Important Parisian animals

Duck couple

A nice resting spot

The rabbit tasked with guarding the tomb of Napoleon

Notre-Dame, Natural History, Paris Mosque

Went to Notre-Dame right after it opened this morning, so caught some of a mass in progress: Wow, it’s just like in Conclave!

The Natural History museum is a bit of an odd place: one doesn’t, in daily life, get used to seeing quite that much aging taxidermy in one place. They also made a fake thunderstorm with the ceiling, for some reason. Same, shark.

Right across the street, the Paris Grand Mosque, modelled on al-Qarawiyyin in Fez:

At the Arènes de Lutèce, a Roman amphitheatre:

Père-Lachaise and Médée

First, pregamed Cherubini at le cimetière du Père-Lachaise:

Other highlight, my good buddy Joseph Fourier:

Apparently Pierre-Simon de Laplace was initially buried there, but was removed to Normandy, so I couldn’t get the full set {s ∈ C}.

Cherubini’s Médée in the afternoon, at the Opéra-Comique. The building is Opéra-Comique.v3, as v1 and v2 both burned down.

I saw Médée at the COC relatively recently, a production whose insanely opulent stage design had the effect of overpowering the relatively lightweight music so comprehensively that it made the attempt at horror seem laughable. This was the opposite; it had a small period orchestra, simple set and modern but not overly self-conscious costumes, and added to the spoken libretto with small extra speeches and bits of pantomime that had the effect of actually making the music seem serious and suitable for the topic.

Last Week Tonight with Alexander the Great

Last weekend I played La Mer and Fountains of Rome with the Ontario Philharmonic, which is in Oshawa; I’ve driven to that orchestra before, but I ended up carless for some services this time, so took the train as far as it goes, Hamilton to Oshawa:

A small miracle: on my way home from that concert, the Oshawa to Hamilton train by necessaity passing through a minor town in between where there was a concert apparently attended by a couple people at least… my train pulled out of Union station ten minutes before the reported end of the Taylor Swift set.

At a choral concert last month, I read in the program that one of the involved choirs’ next concert was Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with the Hamilton Philharmonic, one of my favourite pieces, which I got to play some of last year, but hadn’t expected to ever play for real. “I can’t believe they’re doing Alexander’s Feast in Hamilton and I’m not playing it,” I thought, distraught, and manifested an email hiring me for it the next day.

That concert was paired this week with a chamber music concert of Mozart’s Gran Partita, which fatigue-wise is not really what you want to have a dress rehearsal for right before a concert of Baroque continuo.

Two weekends of Baroque gigs

The setup for last night’s concert: you know the party’s really getting started when they bring out the third harpsichord. I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…

Which I won’t need next week, because next week’s Baroque show is BWV 149, a bassoon part that calls to mind Bach sitting at his desk thinking “gee, I sure hope someone completely reinvents this instrument in a hundred years or so.”

The Conductor Hole

The Burlington Performing Arts Centre is very committed to ensuring things to not fall in the orchestra pit. Which is appreciated, however, has the amusing effect that the conductor needs to stand on the podium located under the net while sticking their head out of this… conductor hole.

Playing La Bohème this week, calling to mind the words of my conducting teacher, Alain Cazes, at music school: “If you ever have the chance to listen to a Puccini opera with the score, you will freak out! I guarantee it! You will freak out!”

Indiana

With the fish that haven’t been stolen They told me to kiss the bricks but they weren’t kissing back Mr. Maxym’s bassoon in the process of being restored, Canadian dime possibly by Stéphane?

The real purpose of a trip to Indiana: a bassoon overhaul by Paul Nordby. My bassoon hasn’t been touched by anyone but me since before I got the Regina job, so I’d developed something of a “if something goes wrong it’s because you suck, learn to make a reed, idiot” approach to diagnosing issues. (A philosophy not scorned in the Nordby studio, it seems: several buttons strung up proclaimed the motto “Schmuck, go home and practice!”) However, now that the pads on the instrument actually seal and the corks/felt aren’t thirty seconds from falling right off, playing the right notes at the right time at the right pitch has never felt so possible!

heeeey

Metronome

Pst of basic (but somehow also, seemingly, top-secret) info from Bret Pimentel, Use your metronome most of the time, with some excellent quotes:

I know very few musicians who have the problem that their tempos are too steady. It’s important to practice the tempo nuances too, but if you can’t play the line in perfect time then you probably can’t do a convincing accelerando/ritardando.

In my experience, there are two kinds of musicians who think they don’t need a metronome. One is the top 1%, who have spent a lifetime developing world-class musical abilities. The other is beginning and intermediate musicians, who haven’t learned the value of metronome work because they haven’t done it enough. Don’t mistake a top-level musician’s musings for good beginner advice.

The gorge

This weekend I went to visit some relatives in Ithaca, NY. Ithaca was raked into deep gorges by the receding ice sheets twenty or thirty thousand years ago, leaving behind impressive valleys and waterfalls.

As we were eating lunch after a hike, there was a knock on the door. It was a colleague of my great-uncle Dick’s from Cornell, where he taught statistics before his retirement. The colleague was returning a package of documents that he had asked for to research a book on the history of the area, including my great-aunt Betsy’s contribution to the preservation of the natural areas owned by Cornell.

In the late Eighties, when walking through the gorge was her regular commute to work, Betsy noticed some stakes in the ground. She assumed they were going to be building a new walkway, and called Cornell, who owns the land, to learn more. What she learned was that it wasn’t a walkway or enhancement to the natural area: it was an eight-story supercomputer research centre that was going to plunge right into the gorge.

“I told her, Betsy, the stakes are already in the ground. There’s no way you can stop this building,” said Dick. But there was a way: the federal funding for the building required public consultation. The building was a rush job, and the public hearing hadn’t happened yet. All summer Betsy set up a table on the footbridge in the gorge with information about the land and the planned building. She gathered thousands of signatures on a petition and finally, after a public hearing which went long into the night with residents voicing their opposition, Cornell scrapped the plans for the building to extend into the gorge and redesigned it to stand back from the edge of the valley.

“What’s funny,” said Betsy, “Is that a lot of the people who were in favour of the building at first actually thanked me after. The people who worked in the building hadn’t gotten to be part of the planning of the original design, and they said later that the redesign was much better for them.”

“Before that,” said Dick, “She was Dick Darlington’s wife. After, I was Betsy Darlington’s husband.”