Did you see that quiz going around the other day? I think you all need to take it: Which is cuter?
I got most of them wrong. So did Chris, who became increasingly frustrated AND amused by the answers.
Test: (Please leave a comment with your answers, and yes, this is a test)
Part one: Tell me how you did on the quiz, and what your favorite answer was!
Part two: Which of the above pictures of my cat is cuter, and why?
What do you think of when you think of Mahler? Horns? Lots of people on stage? Chorus? Really long symphonies? That guy who sat near you at the concert texting the libretto to Mahler 2 to someone as it appeared on the screen…even though it is available online and in the score and the light from his phone was incredibly annoying, leading my friend to exclaim "that’s the last time I’m ever going to be friendly to anyone!"?
Violins?
(I really just wanted to post this picture because it’s funny how much taller I am than everybody else…including the other teacher in the picture with me. Also my neck looks broken.)
But. Mahler. The greatest of all composers. Except maybe Beethoven. Okay, don’t make me decide, that’s just not fair. I’ll take late Beethoven quartets and my Mahler symphonies and die a happy woman.
This weekend the Symphony is playing Mahler’s Symphony no. 3. I’m going Friday night, but the performance repeats on Saturday night if you are busy watching baseball or something on Friday. (I don’t watch my team, that just ruins things.)
I recommend you listen to (well, at least the beginning of) Mahler 3. It’s the longest symphony by Mahler, and is just wonderful and intense and covers all the emotions. As always for Mahler, I’d rather play than listen, but I’m happy to do both. I can’t wait.
Here’s the Wikipedia article about the piece: Mahler’s Third Symphony.
And the music itself. That one starts right away.
And this one is of Leonard Bernstein and has the entire symphony, so if you have an hour and a half to listen, go for it! I’m bothered by the fact that the first 45 seconds or so are silence, but be patient.
I’m listening to it right now!
I can only think of two times I’ve played Mahler 3…I might be forgetting something, but I think it’s just twice. Once with National Repertory Orchestra and once with the Charlotte Symphony. I’ve definitely heard the Cleveland Orchestra play it, and I feel like there is probably another performance in there somewhere, but I can’t remember everything!
Since I’m talking about orchestras and music, now is a good time to share some links I’ve read recently. You may be aware that various orchestras are running into financial difficulties and many players are being asked to make concessions. Classical music, and indeed, the arts, are so often the first thing cut when people have money issues. I’m lucky that my parents considered music lessons to be of the utmost important when we were growing up—even though money was tight, there was always room for lessons. Without them, where would I be today? I can attribute most of my success and happiness in life to my music lessons. Sadly most people do not feel this way.
A friend quoted the National Endowment for the Arts’ motto recently: "A great nation deserves great art." I guess it depends on whether or not you consider the US to be a great nation. I certainly do.
It’s important to remember that for the vast majority of American orchestral players, a spot in an orchestra does not bring a six-figure salary, or even, in many cases, a living wage. (from the Philadelphia Inquirer)
How to turn things around (one man’s opinion)
Does skill justify their pay? (From Minnesota Public Radio)
The MLB sides with the Atlanta Symphony Musicians– "the Players ARE the Game" (sadly the orchestra had to take a crappy settlement, cut their salaries, cut their weeks and their players, while the management remains bloated and overpaid…)
Many boards seem to think that musicians are easily replaceable… if this is the case why do so many positions go unfilled?
Oh, and to make things end on a happy note (though with Mahler looming that hardly seems necessary!)–
The St Louis Symphony just had its best year in a decade (from the Riverfront Times)
We classical musicians are constantly reinventing ourselves and battling against people who don’t see the difference between a teacher or performer with advanced degrees and a high school student…I could go on for days on a soapbox about that…the best way to teach people to tell the difference is to just continue to perform and teach at a very high level. The further along my students get the more they stop simply impressed by someone playing the violin and start being impressed by HOW someone plays the violin…the difference between a beginner and Itzhak Perlman for instance.
Oh and here’s Perlman on the Colbert Report, speaking of ;) This delighted me to no end—a famous classical musician on a popular show. FANTASTIC! And great news for violin, right? At least for every few steps back we take a few steps forward.
Weekend update…I had a very busy but fun weekend. Friday night Chris and I were going to cook but we got lazy and went to Frazer’s instead. We hadn’t been there in awhile and it is always good. I had Duck confit (one of the specials—Frazer’s is ALL about specials) which reminded me of France (le sigh.) Oh and this tasty looking salad.
It was a Pear Endive Salad. Very delicious! Why did I take a picture of my salad but not the duck? I guess that’s just how I roll.
