Vienna: Wednesday, 8 May 2019

Wednesday, 8 May 2019
We are seated outdoors under cover of an awning with heat lamps. It is still daylight. Across the street is the Vienna Konzert Haus. Another block away is the Musikverein, the home of the Vienna Philharmonic and the room where they were led by Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Within a radius of six blocks are the apartments of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. We are in one of the few "ground zeroes" for classical music, where it's creators masterminded our musical equivalents of the Mona Lisa.  But just now, before the week of concert going begins, we are eating traditional Austrian food: beef gulyas, kartoffel (potatoes), herring, strudel and grüner veltliner (dry white wine) and beer (which has an aroma of hops flowers).

We left home Tuesday and arrived today, Wednesday. Our flight was near eleven hours. Do not feel sorry for us. We did not rough it. It was not cramped. It was not noisy. We were in spacious seats. Large electronic easy-chairs. They fully reclined into flat beds.  If one must endure a long flight, it is best to be on the intimate and cozy second floor of a 747. We slept some, but not more than a few hours.  The time "flew" by.

On arrival, we were met at the Vienna airport by a car. Twenty minutes later we arrived at the Hotel Imperial. We have stayed there once before. Then as now, our windows look across to the hallowed Musikverein concert hall. Last time our room was beautiful, spacious and comfortable in every way. This time it is the same, but double as our room is a one-bedroom suite. The walls are upholstered in blue brocade fabric. The blue, satin, floor-to-ceiling drapes hang twenty feet. Our ceilings are that tall. They have to be that tall to accommodate the large crystal chandeliers.

After a walk after dinner, there will be a hot bubble bath, followed by a good long sleep.

Wes and Marlow
Vienna, 8 May 2019



Casey in flight.


Casey in the Elizabeth Suite, Hotel Imperial, Vienna


When we desire a refreshment, we find it in the hotel bar.

Vienna: Anne-Sophie Mutter; 9 May 2019

We picked Vienna, for this trip, in part for the grand hotel availability and also because it is feet away from the Musikverein concert hall which is a hive of outstanding classical music events.

When I was a boy of ten I heard live and up close a violin. It was played in a small elementary school auditorium. The player was a girl two years older than me. I loved the sound from the first note. A year later, I lived across the street from a public library. After I discovered they had a listening section where I could enjoy their classical recordings through their headphones, I spent as much of my free time there. I could tell you the exact pieces I listened to. I listened to them over and over. Each time, I noticed more details. Eventually, they became my agreeable friends. They brought enormous comfort, pleasure and satisfaction.  Classical music still does that for me.

Our first concert was the violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter. The first time I hear her, thirty years ago, was on a car radio. I was rapt and enthralled enough that I pulled over and parked the car to be able to focus entirely on her. It was a thrill to hear her here.

The Musikverein was built in 1870. Vienna had an Emperor, Franz Joseph. A music club, formed in 1812, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, asked him for permission to acquire land and funds. 1870 was the year in which the Emperor decided to pull down the medieval fortified wall that had encircled old Vienna for 500 years. He was aware of what urban renewal had recently done for Paris and Barcelona when the ancient crooked narrow streets were replaced with straight wide boulevards.  The medieval wall came down. In it's place was the elegant "Ringstrasse," ring road. Extra wide. With rows of trees. It became the place to be. The elite, the wealthy, the aristocrats races to build palaces their. Our hotel, the Imperial is one of those buildings. And the Musikverein, next door, is another.

The Musikverein creates an immediate impression. You cannot enter the grand hall and remain calm. It is splendid and gold leafed and hung with crystal chandeliers. Your eyes never rest, there is so much to see and it is all so gold. The architect spent eight years in Athens. If you have been to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon the you know the basis for the Musikverein's design aesthetic. Today, the Parthenon is a unadorned structure with many missing parts. In it's day, it was heavy laden inside and out with statues and brilliant surfaces. It's inner sanctum was a temple, a shrine, a sacred place. That describes the Musikverein's interior. It is quite over the top, but it's splendor impresses that you are in a special place.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is 56 years old, slender and blond. She always wears a gown without arms or straps. The wood of her Stradivarius rests directly on her bare shoulder. She is not a showman, which is to say, she does not smile, nor does she put on an extrovert show of movement for effect. Playing a violin concerto, particularly at her superior level, is a highly precise, athletic, technical feat. You could say, it is walking a tight rope without a net. I am not bothered, nor disappointed by her serious demeanor.

She was accompanied, in her Mozart program, by the Kammerorchester Wien-Berlin, which is an elite small group of players drawn from the Vienna Philharmonic and from the Berlin Philharmonic. The Kammerorchester is what they do in their time off.

The orchestra played a few pieces alone then were joined by soloist. They played Mozart's first symphony. He wrote it when he was eight years old. Mozart was a local composer in his day in Vienna. (So were Beethoven and Mahler and Schubert and Korngold.) Anne Sophie played Mozart's second and fifth violin concertos.

