There's no pool at home

but it's still nice to be here. Hello, Basel. I'm back from Aix, my visiting friends are on their way to Paris, and I've got two weeks of completely unscheduled time to faff away. Thought it might be nice to faff some pictures up onto the interwebs. After debating the virtues of chronology, I've decided to throw order out the window and go for a random selection.

Starting here with a little video I took of some of the trees in the park behind the Grand Saint-Jean in Aix. Though you can mostly hear the sound of the camera's inner workings, the trees made a particular sound, I'm sure you can imagine it, of all their leaves clattering together in the whooshing wind. You could hear it during the performance sometimes. Oh yeah, the performances! I haven't forgotten, since the music is still in my head nearly constantly, but it's growing fainter. There's a video online where you can watch the whole opera, and see my bass scroll in silhouette against the bright stage a few times. It's only an hour and a half, maybe you could watch it on a lazy evening indoors? It'll be online til sometime in early October. 100 days from the original performance, July 17. And, here's the link.

Since the last blog post, I saw that Shostakovitch opera, The Nose, it was crazy and interesting - Shostakovitch was 22 when he wrote it, and it's clearly his work, and also loud and difficult. There aren't so many moments of rest in the production, and the sets, designed in part by Wm Kentridge, reflected the action. Sometimes a wall, tall as the entire stage, would move forward or back, would open up with doors or windows in which the action would happen, would disappear. I brought with me the libretto on an iphone and followed it for the whole performance, which really helped; otherwise the constant stream of conversational and theatrical Russian (why aren't there repeats and da capo arias, like in Baroque opera??), clarified by French supertitles, would have pretty much left me in the dark.

An orchestra from Lyon was down there in the pit. They did a good job. I saw one other performance during the festival, a dramatic staging of my favorite book, Austerlitz, by WG Sebald. It was all in French with no supertitles, but having anticipated that I read the book again before going to see it. The staging was simple, there was only one actor, and he half acted, half spoke text directly from the book. In the back of the stage was a contemporary music group, Ensemble Ictus, based in Belgium, made up of clarinet, prepared piano, flute, trombone, viola and cello. They were playing music composed for the production, and it was mostly a succession of rhythmic chords in clusters. The whole production exuded anxiety. There is anxiety in the book, it's essentially the story of a man discovering his identity and uncovering the fate of his parents, both of whom were forced to leave their homes during the war and ultimately perished in concentration camps, but the book is so much more than that story: it's a meditation on architecture, moths, libraries, human nature. Discovery and wonder. The production did have a spare and architecturally evocative set, and it used images from the book and images from the director, who had followed the same path of the protagonist in the book, and taken his own photographs; these were all well done. But for anyone who hadn't read the book and didn't speak French, I think it was mostly an opportunity to space out and think about things. Way to hang in there, Andrew. Props to Andrew also for his zen-like patience during the several performances of Acis & Galatea for which we couldn't get him a ticket, spent sitting backstage while singers darted in and out and the music was piped in on tinny speakers.

We did do some things aside from opera performances while Andrew was in Aix, of course. There was plenty of obligatory eating of beautiful farmer's market food and poolside relaxing,

and we also took advantage of my one day off to rent a car and drive all around the area. We looked at the sea from the top of a cliff, while lunching on goat cheese spread on fruit bread and sweet ripe apricots and nectarines. We drove north in the direction of Gap and looked at a river, and an abandoned chapel. We wandered around the "ancient" part of a town in Provence in which every charming old building, including something that looked like a castle and the city hall, had been converted into residential units, either by adding a block of mailboxes outside or by building a mismatched structure (apartments, a corner store, nothing classy or matching) directly into the side of the hill or the old brick. There were TV antennae attached to the battlements of an ancient stone tower, and xmas lights strung around the oldest chapel in the city. We kept walking around thinking, oh, here, maybe now we've found the historical center! and instead of Good King René's castle, we'd find laundry strung between houses and deserted streets. Weird. I'm hoping my understanding of the situation there will change or develop though I'm not sure how I'd add more information to my confusingly incomplete picture. Wait and see, I guess.

Lest it seem I only swam in the pool while 30 km from the Southern coast of France, here are a couple shots from a delightful day spent with my housemates and one of the singers on an island called Frioul, a short ferry ride away from Marseille, swimming and floating in the clear, salty water.

