Leaving this weekend for Canada

A quick post late on the eve of my departure...

It's been a good autumn here.  The weather has often been sunny or at least clear, something that the Belgians appreciate.

Speaking of the Belgian appreciation for good weather, I had a conversation recently with a woman from Peru, who married a Portugese man, and who now lives in Portugal, on this very topic.  As it turns out she bought the Volkswagen Eos hardtop cabrio, while we opted for the Golf softtop cabrio.  She said that while everyone expects that she enjoys frequent drives with the top down in Portugal, the truth is that it is either far too hot, or far too windy to do so there.  She herself suggested that the rainy climate of Belgium, with its sudden beautiful "flemish primitive" sunsets, is the idea place for a cabrio.  I agree.  So many days are grey and dreary, but then you suddenly get a warm day with incredible views, and it's like driving through a Breughel painting...

Today was cooler but still in the teens, much warmer than Toronto at this date, but still I took the opportunity to bring in the cold-sensitive plants from the terrace.  The aloes were still doing very well, as were the clivia plants, and the fern is huge, and the as-yet-unnamed succulent that we were given by the neighbour has exploded.  One of my three orchids is sending out three shoots and two of the banana plants look promising.  But I knew that if I didn't bring them in today there was a chance that they'd get frozen, so that was one task on the going-away list.  The geraniums are still blooming, but at the first sight of frost they will go into the cellar to hibernate.  Strangely I picked and ate a dozen strawberries today; the wild plants on our terrace have literally been producing berries since april, and I imagine that they would continue if the frost doesn't knock them back, given the southern exposure and lots of rainfall.

So what has been going on since my last post?  Apart from a great deal in the political world, the following, briefly:

A lovely birthday celebration for me... my request to Malcolm as part of my present was a Viennese Sachertorte, and he delivered.  He shopped for the ingredients that we didn't have on hand, and baked the cake while Maggie and I were out.  The chocolate fondant icing was masterfully executed, and the cake had a very fine crumb.  My only criticism was that he could have been more liberal with the schnapps.  We are all looking forward to his next Sachertorte!

Just after my birthday was the first wednesday of the month, and on that day the main museums are all open after 1:00 pm for free, to coincide with the half-day off that the schoolchildren enjoy.  I took Duncan and his friend to the Cinquantenaire Museum, where we enjoyed viewing the sarcophagi from Egypt, before doing a brief tour of some of the permanent collection.

Duncan and his friend Arthur spotted a Lamborghini and a Ferrari outside the car museum; unfortunately it is not free to visit, but as we had already explored two collections and the day was getting on, we hung around instead, and pressed our noses to the windows, and explored the gift shop a bit.

Other than that the month has been largely taken up, for me, in preparation for the upcoming set of concerts in Canada.  Rehearsal at home hasn't happened so much; Maggie had her week holiday of Toussaint prior to the boys, so I wasn't really alone (as I usually am) for that two week period, but in fact for the first week she spent much of her time in the empty school, as she had lots of space to work on her latest piece, which is a patchwork/embroidery altarpiece for the Church of Scotland here...

Maggie was asked to make a fabric art piece to commemorate the founding service in this building, held on November 15th, 1925.  The anniversary sunday was this past weekend, to the day, and the moderator of the Presbytery of Europe (our own Alec Grant) and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland himself (Angus Morrison) were there for the service.  Here's the senior choir (with a Certain Person in the bass section) rehearsing before the service.

It was quite a success.  We are all very proud of Maggie, now that she has a piece of textile art hanging permanently (this idea is that it will be displayed each year in the period following the harvest service in late October, for the duration of the memorial month of november, until Advent begins) in a European capital.

This wednesday I knew that it would be the last lunch I'd have with the boys for a couple of months, so I was excited to find jumbo netherlands mussels on sale at the Carrefour.  We had a bang-up lunch, and the boys ate their fair share of a kilo or so each of these delicious and easy-to-prepare morsels.

