out of the opportunity to hear this great Quartet perform Beethoven, Smetana and Mozart quartets.  Quite a nice way to spend two hours on a rainy Saturday!  We will also be hearing the Takacs perform a slighly different program here in London at Wigmore Hall.

The Circus at Bath Spa

Bath is known for its Georgian architecture and there is plenty of it.  But I think we felt that the older, Gothic Bath Abbey was the jewel in this lovely city.

Fan vaulting in Bath Abbey

Upon entering this great space we heard live vocal music being performed by a Baroque ensemble rehearsing for a concert in the Abbey later that evening.  So we were able to sit and enjoy the music and the space.  One of the many unexpected pleasures of travel!

London, November 10

London and a Birthday

The Eurostar train takes you from Gare du Nord station in Paris to the center of London in just over two hours time.  We are staying in a modern short-term apartment building in EC1 - just north of the LSE campus on Rosebery Avenue.  We arrived on Marlow's birthday so a celebratory dinner at the River Cafe was first on the agenda.  

Departing Gare du Nord

Arriving London Underground

Time for laundry in our London flat

Birthday dinner at the River Cafe

Attacking the grouse

Birthday Boy

Scenes from our last days in France

BM and Wes

12th c. glass windows

Before leaving Paris we wanted to visit Chartres Cathedral located just an hour south of Paris.  Our friend Bernard insisted on driving us and it was wonderful to have not only a chauffeur for the trip but a well informed guide as well!  Among the Cathedral's many distinctions is that it is extremely well preserved - the magnificent stained glass windows are original dating from the 12th and 13th centuries.  And the facade and interior is pretty much the same as it was when constructed in the 13th century.

Chartres exterior

We couldn't leave from our apartment in Montmartre without an evening of chansons, so enjoyed desert in a classic cabaret-bar down the street.

Caught checking e-mail - again!

View from our apartment of Batteau Lavoir artist studios
used by Picasso and Brancussi among others

Montmartre apartment

Rainy night in Paris

J'aime les chansons

Montmartre, 5 November 2013

Montmartre
5 November 2013

We are in London. It is wonderful. But there was more to tell about Paris. Here it is...

We were at the Salle Pleyel on two evenings for concerts. It is a large venue. Two thousand four hundred seats. We selected our seat locations so as to be near the stage where what we might lose in optimal balance is made up for by the visceral thrill of seeing the musicians's faces up close and feeling the strong vibrations of the powerful sound rattle our bones.

For the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra we were in the second row. Riccardo Chailly, from Milan, conducted a symphony and a concerto by Johannes Brahms. Chailly, in his youth, was a jazz drummer.  His rhythm was to me like the course a river runs from it's source to the sea. Think of the Continental Divide where rivers originate. Their ultimate destination is determined. During the journey they are at times more wide or more slender. They twist and turn or they straighten out.  Their velocity races or slows, but they never stop. Relentlessly in motion, their destination is inevitable.

For the Budapest Festival Orchestra, we were seated above and behind the orchestra, facing it's conductor, Ivan Fischer. Recently, he made headlines. He composed an opera on the subject of eliminating anti-semitism in the current Hungarian government. His concert began with an Homage to Bela Bartok—somber, reflective, mildly folk tune laden. Continued with Beethoven's fourth piano concerto. And concluded with Dvorak's eighth symphony. We once visited Dvorak's Prague, particularly the house that he was born in. It is in a verdant hilly countryside. Our guide said, "Dvorak did not have to search for inspiration, he simply opened his window and wrote what was outside."  Budapest is similarly beautiful. The orchestra has those images in their blood. Their Dvorak was ravishing and in it's ending where the music sounds like laughter the players gave an audible in unison hearty "ha-ha-ha" before the ecstatic joyous circus finale. Then came the encores. First, a gentle, tonal, old fashioned waltz by, surprisingly, Toru Takemitsu, a challenging modern composer. Next up was a Brahms Hungarian Dance. It was no-holds-barred, all heck turned loose. Mayhem. Danger. Fischer's body went low on the podium, a whirling dervish, his baton a lion tamers whip that he lashed at the players, he began shouting things to them, Hungarian vulgarities, I imagined. They became gypsies with their caravan wagons in a circle, campfire blazing under the midnight moon, slashing at fiddles, slapping on basses, they were possessed. I've never heard anything like it. 