Oh, good weather, aren't you grand. (Just looked up and out the window at the pokey, puffy gray things in the sky out there.) Summer continues anyway. I spent the last three days with friends in town from NYC, we climbed an Alp (more on that later), and in about two weeks I'll travel to Venice to do 11 days of printmaking. Summers are nice, it's great to have a job with a distinct season. Will this change? Let's hope not.

festival time

Hi from France - I'm in Aix-en-Provence for the month, playing at one of the world's largest opera festivals. My production is of Handel's most popular opera, Acis and Galatea, written on a pastoral, mythological theme. Acis is a shepherd, Galatea a nymph. They've seen one another before the opera begins and spend the first few arias talking about their love, and trying to find each other. They're reunited, and sing a couple lovey-dovey arias - "Love in her eyes sits playing", and "Happy we". But alas, "no joy shall last" - Polyphemus the Cyclops sees Galatea and falls in love with her ("O ruddier than the cherry, O sweeter than the berry"), then pursues her. Acis stands up to the monster and is killed when Polyphemus hits him on the head with a rock. Galatea is heartbroken, but uses her powers to give her lover immortal life, as a spring - the source of a river. (Here is a link to the libretto.)

The venue is in the middle of the countryside, at the site of a derelict stone house; the stage is attached to the side of the building, and is in the open air. Behind the stage is a big field, with several disused ponds and stands of trees. This is a shot of the stage from the field. Below, a terrible picture of Galatea on stage, with dusk and trees in the background:

 

looking past the side of the stage, to the field; and

 

a view of the continuo section, with the stage above/behind them.

It gets quite cold at night here, and can be very windy, so many layers of clothes are necessary. More layers even than I brought, so sometime this week I'll do some searching for one more long-sleeve black thing for the concerts. If I can't find anything I may end up wearing my black raincoat during performances.

The music is really, really nice. It's clear why the opera has remained popular for the past (nearly) 300 years. Handel was born in 1685, the same year as Bach, also in Germany, and after many years of schooling, traveling, and working in many different places in Europe, he settled in England, and in fact became a naturalized English citizen. That's why so many of his pieces are in English - this opera, and of course works like the Messiah. The longer I live in Europe, and work and travel throughout the continent, I understand how old this tradition is, and how many peripatetic musicians there have been throughout the centuries. In many ways I think it must be at least similar now to how it was in Handel's time, in that you follow the work through the different countries, and meet an international crowd of musicians doing the same thing. It's nice, actually, to find myself inside that tradition.

Wretched lovers, view from the pit.

Aix-en-Provence is a charming town around 30 km from the sea. Marseille is the closest big town. It has a well-preserved old center, and while many of the shops are geared towards tourists, it seems overall to be focused on pleasant summer living. Cafés in squares, plane trees, restaurants everywhere. A big Saturday market, with perfect ripe nectarines, fresh goat cheese, gorgeous olives. Beautiful bread. Did I mention that it's nice here? I'm staying with five other members of the orchestra in a house just outside the city center, it's got a pool (!) and plenty of space to lounge around. With the big backyard and stone floors it feels like some kind of villa. In the backyard we've got a fig tree (nearly ripe), olive trees, a pomegranate bush, lavender, rosemary, and some small palms. The only downside I've found so far are the hordes of mosquitoes waiting to bite me any time I let down my guard - the first night I got bitten on my eyelid, and had to spend the first rehearsal (Hi everyone, I'm Megan, don't mind my half-closed eye) squinting at the music and trying not to scratch my face. Little jerks. I've bought a fan, though, and started wearing bug spray to bed, and that's helped.

Everyone is really nice. The orchestra is an extremely friendly bunch of people, I'm among the oldest but not out of place. I think the youngest is 21. The singers, too - occasionally charmingly obnoxious, but very very nice. Yesterday we had a wildly successful party at the house and most of the people from our production came over. Nothing like a pool and a bunch of bottles of rosé to make a good party. By the end we were dancing in the living room to French radio.

I'm looking forward to the beginning of the productions. The rehearsal schedule has been really long and taxing; on Saturday, and also today, we rehearse at the outdoor venue until 12:30 AM. Goodness me, I'm not used to this schedule. The opera is only an hour and a half long, so once the run begins we'll be done at 11 every night. Fortunately we rarely have anything during the day, so it's possible to sleep as much as we need. There are a number of other interesting operas up this week, and we have the chance to attend dress rehearsals for free. I'm planning on going to see The Nose, an opera by Shostakovich, based on a Gogol story, directed by the South African artist William Kentridge, who also helped with set design and created videos to accompany the production. (Link to a NY Times article about it.)

Well. This post seems to be going on forever. I'll add a few more pics and leave it at that.