Lastly, I was in a bit of a quandary as I have lost a bit of weight recently, and the kilt that I had made to order in 2012 is of a size that it won't quite stay up, even on the tightest buckle.  Alec Grant had some wise advice about kilt braces, or "suspenders" as Canadians would call them... apparently most antique kilts are fitted with buttons for suspenders, and the idea of wearing a kilt belt with a waistcoat or vest is rather a new idea.  So I did a little research myself, and found this photo of a Canadian regiment from the first World War...

That was enough to convince me.  I already wear braces/suspenders on my white tie and tail trousers, as I do on my tuxedo trousers, and Maggie was very kind to apply some buttons to the kilt as well.

I expect that given enough time it will (ahem) shrink back to the proportions under which I purchased it... I don't think I'll be wearing it for the Toronto or Halifax performances of Messiah or l"Enfance du Christ, but Scotland's national dress will show up in a number of events, if I have anything to say about it.

That's it for tonight.  I must get to sleep as we have an early wake-up tomorrow so that I may make it to the airport on time.  Good weekend to you all...

Almost Hallowe'en

I realize that it's been a month since I posted, so it's too much time for me to write a long linear description of all that's been going on.  Instead I'll just look through the photos and touch on a few of the things of note that have happened.

It's getting close to Hallowe'en now, and the trees are mostly changed.  We get some bright oranges and reds from the Japanese maple trees that you see dotting the gardens around Watermael-Boitsfort but for the most part the autumn colours here never come close to what you see in the hardwood forests of our part of Canada.  Pictured above is the flowering tree from the park down the street that is typical: more yellow than anything.

The school holiday of one week for the boys starts next week, right after Hallowe'en.  This year Maggie's school has their Toussaint holiday a week earlier, so the two of us have been enjoying being around the house together on our own.  It's nice to have lunch together on the back terrace, and so far the weather has been surprisingly nice.  Here's one such lunch, of a salad with fresh figs, prosciutto, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, baked potato bits and chopped red onion that we improvised.

We have some company for our terrance lunches: the spiders are huge, and they have beautiful large webs that are covered with dew in the early mornings.  I seldom see them catching many flies - there are almost never any mosquitos here - but obviously they are doing well, as every year around this time there are many on both sides of the house.  I guess they are thoughtful to help us decorate for Hallowe'en.

Our car is now old enough that it needed to have a contrôle technique.  This is a safety inspection that has to been carried out once a year, and must be done again in more detail in the event that you are selling your car.  It is really a good idea, and tests the brakes, suspension, seatbelts, lights etc. and although it is a bit of a cash grab for the government I think it makes sure that every car is made roadworthy every year.  We went together very early in the morning to line up and got it done without too much trouble, although we were a little worried about the emissions test, given the recent Volkswagen scandal.  But there was no problem and that's taken care of for another year.

Maggie celebrated a birthday this past month and so Malcolm's present included a birthday cake that he shopped for, and baked and iced himself... she also got some chocolate, slippers and some perfume, so she was very happy...

Her requested meal was pizza, so we made a truly heroic number of pizzas of various types.  The boys and Maggie all take lunch to school with them so it's good to have leftovers.

We also spent an afternoon this past month with our friends in Ottignies, visiting with them, with Osa the dog, and checking out the latest member of the Kiana animal hospital... the patient pictured here is an ill or injured pheasant, and after a week or so of nursing, he recovered and went back on his own.  But he seemed quite tame, and could be picked up and carried without any fuss.

We all went to see the Weird Al concert in Brussels this past month also.  It was his first time in Belgium, and we all really enjoyed it a lot.

pre-concert

Canadian Idiot?

polka medley #1

Word Crimes

Jedi, Weird Al, accordions and Marshall Amps... what's not to love?

