I went to Verona with a friend to hear Bruckner’s 8th, The Orchestre des Champs Elysées conducted by Philippe Herrewege. She hadn’t yet heard a live symphonic orchestra and loves B.'s music.
As I expected, tempos were too fast, the playing not so accurate as is customary in what they now call HIPs, the structure rather episodic - not Bruckner’s fault - and all wagnerian occasional traits evidenced beyond necessity. But my friend looked so happy that I avoided sharing my feelings with her.
Used as I am to Celibidache’s perfect voicing, textures, dynamics, phrasing, care, insight and amazing possession of the whole structure - not to mention his immense love for the composer - it wasn’t so fun; but a concert is always a concert, and Verona is a wonderful town.
Left on the 6:20 am ferry heading for my daughter’s wedding in Toronto.
Driving through Washington State via the Snoqualmie Pass into Oregon yesterday. The posted 70 minute wait to cross into the USA was only 2 minutes as I was expedited through as a Nexus card holder. Like they used to say about American Express, don’t leave home without it. Great mileage on the A7, 6.7 litres per 100km.
Spent much of the day checking out the WW1 and WW2 tanks in Bovington Tank Museum’s superb collection. This Tiger 1 (‘Tiger 131’) is the only drivable tank of this type left worldwide, in amazing condition and was still dripping moisture from its tracks, having been driven around the test track on a special display event yesterday.
I like HIP, but mostly the first wave of Hipsters. Guys like Leonhardt, Bijlsma, Bruggen, Koopman. What later happened has nothing to do with authentic performance it’s just fancy folks playing fast and clean.
The museum had an audio interview with a Sherman gunner who had taken out 3 Tiger tanks in one engagement. As he said, his luck was in that day. The Sherman was about the only allied tank that could engage it with some confidence, although its armour was inferior.
We had Toob fibre broadband installed today. It was a bit of a fiddle swapping their Linksys router for our own Netgear Nighthawk, but I managed it after a bit of head scratching. Our PlusNet copper gave us 24Mbps and now we have slightly more, for only 96p a month extra, with the price fixed for two years. Now we can do not very much that bit faster.
Pete, I missed this post of yours at the time. I trust they’ll give you a large capacity SSD and that the new OS will have been thoroughly tested and bug-free. All the best and look forward to many future enjoyable exchanges on the forum.
With my hearing issues, I find it really helpful to go to subtitled performances at Chichester Festival Theatre. Mrs HH discovered that if one is disabled one can get half price tickets for the subtitled performances, using the disabled railcard in order to register. So we have upgraded our £10 tickets miles from the stage for the top price £47 tickets, which we both get for half price. We are off to see Redlands, a new play about the Stones’ trial, which was of course held in Chichester. It’s lovely that CFT do this, and it will make my evening out so much more enjoyable.
Herreweghe and his Bach interpretations is a compete kettle of fish compared to his romantic interpretations. My first CD was the Mattheus Passion by Herreweghe and I still love it. His second edition of the Mattheus Passion is more sterile and indeed less ‘music’ to my ears but still better than others. I still don’t get his performances of romantic music, it feels like seeing romantic music thru baroque spectacles.
I see Herreweghe as a second generation Hipster.
Thinking about it, the first gen Hipsters were genuinely interested in discovering the music how it could be interpreted and had great fun in doing so (I know first hand since one of the 4 mentioned above was one of my teachers) but later on it became more high tempi, flawless performances / recordings and so on.
Nigel, what do you do about email? I was quite interested in switching from VM to Toob**, but there were some technical infrastructure issues. However a major “no no” was that they told us that they did not have a email system, and we would have to use Goggle.
We also have a Nighthawk router, so interested in what you had to do to get it working.
**TBF, VM is no slouch at 137MB download (and “faster than I can type” upload ), but the cost is rising……….
Thank you for the side profile view, even today, over 80 years since it first made it’s appearance, the Tiger still looks pretty capable of looking after itself.
showing the bulk of the Tiger, and its 88mm, the famous "eighty-eight, although not what you wanted to see if you were in a Sherman.
), but the cost is rising……….