Cleared to run; Burns Supper; Schubert anniversary; guitar building

In my last blog post I mentioned an upcoming consultation with the orthopedist… 

We had a look at the MRI, and he pointed out that it confirmed quite a bad stress fracture (the yellow line in the photo above) right across the entire tibia.  He said that normally fractures of this type call for a cast, and sometimes they require bone screws if the bones aren’t knitting properly.  But as we didn’t get a diagnosis for at least a month after the injury, and I used a stick and a tensor bandage, and refrained from running for three months, that was apparently enough for it to heal on its own.  He did a little manual exam and found no swelling or pain on pressure, and said that if I had already started running shorter distances and had no discomfort then there was no problem.  Good to know!

The following friday evening we had an invitation to go to the residence of Daniel Costello, the Canadian Ambassador to the EU, where the Canadian Club of Brussels was hosting a New Year party.  It was nice to meet him, and also to meet Olivier Nicoloff, who has just replaced Denis Robert as the new Canadian Ambassador to Belgium.  As well we had a nice time chatting with other members of the Canadian community; at the party it was stated that there were approximately 10,000 Canadians currently living in Belgium!

The next morning I celebrated my all-clear diagnosis, and got up fairly early to go run with Lawrence and Bryan in the Foret de Soignes.  Lawrence is a real trail rat and he never runs the same route twice, always striking out along new routes, sometimes on paths that are obvious but often running straight through the underbrush to make a new connection with another route.  Bryan takes longer routes, as he is an ultramarathon runner, but he also does shorter training runs with his eleven-year-old son and their border collie.  Afterwards we enjoyed a beer together and some slow-cooked civet de marcassin.  This is basically a red-wine-marinated wild boar stew, but civet can be made with just about any game, like hare or venison.  Here’s a recipe if you’d like to try it, very yummy on a cold day.

We repeated the Saturday morning run routine the following weekend, with an even larger group of runners, and both times I managed about 10-12km.  Along with my two 5km-7km weekday runs, this training regime is helping me get my endurance back, although I still don’t feel as strong as I did in the summertime.  It takes time to get back in shape, and I am being very careful not to overdo it.

I was trained up enough to run my first race of 2017 yesterday: The 10km Hivernale de Boitsfort, right here in my own backyard.  The race started near the International School of Brussels, and while it did have some running on streets and pavements, the bulk of the run was in the Foret de Soignes, which made me very happy.  I was glad to complete the 10KM in around 59 minutes, which met my speed goal, and I never really broke out of my breathing rhythm, which is a great feeling.

The last weekend in January was a very busy one.  Friday night began with an engagement party in Leuven for some colleagues of Maggie.  Saturday morning was the training run I already mentioned, and then in the afternoon I had the rehearsal for the Minimes Bach concert due to happen the next day.  This was the to be the first concert since the series began in 1981 to be performed at 17h in the afternoon instead of 10h30 on Sunday morning.  The change is meant to accommodate the wishes of the priests at the Eglise des Minimes, who have been trying to change the routine originally established by the previous abbé.  It is hoped that this new time for the monthly concert will be less disruptive for the mass on Sunday mornings.

After that rehearsal I put on my Master-of-Ceremonies kilt and prepared for the Burns supper that took place that evening.  Fortunately the job of the Master-of-Ceremonies is quite light; any speeches that one must give are vary short and transitional ones to help move the evening along and introduce the more important speakers.  We had a great time together with good music, speakers, and lots of good food and drink, thanks to the efforts of the kitchen staff of which Maggie was a part.

The Minimes concert organisers were worried that the public might not appear, but on Sunday afternoon they were very pleasantly surprised to see that the church was filled to capacity, and to my eye there was a much more diverse audience than the usual 10h30 crowd, with many younger people and families with children.  I am hoping that strong audence attendance will continue; it seems likely to, as Sunday afternoons in the Sablon are usually quite busy, when many people are browsing the antique market nearby, or are enjoying a lunch out at the many cafés, and then have the option of hearing an early Bach concert before heading home to prepare for the following day's return to work and school.  It also means that there is no longer a conflict for our family between attending the Minimes concerts and attending St. Andrew’s morning services.

Last tuesday Malcolm left for four days in Berlin with his German class.  He got back on Saturday evening quite late, and seems to have had an eventful time.  While he was away I made a trip to the Canadian Consulate to apply for new Canadian passports for him and for Duncan… it is an involved process; as Malcolm is nearly eighteen years old we needed the adult passport application.  The rules for guarantors are relaxed somewhat, and Maggie could be his guarantor.  Duncan’s under-sixteen passport was a simple renewal, so he didn’t need a guarantor, but we still had to provide their long-form translated and notarised birth certificates, as well as their Belgian passports as a secondary form of ID.  But it’s all been settled now and they should get their new Canadian passports in about a month.