Weird Al Yankovic is someone I have been listening to since I was Duncan's age, and everyone in our family enjoys his music.  Rather surprisingly his most recent self-produced album "Mandatory Fun" was a smash hit and won a Grammy award for best Comedy Album last year.  It also went to number one on the Billboard Pop Charts, something unheard of for a comedy album.  His parodies are funny, bizarre, but often quite intelligently written, and his live show, performed with his backing band of many years was excellent.

On the topic of music, Malcolm is continuing to play the flute, play in the flute ensemble and orchestra, and sing in the choir.  He's also starting to learn some guitar chords, and has been expanding his vinyl record collection.  I found a gorgeous second-hand Harman Kardon amplifier to replace our old one that was starting to hum, and he purchased a turntable so that he could stop borrowing the landlord's, and with his babysitting earnings he has been expanding the collection quite a bit.

I have some records here in Europe but the bulk of them pictured above are his.  He has recently acquired three Led Zeppelin Albums, for example, and two of them are coloured vinyl (green and orange), which I have never seen before.  They play just the same as the black vinyl ones do, but look much cooler... He has two regular babysitting customers and it looks like he has picked up a third, so he's raking in the dough, and feeding his vinyl habit enthusiastically.

Speaking of habits, I have been feeding mine... for coffee.  Apart from the stereo amplifier I have made a couple of additional thrift store finds, and one of these is this coffee grinder, which I found in the Troc consignment store, for 79 EUR.  If you read the espresso fanatic forums, you will soon learn that most connoisseurs spend more for the grinder than they do for the machine.  The beans need to be of uniform consistency, ground just before brewing, and ideally they should not be heated too much while grinding, so as to not destroy a lot of the aromatic molecules that make espresso taste and smell so amazing.  I saw that this orange grinder did not have a recognizable make or model number, but I had a hunch that it might be a Rancilio or similar make based on the build quality.  Because of the obscurity of the make and model, it had already been there unsold for three weeks, and knew that they would reduce the price if I waited and was lucky, and that is what happened.  I bought it for 65 EUR, and have since discovered that this type of grinder is actually a Mazzer, probably a Super Jolly, and they retail new for between 800-1000 CAD.  Used they can be found for around half that, so I definitely lucked out!  It needed a little cleaning but we are now pulling espresso shots with a ton of crema and an excellent taste as fast as you can say barista.

Here is a photo of the two boys at church this past month.  Duncan is doing pretty well at his new school... he's starting to develop better study habits, and settling in with his classmates.  He does karate twice a week this year, and since he graduated from the ballet class isn't dancing regularly at the moment, but auditioned for the musical Peter Pan that will be run by an anglophone theatre company in March of this year, and has been cast as Peter's Shadow (a plum role) and as an "Indian" and his rehearsals have already begun.  There's a commercial tap and ballet school relatively close to us that offers classes priced per-session, so maybe we'll go try that out soon.

We had a visit this week from another international actor friend, Greg Ellwand, who lives with his actor wife Toni on Endean Avenue in Toronto.  Their three daughters were well known to us, and the two older ones babysat both of our kids, when we were living in Toronto.  Greg is playing a role in a famous Canadian play called Helen Lawrence, by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas.  So far this play has run in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Munich, Paris, London, and now it will play three times in Belgium at de Singel in Antwerp.

Greg and the cast made a side trip down to Brussels this week, and so we met him afterwards for a little sight-seeing, and had him over for dinner and a visit with the boys.  Greg is also a singer and musician and likes to draw and paint, so I was happy that he spent so much time discussing art with them...

After dinner I had already made plans to meet with my friend and neighbour Matthias, who is a senior policy analyst with the World Health Organization...  We had already planned to go for a beer at this amazing bar called La Porte Noire, named for one of the ancient gates of the medieval city wall of Brussels, that our friend Lawrence had introduced Bryan, Bruce and myself to this past summer.

The bar itself traces its history back to the 16th century, with its subterranean vaulted ceilings, a water well and vintage icebox; it once served as a kitchen for the nuns of the Alexien Convent, located nearby.  But the important part is that it has a ton of beers on tap that you can often find elsewhere only in the bottle, and a large inventory of many other little-known beers.  The ambiance is really great and the staff is knowledgeable and helpful.