After ten days in the Marais apartment we moved uphill to Montmartre. From the second floor we had a view. (Napoleon is under the dome, right of center)

The neighborhood made me swoon. So much history concentrated in so few blocks. On our immediate corner, nineteen year old Picasso invented cubism and Van Gogh lived still with two ears. Five or six blocks away Bizet wrote Carmen then died at thirty-six,

and Renoir painted canvases of colorful dances beneath the moulins (windmills) and of little girls, rosy-cheeked, swinging under trees in a garden. The Moulin Rouge inspired Toulouse Lautrec to drink, carouse, fall in love with music, faces, capes, red scarves, can can girls and everything he put into his huge colorful posters. Berlioz lived in a little cottage around the bend and wrote Harold In Italy so Paganini could show off his Stradivari viola and he was visited by his friend, "chopinetto mio"—Frederic Chopin. Closer to our time, violinist, Stephane Grappelli played jazz with Django Reinhardt's guitar at Le Roulotte, which means gypsy wooden caravan wagon.  

Henri Murger, a writer, in the Latin Quarter perfectly spot on captured it all in his short stories in eighteen-forty-two He created Marcel and Schaunard and Colline, starving artists—painter, composer, writer. Fifty years later, Giacomo Puccini made himself and the "bohemians" famous when he turned Murger's short stories into an opera, La Boheme.

Montmartre is steep and hilly with twisting narrow cobble stone lanes that glisten in the rain. During our stay it was overcast, drizzly and rainy. Which heightened the "bohemian" ambiance. Much has changed. Much remains the same. There are artist studios aplenty, garrets with banks of extra tall windows. There are lots of tiny apartments for creatives to settle into, to struggle and work hard in. Hungry for food, shelter and for the day the public will discover their genius.

Next stop London.

Marlow and Wes
Montmartre
5 November 2013

Paris Apartment #1 and Maître Alain

Marlow and Wes
1, rue Saint-Claude, Paris
31 October 2013

We were staying in the Marais for the first ten days. The small building was elegant. Our ground floor unit, (see open door in the photo,) a one-

bedroom, opened onto a tree-lined cobblestone courtyard. Beyond the distant wall, through large green doors—large enough for your carriage and horses—is rue Saint Claude. A few paces to the left is a small barber shop. More than a barber, really. As per his card, his title is, "Maître Barbier Coiffeur." (Master Barber Hairstylist.) His name is Alain. He offers "coupe personnaliste, taille de barbe, rasage à l'ancienne." His shop is a "salon musée."  The walls are hung with antique porcelain bowls, for washing hair, each with a crescent shaped indentation (like this)

to accommodate a human neck. For several days we walked our unruly hair past his windows. We peered in. He peered out. He knew we needed him. We made appointments. He was polite and formal.  He wrapped us in capacious robes of flouncy fabric.  Christening gowns. Classical music wafted. Our hair was washed in warm water with soothing hands. After a quick rub with a towel the snipping began. Quick, confident, without conversation, and finished in ten minutes. I have to admit we looked great. Maître Alain was

pleased. Seeing us daily through his windows, he knew he had skills we needed. What will we do without him.

Marlow and Wes
1, rue Saint-Claude, Paris
31 October 2013

Monuments of Paris

Paris, 1 November 2013

Take several handfuls of watercress leaves. Put them in a pot. Add an onion and water. Simmer. Purée. Voila! Watercress soup.  That was the start of dinner at the Café des Musées.


In Spain, they raise small black pigs within an oak forest. Their entire diet is acorns. They are pampered. Their meat and fat taste subtly of nuts. On my plate is the filet mignon of such a pig. It is tender. It is juicy. Surrounded by cloves of roasted garlic. On the side is a ceramic dish of gratin potatoes smothered in cream, or is it butter, and cheese.

Across the table is a Staub cast-iron miniature dutch oven. Inside it are vegetables. Green beans. Carrots. Turnips. Mushrooms. Cauliflower. Pale green, pointy tipped broccoli. Onions, red and white.  They are cooked individually and lightly then layered inside the oval pot. On with the lid and into oven. The flavors meld. And it is our main course number two.


