I’m baaaaacccckkk (in creepy child voice). I just got back from the city, and it was amazing. I took the Concord bus line from Portland to Boston (great trip, and cheap too!) and the Fung Wah from Boston to Chinatown in NYC (a little sketchy, but cheap). I then proceeded to get lost. Well, I wasn’t lost, because I knew where I was, I just didn’t know where to find the Kitchen (where my friend Meg works). So, I walked for two hours in what seemed to be and endless Greenwich Village until I finally decided to call Meg (I was on roaming) and find out where the Kitchen was (19th W St between 10th and 11th avenues for future reference). So, I met up with Meg, and we went to the Chelsea Market and got some amazing Basil Ravioli. We went back to her apartment (a little sketchy, but near prospect park) and had a Madonna themed dance party with her roommates (I mostly watched and laughed). The next morning I went to visit Juilliard on a little tour, where I saw the most bad-ass kid ever (picture Richey-Rich with and AC-DC shirt on and a tough-guy/geeky strut). Juilliard was cool, but it was weird being the only undergrad on the tour (the rest were all high school students). Then I got lost for two more hours trying to find Patelson’s sheet music shop until I finally asked the nice people at the Steinway gallery where it was and realized that it had been hiding behind a giant truck. After that adventure, Meg and I saw the premiere of the operatic version of “Our Town” at Juilliard.
My review: The beginning started out kind of boring and a little home-town musical-ish, but it became a deep and soulful masterpiece by the third movement. I really enjoyed the play with the projector. It sort of became its own character throughout the piece, giving quick asides for the other roles. I thought it was very good overall.
Today was the six-hour bus ride back. I read half of Gardner Read’s “Notation” and some of Paul Hindemith’s “The Craft of Musical Composition”. Tonight, I went to the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s first official performance with the comical Robert Moody at the helm. He was a fun conductor, complete with bad music jokes (which are my favorite) and a new vision for the future of the PSO. The night was themed around the idea of tango, playing excerpts from Bizet’s “Carmen”, Piazzolla’s “Tangazo”, Marquez’s “Danzon no. 2″ (to which Moody remarked “It’s number 2, but there is no number 1″), and Lorenz’s “Rumba Sinfonica” featuring Tempo Libre, a guest Rumba band (pronounced Room-ba). It was a fun concert, although the “Rumba Sinfonica” felt a little piece-y, like the symphony and the band didn’t quite work together but as two separate entities that just happened to come together once in a while. Each individual part was great, the symphony was beautifully ethereal as it “Thought” about the Rumba music, and the band was lively and entirely into everything they did. It was a great night. But now, I’m off to watch a tape of Thursday’s episode of Lost (yay). Bye!