Afterwards we headed to L'Express, which is probably one of the best durum pita places I've ever eaten at, and then we walked Greg to his train and then made our way back on the subway to Delta and then walked home.  We'll see Greg again on this friday evening; he has arranged tickets for our family to go see the show.

I almost never go out in the evening for that sort of thing, but I was in a mood to celebrate.  I received a lovely note this week from Julius Stenzel, the cellist and the artistic director of the Minimes Choir and Orchestra, with whom I sang BWV 96 this weekend, conducted by Jacques Vanherenthals.  (Both Julius at the cello and Jacques seated with a score are pictured above along with mezzo Aveline Monnoyer in rehearsal).  Here's what Julius wrote:

Hi Matthew,
Just checking in with a little positive feedback after Sunday—I didn't see you after as we had to race off... as always I very much liked your performance...
At last night's committee meeting, where the previous performance gets dissected, Jacques expressed his very positive impressions with your sound!  And I had not noticed it, but Jacques had a friend in the audience who also expressed admiration; this friend just happens to be José Van Dam, with whom we've worked with the Ensemble Orchestral on many occasions.  (I'll never forget playing the big solo from Don Carlo with him in the packed Beaux-Arts—that was as intense as it gets for an orchestra soloist.)  Van Dam is not a big baroque specialist, but he's quite a reference.  So I just wanted you to know you had some impact!
You'll be hearing from me at some point, when I've attacked the soloist department for the 2016 part of this season.  In the meantime, bravo and thanks again!
Ciao,
Julius

I'm just glad that a) the conductor was happy and b) the director was happy and c) I didn't know ahead of time that one of the finest baritone voices of all time was in the audience...

To finish up, there are a number of things to get done around the house.  I realize now that I only have a little more than three weeks left before I fly to Canada, and I still have a lot of prepare for the Berlioz l'enfance du Christ for its Toronto performances.  I have been working with Marie-Claude Roy, a Quebecoise pianist who lives here in Brussels, so I have the recordings of our rehearsals to listen to now, as well as some commercial recordings, including one conducted by John Elliot Gardiner, with José Van Dam singing my part, interestingly enough!  And then there are a number of pieces that I want to work on for the opera recital with Bruce, and also audition pieces to continue refining, and of course it wouldn't hurt to sing through the Messiah a few times just to stay in shape for the performances to come, and see if I have some new ideas about how to approach it... I have sung it more often than any other work but I may have missed something important...

Maggie is in her classroom right now but I should expect her home soon... she is taking advantage of the quiet and the extra space there while the school is empty to continue work on the quilted hanging that she is making for the 90th anniversary of the dedication of St. Andrew's Church of Scotland, which will go beind the communion table.  Anniversary Sunday is coming soon, but she might have it completed early, in time for Remembrance Sunday on November 8th.

This hanging isn't completed yet but it's getting quite close.  It's a bit of a family project: I drew the first concept sketch, and Malcolm enlarged the drawing and developed it with his own drawing skills.  Maggie has received a number of donations of fabric and has been experimenting a bit with the design; the colours are her decisions, and she's done some study sections that she has discarded, but I really like what she's created.  I think its coming along nicely, and I'll be sure to share the finished product here, when it's sewn and hanging in place...

Autumn Projects

This September is approaching its end, and so far we have had many projects to keep us busy.  I wrote earlier that when Bruce and I returned from Bayreuth Maggie greeted me with a number of her sewing projects, including a half-dozen bow ties... I've been taking opportunities to try each of them out at a variety of church services and parties over the last few weeks.  Here's a nice linen one for summer pictured above...

and a nice flowery one for any time of year

car-free Sunday

Last weekend I opted not to wear a tie to church however, as we four saddled up and rode our bicycles instead of driving to the service.  It takes a tiny bit longer to ride as it does to drive the 3.3 km to get there, but I particularly enjoyed the lack of street noise... I am reminded of the Eastern Seaboard blackout of 14 August 2003, and how beautiful the summer evening in Toronto was without the noise of air conditioners and other electrical appliances.  Cities become much more pleasant places without the mechanical and electrical noise pollution.

in front of the palace

I don't know if it is atmospheric pollution, or if there is some reason for a lot of dust in the atmosphere this autumn, but the sunsets here have been monumental recently.