Saturday was a full day of teaching (makeup lessons and a class) followed by a wedding. After that I had plans with Melissa to go to Farmhaus Restaurant. I had wanted to go for awhile but hadn’t found a good time. According to the website they don’t take reservations for less than four people so we had to just walk in. Luckily we were able to get two seats at the bar (very tiny). We split everything except dessert and drinks. (You all know I don’t share my drinks.)
The menu changes daily—you can see the date in the corner.
Cotechino. The greens were delicious too—maybe that’s a sign I need to eat more vegetables? Or, more likely, they were drenched in animal fat and thusly, delicious.
Crostini—these I think were my favorites!
Nachos—yeah I got fancier with this picture.
I tried the Hipster Princess and Scratches Lemonade. It seemed that Scratches was the bartender.
This was a peanut butter mousse with chocolate around it. It was very good, but Melissa’s pecan pie with root beer ice cream was better. Oh well.
Sunday I had more teaching followed by a concert at First Presbyterian of Kirkwood.
Amazing stained glass window back drop. I guess the picture is a little blurry, huh? I’ll try to take a better one next time I’m in there! The concert went well. Finally Sunday evening I just relaxed at home with Chris. I bet you were worried 😉
Oh and Monday night was Pho Grand:
SO yummy!
Tried any good restaurants lately?
I know it’s been a little while, but I wanted to finish my Paris trip recaps.
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6:1 and Day 6:2 if you’ve missed the previous posts.
I was sad for our last day in Paris. We decided to do a few different things but not pack the day too full so we’d have time to relax at the end of the day. We decided to go to the Musee Jacquemart-Andre based on a friend’s recommendation and then to do the guidebook’s Montmartre Walking Tour which included the Sacre Coeur Basilica AND the Museum of Erotic Art (We thought it would be a nice contrast.)
First we had to make a few stops, including at the Pharmacie because I had a slight cold and needed some medicine. I did online research about how to tell the pharmacist I had a cold, but luckily she spoke English. (In France, you don’t just buy the medicine, they ask about your symptoms and your allergies and give you what you need.)
The day was going to have a variety of metro rides and connections. I had written all the directions out on a paper, and we were “prepared” for a bit of trouble navigating the streets, as I’d been having trouble all week.
This museum is a private house that belonged to a couple who were avid art collectors in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. At times their yearly budget for art exceeded that of the Louvre! The phrase “theirs was a marriage of reason” was used at one point. What do you think that means?
We used the audio tour as recommended and it was very interesting. No photography was allowed inside the house, but it was an amazing mansion with great art, and possibly our favorite museum. It isn’t covered by the museum pass, which was fine because ours had run out.
After the tour we took the metro up north of the city to Montmartre. Well, to the north part of the city that is. We had our first metro problem—we ran to catch the train and after we just barely made it on we realized we were on the wrong train. No big deal though, we just got off a little later and transferred to another one. (Generally I found the metro system amazingly eager to navigate. Europe. Rocks.)
The Basilica is on top of one of Paris’s only hills (which really makes me want to run the Paris Marathon—imagine how flat it must be in comparison—who wants to sponsor me for this?) and so was naturally quite crowded. It’s in a slightly more seedy area of town than we had experienced so far on our trip, but it wasn’t bad, and it was jam packed with tourists. (Weird combo: seedy yet really touristy—it’s like the Myrtle Beach of Paris?)
You can climb up a ton of stairs or take the funicular up. I was sick and was pretty tired and out of breath so I insisted on the funicular—you know ordinarily I’d have been running up and down the stairs. The funicular cost a metro ticket but I felt was worth it under the circumstances.
I think Chris was tired of having his picture taken.
Anyway, after we rode up the hill we were starving and needed to seek out lunch.
Quite the view!
I’m a little annoyed that THIS was the only picture of me in view of this view. I guess Chris was tired of taking pictures of me by this point too…or simply tired of me? 😉
We found a little cute Italian place nearby. We were a bit apprehensive, but it ended up being GREAT.
Delicious meat and cheese plate, delicious pizza. We never got used to how much delicious cheese you get on a cheese plate in France! And for less than cheese plates in the US.
Then it was back to sightseeing.
There was a violin player outside the Basilica. He was a gypsy fiddler and sounded pretty decent.
Quite the view of Paris!
We ran into a couple of friends of ours outside the Basilica after we toured it. Paris is, seemingly, as small of a world as St Louis is!
After chatting a bit we continued on the Montmartre Walk. Now. I don’t know if it was the fact that I was sick or what, but I couldn’t follow the directions and kept getting lost. Finally we gave up and missed several steps and then caught back up, but basically, I have no idea what happened…I’m guessing because, in addition to the regular challenge of Paris streets, we had to contend with steep hills?