We have eaten here before. The chef does clean honest cooking. The meats are cooked perfectly. Even the steak tartare is just right. The seasoning is moderate. The flavors of the main ingredients speak for themselves. We are happy.

Earlier today we visited the salon de thé of Dalloyau on the rue Faubourg du Saint-Honoré. It was four in the afternoon. Quiet and calm. We gorged on Baba au Rhum and Financier and Chantilly cream.  Everything rich and decadent and what the cardiologist bans. We were happy to flout the doctors advice for the afternoon.




Before the pastry-fest we ate lunch at the Breizh Café. It's owner has come to Paris from Brittany, in the north, and brought with him the special cheese, the special ham, the special eggs of the north which he converts into galettes. A galette is simply a crêpe made with a buckwheat batter. We ate our galettes

and each drank a small bowl of fresh, fermented, hard cider made from the fresh crop of apples.

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? Not in Paris.

Marlow and Wes
Paris
1 November 2013

Paris: Lang Lang, Place des Vosges, 31 Oct 2013

Wes and Marlow in Paris

31 October 2013

It is Thursday, October 31, Halloween in Paris. We are inside the Theatre des Champs-Élysées. In thirty minutes, we will hear Mr. Lang Lang play Chopin while the soloists of the Houston Ballet dance beside and around his piano.

This theatre was built in 1913. In it's first season, on this stage, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe gave a performance of a new ballet by a young composer. His name was Igor Stravinsky. His ballet was called, Le Sacre du Printemps. The Rite of Spring. It ends with a young woman in a dance so frenzied that it kills her. The premiere scandalized the music and the dance world. So primal. So sensuous. That was in nineteen-thirteen. We once met a woman, Beatrice Wood, who was at that famous performance in this exquisite theater and she told us what it was like.

The theater is looking good in it's hundredth year. It is Art Deco. Elegant. Gold leaf, Lalique glass, marble, rose-color walls. Every seat on the first two levels is an individual armchair: wood framed with brass tacks and velvet upholstery.  We are sitting in them.

one hour later ....

It is lovely program. Mr. Lang Lang gets to play and play. Uninterrupted. One beautiful Chopin work after another while the dancers dance.  Only a few streets away from this theater, delicate and sickly Frederic Chopin lived, taught, composed and induced swoons from the elite who attended the salons where he played, where he dazzled. Tonight, too, has a salon ambiance. The interior of the theater is round. The chairs are typical of a living room. The lighting gives the room a warm glow. It feels intimate.

The sixteen dancers began and ended the show together on stage.  In between, there were solos, duos, trios and quartets. Typically, during a dance concert the musicians will follow the dancers. In this instance, with a celebrity piano soloist, the dancers were obliged at times to follow the piano when he'd get in a lickity split mood. In these days when dance companies cannot afford live musicians, the Houston Ballet must be under a lucky star.

We have been in Paris for one week. Everyday we walk in the Place des Vosges, a square with former royal apartments and a park in the center. The park has double rows of trees on the perimeter and in each corner is a two-tiered fountain and lawns. In the center of it all is a circle of chestnut trees surrounding a stone statue of King Louis the Thirteenth on his horse (which is anatomically correct).

The current statue was erected near 1830 as a replacement for a bronze statue installed in the sixteen-thirties. That statue was pulled down and destroyed during the French Revolution.

There is in the Place des Vosges an outstanding hotel, the Pavillon de la Reine. We stayed there twenty-five years ago, in our youth. We stopped in this week to have a look, rekindle a memory. If one wants to splurge it is a great place to stay. You'd never have to leave the square. There are restaurants, an art museum, the park to promenade in, and there is the residence of Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables.

Place des Vosges is an elite address. The apartments, no longer royal, are still palatial. On the ground floor are various restaurants. I peeked into one. It is called L'Ambroise. Sumptuous. Luxurious. Intimate. Living room like. Velvet, mahogany, brocade, gold leaf, every material the best of it's kind. I read the posted menu. Here are the general prices in US dollars: appetizers, $130; main course, $200; dessert, $110. And that is the Place des Vosges.

Wes and Marlow in Paris
31 October 2013