Autumn is my favourite time of the year, when one can get out the slightly warmer clothes, and evenings are cool enough that you really enjoy a cup of tea, or the experience of an open fire.  I also was prompted to try out the canned pumpkin from a local Mexican importer, as a trial run before Thanksgiving.  Kiki certainly seemed interested in the result.

Rhubarb was also looking great at the DelHaize, so I also made a rhubarb pie.  I always bake the shells blind first, with clay beads to hold the pastry down, and bake the filled pie for a little longer than suggested, at a slightly lower temperature than suggested, and this time also thickened the rhubarb with a mixture of sugar, cornstarch and a little water, so it came out of the oven softened and gelled, but not burned on the top, which is always a risk.  The edges in particular are a problem: I am looking around for a steel or aluminum pie crust shield that protects the edges of the pastry, but I use an unusually large enameled steel pie plate with a diameter of 12", which exactly fits the pre-made Herta or DelHaize pastry, with nothing left over, and most of the aluminum pie shields that I have found online are for 9" or 10" pies.

I could make homemake crust, but the Delhaize butter crust is only around 1,30 EUR, so I usually don't bother to do my own.  It's also time-consuming: with two boys in the house pie doesn't seem to hang around very long.

Last weekend we were invited by Raoul and Louisa, our neighbours, to dine at the Moroccan restaurant maybe 20 metres from our door.  Miriam is the manager of this new restaurant and her brother, a former professional soccer player is the waiter, and they are both really nice... Maggie and I tried it out when it first opened perhaps two years ago, and we were very happy to see that it is doing well.  We are rather spoiled to have five restaurants within 100 metres of the house, but to be honest, we almost never go out.  There are too many good new recipes to try out!

Speaking of recipes, here's a fantastic one that I discovered recently in Julie Sahni's Indian Heritage Cookery that is wonderful with curries... Maggie makes a knockout spinach with chickpeas that I love, and we also do a dry-fried cauliflower with ginger, but it's nice to have some variety and this bean dish is amazing, even as a cold salad the next day.

We are fortunate to have so much good food to eat.  We have been following the news of the Syrian refugee crisis recently with great alarm... the stories are heartbreaking, and the fracturing of the Schengen border-free zone has some serious implications for the future of Europe.  Brussels has already a small refugee camp established in a park near the Gare du Nord, which at the time of my visit last Monday held about 1,000 refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea.  Andrew Gardner and I decided to go find out in person exactly what the situation was in the Parc Maximilien, to see what things were needed, and report back to St. Andrews congregation.

lots of food for the moment

There are several Non-Government Organizations helping the refugees; for the moment they have received lots of food donations, and are in need of other items such as toiletries, and will soon require raincoats and warmer clothing.  There are a couple of facebook groups that are helping coordinate the drive for donations: Collectactif is handling the kitchen and food supplies, and the Plateforme citoyenne de soutien aux réfugiés Bruxelles also is publishing lists of the items required.

Part of the problem, and one reason for the very existence of such a makeshift camp in this European city is the slowness of the official response to the arrival of these refugees; there was no building initially available to house them, and so the tent village was established.  There has been a lot of finger-pointing between the commune, city, regional, federal, and European governments about who should take the lead.  The national minister responsible for those seeking asylum has finally opened up accommodation in the World Trade Centre III building close by, but the places they created were only available initially for sleeping, and there were no food preparation or dining facilites, and almost no privacy.  Either way, there are more people than places there (500 places versus 1000+ refugees) and while the minister is trying to improve the spaces with showers and lockers and more privacy, it is unclear how these people will fare as the weather gets colder and more wet.

