Back to this weekend, and on to the opera

So, I promised to write something about this past weekend – it went by really fast, beginning with Kindergruppe on Friday night. I introduced a new song to the kids, but reviewed the two I taught before Christmas before that…to my amazement, they remembered both! They sang so loudly and confidently! I’m very excited about our first performance, which will be in April. The kids will be great!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning a lot – I always feel like I’m behind in housecleaning. It’s better than it was when things were super nuts, but I’m looking forward to this coming Saturday to work on things a little more.

After a full day of chores I hopped on the train to meet T downtown at the symphony – someone in the RLCB couldn’t use their subscription tickets so lucky us! The program was great with a Spanish suite followed by Lang Lang, who’s still amazing to me. At 24 he’s still as cute as he was the last time I saw him (5 years ago), but really has incredible musical depth. He did Chopin piano concerto #1, and, as an encore, a Chinese folk song called "The colorful clouds chasing the moon" - the title made everyone giggle. The second half of the program was Respighi’s Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. It really brought up images of Italy for us, but man, when the brass let loose…wow! My only complaint was with the first clarinet, and I’m wondering if something was wrong with his instrument from the sounds of things.

Sunday I woke up with this feeling that the day was going to end up being longer than I’d planned. Well, after 10:30 mass the cantor for noon didn’t show up, so I sacrificed watching the first half of Da Bears to stay and sing – glad I could help out, really. After that was a bunch of errands with T.

Monday night I had a Kindergruppe meeting, and good thing because it made me look at my calendar for Tuesday and realize our Fledermaus tickets were for this week, not in March. Duh. So, last night ended up being opera night.

This is one of the two we’d been looking forward to all year, and it was really cute (a synopsis can be found at http://www.theatrehistory.com/misc/diefledermaus.html). T liked the period costumes and set, and I loved Adele and Dr. Falke, both of whom were native German speakers and very easily understood. The rest of the cast was pretty good, too. Comments are:

• Rosalinde – great, but sounded like she was having to push her high stuff on the sustained notes at the ends of things
• Eisenstein – great actor, but not good German (he was Danish)
• Orlovsky – fantastic! Her speaking voice was a little low in comparison to her singing voice, but her acting was wonderful!
  

Really a great show, and definitely worth the very late night last night! Anyway, enough for now – hope everyone’s Wednesday is going well…