 

summer things

Last summer was a Salad Summer. This one, so far, is a Pizza Summer. How many delicious variations can I make? Tonight's is a Pizza Mandala. Potatoes spiral inwards. Second level, tomatoes to infinity. Then cheese, gently. Salt. And I'm going out to pick some of the chard I've grown, to saute with olive oil and white wine, and then put on top. Chard:

With drops from a recent rain shower. I had a rehearsal this afternoon, and during a break we opened a window, and there was rain, but there was also thunder like I've never heard. For several minutes I asked my colleagues if it was thunder, or someone rolling a dumpster down the street, because it just didn't stop. On and on, rumbling, no cracking, and nearly constant. I really thought it was someone with a dumpster. But then I looked, and the street was deserted. The sound seemed to be coming from all around. The it started to hail. Summer! The rehearsal was for a recital in which I'll be playing, of renaissance consort music. It's great. I'm playing "consort bass" which is the renaissance equivalent of the g-violone from a couple posts ago; it's got 5 strings, instead of 6, but the string order, and fingering, is the same. All the viols were made by the same maker, and I'm sorry to say it but they've got faces that only a mother would love. They sound great, though! Playing in a consort is amazing. It's so different from anything else I've ever done. My part is equal to the other parts, and there are only 5 of us. Rhythm and melody are much different from later music, and playing the instrument is challenging but in a way that helps me play better. I can feel myself becoming more adept throughout the course of a rehearsal. Skills! Happening.

Since I won't have the chance to go home for the summer, my mom will come for two weeks. She arrives on Tuesday, and though I'll be pretty busy while she's here I think we'll be able to do some fun things. Especially if she enjoys all the concerts I'll be playing. The day after she gets here I'll be playing in Thun, a very beautiful town on a picturesque lake, surrounded by Alps, in what is known as the Berner Oberland (the high land near Bern). She'll also get a chance to see the consort concert (I've been waiting for the chance to write that). And to eat some of my chard. Maybe I'll have peas by then?

I have some more pictures for you. We get a lot of moths flying in the windows at night, this was one of them, in a jar, just before I released it out of a window on the other side of the house:

Last night my roommate Diego had his Master's recital. Someone gave him some incredibly beautiful flowers. Peonies?

 

I spent some time in Copenhagen recently visiting Andrew, and then he came to see me here. We had some really nice weather, in both places.

Copenhagen spring is a little behind Basel spring. It's still pretty nice.

 And, what's that? BABY DUCKS? Yes.

Back in Basel, we found this bike that hasn't seen a lot of action recently.

Then we took a walk in the big hike & bike area near my house, the Lange Erlen. Look, it's me.

Sorry this blog is nothing but news lately. It's not that I don't have as much to say. I think going on those tours made me a little anti-computer and I've never really gotten back into it. In other news, I got a pretty cool bloodstain on the book I'm reading when I crushed a mosquito against the wall at 5:30 this morning. Take THAT, you little jerk. 

Promising, again, to write more, better, sooner. Or, at least, imagining that might be a nice thing to do. Encourage me? It helps.

first swim!

Is it unseasonably warm? You could ask me, is it the perfect temperature? I would say yes. Apparently summer has come about 4 weeks early here. Cheers to that! Today I walked over to the swimming pool near my house, Eglisee, which is celebrating its 100th year of existence. It's a complex of several pools, for kids, and laps, and even an area just for women. (Nur für Frauen!) The water was cold still, obviously, but by the third time I got in I felt well adjusted to it. Then, I came home and started prepping for a taco party with some kammer orchester basel people. Fun fun! Also I took some photos of the little sprouts from all the seeds I planted. They're so cute.

planter boxes, with some strawberries in pots

 someone left their stanley knife to rust on the roof.

 peas and cornflowers

 nusslisalat

 chard! it already has red stalks.

 hmm, tomato, i think, and red leaf lettuce.

 my house, the trees, and what looks like a storm cloud.

 some mourning doves (wood pigeons) being pigeon-y

view from the terrace

view of the terrace

(look at all those planter boxes waiting for plants!)

the missing month

Wow, a month, sorry about that. It can only partially be accounted for with the excuse of "busy-ness" since the past week or two has been spent largely reading books, staring out the window, cooking, eating, reading more books. Or sitting in the sun, on the terrace; or, imagine, practicing bass, or harpsichord, or g-violone. I realize not all of you are familiar with the Violone en sol; hell, I barely was, a few months ago. It looks like a viola da gamba: 6 strings, 7 frets, funny pointy bow. It is tuned similarly to a bass, with g-a-d-e (or f) as the top four strings, and then another c-g accounting for the other two. It took the role of the bass in small ensembles, but the notes sound at "8-foot" - that is to say, one octave higher than contrabass (my instrument) which sounds at 16-foot. Those "foot" descriptions refer to registers on an organ. Is this boring? Probably, I'm sorry. The gist of all this is to say that it's a useful instrument for me to play, if I'm going to keep doing old music, because sometimes the contrabass is just too low for certain ensembles. Here, for your enlightenment, is a picture I took of myself in the mirror in my practice room, with the g-violone.

Yes, yes, taken with my iPhone. At school. I think this particular instrument isn't the best example of its kind; it's pretty hard to make a nice sound. Forging ahead anyway, of course.