My purple pants. Chris was being silly and trying to take pictures of my butt, I think 😉
Cool Paris street view…
We loved the rounded buildings.
We managed to get back on track with the tour in order to see Van Gogh’s old house.
And we saw the Moulin Rouge. Lots of tourists there—this is basically the red light district. And by basically I mean, this is the red light district of Paris.
We decided to go to the Museum of Erotic Art to end our tour. I won’t share my pictures from there, but it was a very interesting (not family friendly!) place. Oh, and I slipped down the marble steps—my feet flew out from under me and I landed on the ground about 4 to 6 steps down. Chris was concerned but he said it was actually quite funny, because I just sighed and said “REALLY?” I remember the pain but mainly I remember being annoyed that instead of slipping I had actually really fallen and made a fool of myself…at the “porn museum” (take that, search engines) no less. Hence, my “really?” I was in shock. Luckily I wasn’t seriously injured—I had been holding on to the railing so I didn’t lose control too much. It was more my pride that was injured, and my hand got a little bruised and my legs and butt were sore the next day.
Anyway, after that I was ready to get out of there (luckily we were basically done) and get back to a nicer part of town. We hopped back on the metro and headed to our neck of the woods for our last evening.
We had a few happy hour drinks before deciding on dinner. We ended up at a restaurant on the Place du Marche Ste. Catherine called “La Marche.”
We liked the menus. We ordered a bottle of red wine and tried to decipher the prix fixe menu.
It was not easy to do, and in fact, I ordered parts of my meal not sure at all what I was going to get. I was feeling adventurous though, and I’m really not a picky eater, so it worked out.
Our meal was okay. I guess we should have gone to a more expensive place (I didn’t think every night needed to be a $$$ meal but I think Chris thought I was being cheap on occasion!) but it was decent, and the wine (as always) was nice, and the ambience was really pleasant. I thought it was a wonderful evening and a great ending to our week.
Night from our apartment window.
I’ll do one more wrap up/travel post 🙂 in case you wanted more! If you have any Paris related questions, please ask!
One of my students likes to tease me about my Toms shoes. Mainly because she doesn’t think I need comfortable shoes because I just sit there during the lessons. She wishes I would wear my cow shoes more often. The other day I was telling her about my new Toms which are fuzzy on the inside and she thought that was really ridiculous. Anyway, I explained to her that I was totally going to wear my cow shoes for her, but I wanted to wear my red jeans, and the cow shoes have pink in them…and then I realized we were both wearing red jeans. That’s right. I have the style of a 7th grader. (I think she’s in 7th grade. Maybe it’s 8th grade. Apologies if she or her mother is reading this and I’m wrong!)
That’s right. I’m awesome :) Or at least my students are!
Okay, this is totally one of those "oh isn’t her life hard moments" but I’m just going to whine…I have to work all day today and into the weekend…the issue is all the darn lessons I have to make up from my Paris trip (hence, isn’t her life hard), so I’m teaching several hours each day in addition to weddings and other gigs. This really cuts into my social life.
I decided to make Wed and Thursday as "weekend-like" as possible, since those days I didn’t get started teaching until later in the day. That meant I did a lot of sitting around, watching tv, reading stuff on the internet, and doing laundry.
Anyway, really none of this is interesting to you (or me, really.) It’s been a crappy week and the weekend isn’t going to be much better.
I did have a fun trip to Target yesterday—I picked up the new JK Rowling book. I’ve started reading it, and so far I am really enjoying it. Of course that’s to be expected because firstly, Rowling is a wonderful writer, and secondly, I love British fiction. It’s dark, it’s REAL, and it’s nothing like HP except that it’s well written and has good character development. So far, so good.
It was cooler and overcast yesterday so I figured I’d jump on the "is it Fall" bandwagon. I also got some Thanksgiving decorations from the One Spot—we are hosting this year.
I’m not entirely sure we can handle a candy bowl but I thought it would be an interesting experiment.
I wanted to get under the blanket and read but the cat had other ideas for the blanket.
Just like she has other ideas for my lap than the computer. It’s not easy to blog with a large feline in your lap.
While I was teaching…silly Barack, always asking for money. He acts like he’s inviting me to dinner, but then he really just wants money. (Oh, and of course Leslie keeps texting, but not about money. She’s getting married soon and there are a lot of details to discuss…I imagine this texting/calling thing will continue until October 21 and then I’ll never hear from her again…)
Make me jealous: what fun things are you doing this weekend?