It's been a while! I have been extremely busy in the last two weeks, traveling, writing papers, seeing concerts, etc. Here is the blog for the last two weeks (or as much as I can get to right now).
Monday
Today was a mostly uneventful day, I mostly worked on homework and ran a few errands. I went to choir rehearsal at night, where we are now working on the Mozart Requiem! I won't be there for the concert, but I can still keep coming to the rehearsals until I leave.
Tuesday
Today, for Music History class, we went to the Handel House museum. It is the house that Handel lived in when he was in London, though it doesn't have the furnishings that it would have when he lived there. It was neat to be in the space and see replications of what it would have looked like though.
In the evening, we went to hear a talk by the theater designer Allison Chitty on her process. It was very interesting to hear her talk about the details of her job, although much of it was over my head. After that, Jon and I went to see "The Habit of Art", a play within a play about the relationship between Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden. It was a quirky, funny play, with lots of banter between the actors and stage manager. I really liked it.
Wednesday
Today, we learned about the Vienna Philharmonic, "The Rite of Spring", and Anton Bruckner, and then went to see the Vienna Philharmonic in the evening! They were really awesome; I loved "The Rite of Spring", and they had a really interesting quality about them. They also played two of Brahms' Hungarian Dances as an encore, which was very fun.
Thursday
Today, I went to a bad concert! I know, it doesn't happen much, but it happened. The LSO was doing Rhapsody in Blue with an American Conductor. It was sloppy, obnoxious, even sometimes out of tune. The two pianists made up ridiculous embellishments that made it really difficult to hear the piece, and the conductor was swaggering around the stage, dancing like he owned the place! It was absolutely ridiculous.
Friday
I worked on my essay for British Culture class during the day today, and also went to the National Portrait Gallery. The Gallery was very interesting; it is weird to see a set of paintings that are all of famous people. The styles were so scattered, which was in its own right intriguing. The room that focused on imperialism, with romantic portraits of snooty British people in the various states of invading a country, made me pretty uncomfortable. It was good to see portraits of a lot of writers and musicians though!
In the evening, I went and saw Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" at the Coliseum. It was put on by the English National Opera, which meant that all of the singing was in English. It was set in an American diner in the 1950’s and the plot revolves around a sort of Music Man-esque traveling salesman who comes in with a magic elixir to sell to the rural folks at the diner.
The catch is, at the beginning of the play, a stage manager came out to make announcements, and said “I have some bad news. The singer who is playing Nemorino (the main male character) is ill. But that’s not the worst of it. The understudy for the role is also ill. After a lot of discussion, we decided that it would be better to bring in a singer who knows the words in Italian rather than have someone sight-read the English words with music on stage”.
So basically, what happened, was the entire opera was in English except for the main character, who was singing in Italian. It made the already hilarious play even funnier! There were many interactions between the main character and others where they would be speaking to each other in different languages, which was just a bizarre situation to witness. Moreover, the salesman knew the Italian words also, so he sang in Italian for his duets with Nemorino, and would also throw in random Italian words into his singing (example: “Che muerte, Uncle Joe”). Nemorino also said the words “20 bucks” one time, which was a hilarious juxtaposition of the folksy translation the rest of the characters were singing on his beautiful Italian lyrics.
Saturday
Today, we rode up on a bus to Stratford upon Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. We toured around the home he grew up in, which was a small cottage, as well as other homes related to him and his family. I got curry for dinner at a pub, and then we saw King Lear put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was good, although I was not a fan of the actor who played Lear. It was 3.5 hours long, and we didn't get back to London until 1:00 in the morning!
Sunday
Today, I went on an exciting thing called "Ethan and Emily's Excellent Adventure". Basically, Emily and I went around to a bunch of the really touristy famous places around London and took pictures in front of them for our blog (http://blogs.lclark.edu/england2010/). It was a fun day, and we walked basically all of the way across western London! At night, I went to see John Adams conduct the LSO, which was very exciting. He was a very good conductor, and the piece he conducted (the Dr. Atomic Symphony) was good, but not great.
Monday
Today was another average Monday. I went over to my internship and worked all day, mostly preparing spreadsheets and word documents for this and that, and then picking out quotes from reviews of the choir. Then, choir rehearsal in the evening. Pretty standard.
Cheers,
Ethan
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