Probably I mentioned at some point in the past that spring was on its way, or that it had arrived. By now it looks like summer around here: trees teem with clusters, fistfuls of the greenest leaves you've ever seen; fields are full of dandelions; beer cans fill all the trash cans by the Rhine. Today we're having what I hope is a temporary break from the mid-70s weather we've been enjoying, but yesterday I managed a nice long bike ride in a north-easterly direction, toward a town called Riehen ("ree-enn"). I ended up following a little paved path into the middle of a field, then into something larger than a copse but smaller than a wood, past an overfull pond and a canal and something that I imagined would be called a sluice, if I knew what that was. There was a stone wall coming in at an angle from the edge of the canal, and a ledge that seemed to be slicing into the water, allowing it to run over the wall and into a lower canal and tunnel. Photos? Yes, of course.

Hipster colors courtesy iPhone and my own bad judgment, exercised while squinting at the tiny screen in full sunshine. Color manipulation stops here.

 so. nice.

slicey-sluice?

In one of the fields that bordered the canal, I saw two herons, and a little falcon of some type, hovering in the air awhile above some quick mouse. Quick, because I got off my bike and watched until the bird flew around looking for a new victim. I thought of that, just now, because a heron flew over my house. That happens pretty often here. Oh nature.

(A little aside here for some brain-vindication. Observe: "sluice, n. 1. a. An artificial channel for conducting water, with a valve or gate to regulate the flow: sluices connecting a reservoir with irrigated fields. b. A valve or gate used in such a channel; a floodgate: open sluices to flood a dry dock. Also called sluice gate." That is certainly what I was attempting to describe. So, if any of you already knew what a sluice was [DJ2!], you were not mislead.)

Upon arriving home, I gave my bike some of the tender loving care it needed after a winter spent in close proximity to snow, and unpleasantly cold rain, and other gifts of nature. The chain was entirely rust-colored, greasy dirt was clumped around the (hmm, which part could this be describing?) sprocket (?), more streaks of dirt covered - oh, who am I kidding? I may know what a sluice is but I couldn't label a diagram of a bicycle to save my life. Seat. Pedals. Okay. Anyhow, I cleaned it all off with a rag, and then I even put on new bar tape, since the old stuff was literally falling off. Riding to school today I was quieter than a cat on a carpet, everything was working so smoothly.

What else can I show you? A picture from the town of Eglisau, situated on the Rhine but upstream from Basel by about an hour, and as close to a paradise as I've ever seen. The river cuts a valley between high hills, both of which are covered in vineyards. Several of the surrounding towns (and maybe also Eglisau, I don't know) have natural hot springs. And the river is so much different than in Basel; it's a lazy, transparent green and still stretch bordered by trees and high banks on one side, and the town and fields on the other, rising sharply to vineyards. I didn't get any really good photos, I hope these give you a sense:

 lunch by the Rhine

 some lucky person's yard

on the left, the church where I played.

What else am I missing here? Hmm, the last big tour I went on? Right, Istanbul was at the beginning, Innsbruck in the middle, and sad, cold and gray northern Germany at the end. In Istanbul, it rained. And I had a cold. Also there were cats everywhere.

excellent-looking bookstore next to a well-stocked candy store

inexplicable hollow space between buildings filled 4 feet high with trash

 cat.

On the way back from Istanbul, my bass must have gotten a little extra-jostled, because at the next rehearsal we noticed light coming from between the fingerboard and the neck. The next morning I took it to my Geigenbauer - "violin builder" - Lubomir, who promptly gave it a little tug and pulled the whole thing off. I don't know if it's clear from the picture, but some previous repair had used PLYWOOD. Plywood, folks. And, what's that in the next picture? A nail?? Yes. A nail.

 Lubomir holds up the sad old fingerboard. Note plywood at base of neck.

 Clearly, a nail.

Needless to say, I decided to get a new fingerboard put on, as the old one was on its last legs. The new one is really nice and well done, though it's taking me some time to get the setup adjusted the way I need it. I bought some files. It's satisfying to make tiny adjustments and then feel large differences in the response and sound of the instrument. I'll keep fiddling around until it's good again.

The rest of tour was spent playing someone else's bass, not an ideal arrangement for a big tour with a nice orchestra. Alas. Also, I was sick nearly the whole time. Life can't be great all the time, I guess. I still had a nice time. The music-making was good, even if my part of it was stressful (how to play in tune? and other questions of that nature), and the people were nice. Funny thing about tour, after it's over you spend the next week or so seeing orchestra members on the street, in the grocery store, on the tram - everywhere around you, even if they're not actually there. Maybe you just get really used to seeing the same faces. I have another concert with the same group next week, which I see as a chance to redeem myself. Healthy Megan that Plays In Tune. Then it's a quiet month and a half of school work and long bike rides before I head off to France. School? Remember that? Me too, but only barely. No time like the present to get reacquainted.