alors, and we go...

recent events. in no certain order of importance.

last tuesday i went to a free flute and piano recital at the sorbonne. the pianist is in my machaut class. she played half-stick and drowned out the schumann violin sonata (transcribed for flute) as well as the 4th movement of the prokofiev sonata. tragic. the flutist was clean though. didn't love her tone, but these french flutists play cleanly, consistently.

haircut wasn't half bad. i got it done right by st paul metro, a hop skip from the wine bar/café meredith and i found a few weeks ago - 5 euro for a crêpe and a café crème. the cut is hipsterish (gasp!)

thursday i heard my flute teacher (cat cantin, of the paris opéra) play the complete mozart quartets on a grenadilla wood boehm system flute at st germain-des-près cathedral. the wood was all the better to match the strings in a very wishy-washy acoustic space. i dined after.

nadia, a former exchange student with the cheminal family, was visiting for a few days hoping that she could get a visa straightened out for her turkish boyfriend that she met at the london school of economics. she is a few years younger than claire, and speaks very good french (and apparently spanish as well).

cyrille leaves for london tonight by eurostar for his "stage," which i learned from darcy means basically anything that had any duration of time. in his case, it's a 6 month internship with dannon yogurt. he wants to learn english - and what better way than by immersion?

friday i wandered around les halles and found the mediathèque musicale, which is sweet! i got my free library card - it extends to scores and books, not to cds and dvds - and took out a score of bach inventions, only to find on my return to 18 blvd st-germain that the piano is woefully out of tune. d'hommage. i'll dream about the inventions, i suppose...

yesterday i went to the marmottan museum with bevin morrissey, a fellow cupa student who hearts monet, to see some estampes japonais from monet's collection, as well as some of his lesser seen paintings, some abstract ponts from late in his life (when his eyesight was decreasing), as well as a few renoir portraits of he and his wife. i then hung around the 16th with bevin, had a coffee at a nice relatively quiet café before taking a brief RER ride to blvd président kennedy to maison radio france for my next adès adventure.

this time it was mostly gerald barry's "triumph of truth and deceit" (opera in two short acts, for 2 countertenors, tenor, baritone and bass). i found the bass and one of the countertenors most compelling. it was unstaged, and the birmingham contemporary ensemble was unspeakably tight. the trumpet players and clarinetists in particular rocked the house. percussion wasn't bad either. i sat next to this extremely gentle older french man who struggled with stairs and didn't particularly favor barry's piece. he found it too repetitive. i would agree on some level, but i also thought it extremely compelling, especially in his use of vocal contour to highlight the text.

for the two concerts that i've seen there, the composers have all been in attendance. i think to play in adès' présence, in the maison de radio france, is a high honor. and all the concerts are free!

this morning, after a brief night's sleep, i walked out (rainy, grey, kinda cold) to chatalet to meet maggie eisenman and her husband at the théâtre for an 11 am recital given by joshua bell (violin) and jeremy denk (piano). the program was: mozart sonata 24 k 304, faure sonata 1 op 13, prokofiev 5 mélodies op 35 bis, and he added rach vocalise, sarasate introduction and tarantella, and as an encore a transcription of a tchaikovsky song. 1h30, beautifully executed, no surprises. denk was SUPERB, in caps because i had never heard of him and was surprised they chose full stick...but this man can play so cleanly, so quietly, and the prokofiev was spot on. mozart too, just beautiful.

please tell me what you think of this blog, i am a newbie, and i have really no idea what the hell i'm doing. it's just me rambling for the benefit of all me obies across the atlantic.