Her sound is easy on the ear. Often, she will play at whisper, so softly you could wonder if she would be heard by the back rows. But her touch, her way of pulling the bow across the string coupled with her magnificent Stradivari violin, (she owns two,) ensures her sound floats like a ray of golden light into every ear in every seat. After her last notes, the audience, which in Vienna, to me, seems reserved and a bit unsmiling, loved her. The applause would not stop. And finally she gave us her own smile.

An hour before the concert, I sat in our windowsill, looking across the road at the artist's entrance for the Musikverein, when she arrived. She was in casual clothes, maybe jeans. She had two men with her. One carried her garment bag. The other had her pair of small dogs. She gave them kisses then went inside to play.

Marlow and Wes
Vienna, 9 May 2019


Two of our concerts.


A handsome concert goer.


A Stradivari and a smile.


This is a photo from the Musikverein website. In person, the gold leaf, on every surface, shimmers and gleems.

Vienna: Fairy Tale Evening: 13 May 2019

Today, Monday, we woke up, dressed and went down to breakfast. I had a petite omelette customized with mushrooms, gruyere cheese and sprinkled with freshly snipped fragrant chives. A few tables away was a familiar face. Our concert tonight featured Cecilia Bartoli. And there she was with her husband and her mamma. She travels with her mamma.  Which I think is achingly sweet. There is a video, on YouTube, in which Renata Tebaldi describes her life. She never married. Never had children. Because her voice was her life. She felt an obligation to serve her voice to the exclusion of more traditional desires. And she travelled the world with her mamma. Mamma Giuseppina was her name. In the interview she tells of a time in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera. Her mamma became ill, seriously ill. Renata was distraught. She did not want to perform. She said later, when "mamma died, I did not ever want to sing again."  When I saw Cecilia Bartoli with her mamma, I thought it sweet and special beyond words.

We knew Bartoli was in our hotel. Our dear friend in her orchestra had told us. He encouraged us to speak with her. So I did.

I simply wanted to pay humble respects to one who excels in her field. She was kind, receptive, warm and both she and mamma extended their hand for a gentle shake. She told me she was pleased with the programming: all Vivaldi. Songs interspersed with movements from the Four Seasons violin concertos.  She hoped we would like it.

The concert is now over. It was in the golden grand hall of the Musikverein. We sat on the stage behind the four violas; close enough to take a few steps and turn their pages, which we did not do. The concert was entirely sold out which meant 1,700 people seated and another 300 people standing. Sitting on the stage is not ideal for a perfect blend of sound, but it is an outstanding visceral experience. We were in the center of the action. It was thrilling.  The concert ran two hours and forty-five minutes with one intermission. Each half played as a continuous stream of movements. Every piece segued into the next.

Cecilia Bartoli is a charming stage presence. She sings directly to the audience. She looks at them. At times she walked the aisles singing to them. From the stage, we looked directly, fifty feet away into the eyes of her mamma in the twelfth row. I got the sense she loves to sing for her mamma. Before too long, it seemed the audience's pleasure evolved into affection. By the end, it was a love fest. And Bartoli was ready to reward us. She had encores, lots of encores. One encore involved a primitive trumpet. He played some wild flourish. Then she matched it. The one upmanship went on and evolved into Gershwin's Summertime, then somehow got back to Vivaldi.

The encores occupied thirty minutes. At the end, we found our friend from the orchestra. We followed him through corridors and up stairs to a reception hosted by the Monaco Consulate. The room was smallish. Filled with the twenty five musicians, a handful of diplomats and administrators and us, the party crashers. Wes sipped wine while the Ambassador to Monaco complimented him on his exceptional performance. He accepted her compliments. After a while, several glasses of champagne, mini-apple-strudels, and chocolates in the shape of the crown of the Prince of Monaco, Cecilia Bartoli entered. Applause. She was brought to the front of the room. She saw me, her eyes widened, she smiled, and asked me if I liked the programming she described at breakfast. I thought, gosh, she has a good memory. She just sang a two and a half hour program for two thousand people and she remembers me from breakfast? Perhaps that is what makes her special. Apart from the exceptional talent and accomplishment, she has a gift to connect with people.

Before we left, I introduced myself to the viola players. I was afraid I would be shy and clam up. They were warm, open, friendly and I was grateful to get acquainted. It was an international group of musicians. One was from Amsterdam, another from Helsinki, and Italy and France and Switzerland. I watched them switch languages effortlessly from English to Italian to French to German. At the end of the reception, I said to Lorenzo, "you take us nice places." And at the end of the evening, back in our elegant Imperial Hotel suite, I said to Wesley, "you take me nice places." What an understatement.

Marlow and Wes
Vienna: 13 Monday 2019
Cecilia Bartoli Concer