The day we were there the weather was ok, and there was an impromptu soccer game going in the centre of the park, in the shadow of the Gare du Nord and the Belgacom (now "Proximus") building.

There aren't many children in the camp, but for the ones who are there, a makeshift school that has been established.

There seem to be lots and lots of volunteers, but the place is still kind of a mess.

We were doing some bricolage (or doe-het-zelf in Flemish) over the last week or so at home to try to impose a little more organisation in our apartment.  The boys have a growing collection of bandes dessinées, hardcover books, and trade paperbacks that were straining the limits of their limited shelving, and purging the unwanted volumes only went so far.  I decided to design and build something that would occupy one wall of their room, and optimised it so that the bunk bed could still be placed against it with a minimal loss of storage, but that it will still be useful if we get rid of the bunk bed and change that room to a different configuration in the future.  Here Malcolm and I are cutting the nosing for the bookshelves, and he's lightly sanding off the "feathers" from the ends.

After sketching out the design and tweaking the dimensions, I downloaded a layout and cut list demo application, entered in the size of the panels, and fiddled around with the dimensions some more until I managed to get the whole thing out of three panels.  I went to the Brico and handed them the cut list, and to my amazement, they cut everything up for me, free of charge!  It sure beats buying and maintaining a table or panel saw, and it's easier on the back than lugging big panels around.  I ended up using the thinner mdf panels of 12 mm, but reinforced the shelving at the back with some repurposed hardwood slats, and installed some clear pine nosing on the facade to help with durability and provide some additional stiffness.

 small bulkhead / base to compensate for existing baseboard, and to allow for backless bookcase to sit flush with the wall

pine nosing going on 

primer coat 

paint coat

Today I think I'll be gluing and tacking on the remaining nosing on the second and third cabinets, and then I may leave the pine unfinished, or I might just wipe on a little bit of clear oil finish.  Then I hope we can get those books sorted out and onto the shelves, and out of the way!

You may remember that last year Malcolm and I went to see the UFA film night at the BOZAR with the Brussels Philharmonic, with a showing of the new restauration of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.  This year the opening night was a showing of the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, with the luminous Louise Brooks.

Brooks had just finished work on a silent film, The Canary Murder Case, and was lured away from Paramount by the German director G. W. Pabst, and brought to Germany expressly for this film.  Her desertion from Paramount would have been forgiven, but when the studio tried to get her to come back from Germany to overdub new voice tracks for a new "talkies" version of Canary she refused, effectively ending her film career.

Pandora's Box an adaptation of earlier versions of the Lulu story, notably the plays Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1904) by Frank Wedekind.  The composer Alban Berg began writing his verion, the opera Lulu in 1929, but died in 1935 with it still uncompleted.

It's amazing to see these films with a live orchestra like the Brussels Philharmonic playing the score...  First of all the music alone is colourful, and executed with much verve and precision.  The shots and transitions in the films are lovely, and the way that they lit these films was magical.  Like Caligari there is something glowing about the eyes of the actors in Pandora that grabs you and doesn't let you go...

But lastly to my own musical projects.  I think that Dina has now received almost all of the music that she needs for our No Tenors Allowed concert on January 24th.  We also have been asked if we could do a preview of our project at the Perth Manor Hotel, on Sunday, January 16th in the afternoon.  We've pencilled in our January rehearsal schedule as well, but we have chosen material that is in our repertoire, so working those pieces is not so urgent yet.  For me the biggest thing is the Berlioz... I now have about six recordings from various decades to listen to as I prepare for December's two concerts... the Flemish library has been great about placing holds on discs for me, and I also have taken a couple out of the mediatheque at the university.

Other than that, I have been given an aria to sing at Minimes at the end of October, in Bach's BWV 96 Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn, so that will give me a little something to work on this month as well...

Have a good weekend!