The second part of the holiday was a good mix of socializing and quiet time. On the social side, we had a big fondue dinner with the Gardners and Julia's parents on the 27th, with lots of great conversation, AND we managed to squeeze 10 around the table without any trouble, even with the Christmas tree. Then we had an engaging and entertaining New Year's eve with our friends Jean-Luc and Régine, and made some new friends at their table. Then the three Kings who had sung Britten's Journey of the Magi reassembled at Leonard and Jill's home for a lovely dinner to mark Epiphany, and we met some new friends there as well. The rest of the time was spent reading, playing our new Catan board game together, and just relaxing.
Speaking of Epiphany, we had a guest ourselves this year: artist manager Laura Adlers is a friend and colleague from Canada who passed through Brussels earlier in December with musician and composer Peter Togni, enroute to Riga, Latvia for the premiere of one of Peter's newest compositions. We had a look around Brussels together on the first leg of their journey, and while Peter had to return to Canada shortly after his premiere, Laura had a couple of days stopover on her way back to Toronto, so we spent a little time exploring Brussels, and she joined us for dinner one night for lapin cooked with Mort Subite kriekbier and dried cherries. Yummy! This year Duncan found the fève in the galette des rois; it was the Schtroumf boulanger!
Today is brilliantly sunny here in Brussels, with temperatures howering around the freezing mark. Maggie is nearly halfway through her ski trip to Anzère Switzerland with her class... I am a little envious of her trip, but now that she knows how to ski (as does Malcolm) it might meant that we can all add this destination to our list of possible family vacation choices. It's crazy, the alps are not far away at all; our friend Matthias said that a flight to Innsbruck in Austria is perhaps one hour, so it's quite strange that I haven't gone yet.
What else? The twice-yearly retail sales period has come and gone, and Maggie and Malcolm both took advantage of them to get kitted out rather nicely. Duncan has lots of good quality clothes that are now coming to him from Malcolm, and I did well last year so don't really want for much in my closet, so we didn't bother purchasing anything. The boys are both back in the swing of things at school. Malcolm has had a relatively easy time of it, as a couple of his teachers have been absent freqently in the last week. Duncan is getting to know his new teacher, as Catherine had her 55th birthday over the Christmas break and promptly retired. I hope that he will get along well with the new one.
I've had quite a bit of musical work to do. I've finished coaching the Haydn Die Schöpfung in german, so that's ready for April 3 and 4 in Antwerp, and have been looking at the english version for Kingston's March 24th. However the bulk of my time has been spent preparing Eisenstein. There sure are lots of words to learn in operetta! 38 index cards' worth so far, not counting the spoken dialogue. Lots to memorize, but after the french dialogue in Duchesse. I'm just happy the spoken stuff is in english!
I also accepted a contract to perform Conte Almaviva in a chamber opera reduction of Nozze di Figaro next fall in Flanders, which promises to be a lot of fun. I did the role in Canada a few years ago, and as I recall I had to learn it very quickly, so I'm happy that I will be able to revisit it, and to spend some time discovering new things to do with it. In other music planning I've been doing lots of emailing and calling, and I'm getting some good responses, specifically with some contacts in Holland, so that's great. I've got to do some more auditioning, hopefully before I leave for Canada, and it's a good chance as well to revisit my audition repertoire in advance of the "No Tenors Allowed" concert Bruce and I are performing in Ottawa on the 31st of March.
Last week I took a day trip up to Gent, to pick up some scores that a conductor/composer/singer friend was getting rid of, and I took the opportunity to also visit the Fine Arts Museum there. Fabulous! There were two temporary exhibits that caught my interest; the first was a John Constable exhibit on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Constable was painting in the first part of the 19th century, and he practiced his art largely in the Essex-Suffolk area of England.
I found it interesting to see his different pictures of Salisbury, and also of the sea at Brighton; while these are executed beautifully it is impossible not to see the differences between them and those landscape paintings of his home, which really "pop" with intensity... I can't quite explain it intellectually, it's just that one can tell that these paintings of his own rolling English countryside are imbued with the love the artist had for his subject, something that I don't feel with his Brighton work, nice as it is. I don't know, perhaps it's just me? The exhibition goes next to Princeton University Museum in New Jersey; if you're in the neighborhood you could always have a look and see for yourself...
The Fine Art Museum was recently renovated, and it is really full of fantastic pictures from the late middle ages up to the present day. I was thrilled to see two Hieronymus Bosch paintings that I'd never seen before; a stunning Van Dyck of Jupiter and Antiope, and a great many other paintings and sculptures. The museum is recently renovated and everything was remarkably well presented, with descriptive cards available in Flemish, French, German and English.
The second temporary exhibition was more modern; it was entitled "The World of George Minne and Maurice Maeterlinck", and reviews the development of the work of these two Gent natives, and their influence on the Symbolist movement. Maeterlinck was known to me as the author of the play Pelleas et Melisande which of course formed the basis for Debussy's opera of the same name. Minne's sculptures during his Brussels period were very important in the Art Nouveau movement, and his work influenced other artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It was a great time in Gent but I was very tired from all of the walking, and I feel I could have spent another day in the Gent museum, as there is so much there to see...
My, what started as a quick blog post turned into something far longer, so now I must get going and get some real work done. Before I go, I should explain that if it's been a long time between blog posts it might be because I've discovered a neat little application called Instagram. I've got a good quality camera on my phone, and it's revived an enthusiasm of mine for photographic composition. An old friend from Belleville (Angela Carter) inspired me with her own beautiful photography work that she's been sharing on Instagram, and so I've started posting the odd picture that I think is worth sharing on my own photo feed, as sort of a micro-photo-blog. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and the application has some interesting filters and framing choices that allow you to tweak your pictures if you like. If you have a smartphone you can download the application for free, or if you just want to look at my photos, click here. As well, I usually post those photos to twitter as well; my twitter id is @matthewzadow.
Again, Happy New Year!
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