During the week alone with Duncan we had some good conversations together, and played a new card game, and he and Maggie watched some tv shows that they both like.  They are both big fans of Murdoch Mysteries, and have recently discovered the Father Brown mysteries television series, adapted from the stories by G. K. Chesterton.

Malcolm has had a lot of fun with guitars recently.  I had posted some photos of his cigar box guitar in progress back in December, but now it’s done, and it sounds great.  The neck feels fantastic and the intonation perfect; it’s quite loud for such a small guitar, and sounds a bit like a banjo with a lot of sustain.  I am really very impressed with the work, and enjoy playing it, with the four strings tunes like the four highest strings on a guitar (D-G-B-highE).  He has decided that he’s going to install a pickup as well.

Also I made a super pawn-shop score this month: a 2016 Gibson USA Les Paul reissue of a 1960 model.  It was very slightly scuffed in a few places, but all the electronics are good, and the rosewood fingerboard is wonderful.  I spotted it for sale for about 70% of the price of a new one, and so Malcolm and I went halves on it.  I have never really been a huge Gibson player, concentrating more on Fender guitars (Telecaster, Stratocaster), but I think this guitar has won me over.

Malcolm barely lets it out of his grasp, but I get time to noodle around with it when he’s at school.  It seems that he is planing to perform a few songs with two of his classmates as the end-of-school party in June, so he’s happy to have such a fine instrument to use for at least one of those songs.  He also used it as a project instrument, and had Benoit show him how to clean all the electronics, change the string gauge, and set the intonation and action.

We also did a little reorganisation of our kitchen, due to the acquisition of a scotch-pine cabinet.  We have a ton of pots and pans and cookbooks and ingredients, and storage for these is tight, so when this hand-made piece popped up on a buy-sell-trade site, I pounced.  It was made some years ago as a custom order for a UK family while they were living in Wales, and came with them to Tervuren, but they are moving back to the UK, and don't need it any longer.  It is really quite a nice piece, with hand-cut dovetails, pinned floating tongue-and-groove drawer bottoms and back panel, working locks, and so forth, and it's tall and narrow and fits the spot we had for it exactly.  I managed to pick a clear day, and picked it up using the convertible, with the base on the trailer hitch platform, and the glass top sitting upright in the back seat of the car with the roof down.  I'm sure it was an odd sight on the highway.

This January 31st was the 220th anniverary of Franz Schubert’s birthday, and the BOZAR had three lieder recitals of his three song cycles to commemorate the event.  On Friday night I went to the performance of Winterreise with the German baritone Matthias Goerne and a marvellous pianist, Lief Ove Andsnes.  Goerne showed us some beautiful singing, but really the pianist impressed me more.  Then again that is where my interest lies more and more as I get older... as a singer I spend a lot of time learning my own text and melody, and making emotional and artistic decisions about it, but in a performance I tend to get excited about what the pianist or conductor of the orchestra makes me feel through their expression of their music, and then use the energy of that, rather than worrying too much about my own melody… for me it’s really much more about the larger colour and texture than just my own part.

This past week I started getting my opera audition material sung back into my voice; the Gounod “Mab” is surprisingly well placed still, which is a relief.  My flight to Canada leaves in ten days, and I need to have those arias sung well in.  As well, I have to refresh and review the Rossini Mass that I perform on the 19th.  It looks at this point like I will be going to Victoria on the 20th, and auditioning there during that week, with a side trip to Calgary to audition on the 22nd.  Then I will stay on the West Coast until probably the 1st of March, when I return to Toronto.  After that there will be other auditions in Central/Eastern Canada before I fly home on March 12th!

Impromptu Dog-Sitting

Last week we received a call from Bryan and Kiana: they were heading off to Rome for the weekend, and had farmed out the kids, but realised that they needed someone to look after Osa the border collie.  It was not a hardship for us to agree!

Their flight left early on Friday, so they came by our place, and we drove to the airport together, a task which was complicated slightly by a rare accumulation of snow that made the roads a little greasy.  I came home and shovelled the front sidewalk in front of our house, and then cleared in front of the pharmacy across the street, and the restaurant next door: most Brusselaeren don't even own a snow shovel and it's pitiful to watch them trying to clear sidewalks with a tile squeegie.  Then I packed up some things and left for Bousval, knowing that Maggie was going to come in her own car after work.  Malcolm and Duncan had commitments of their own on Friday and Saturday so I shopped for a nice dinner for just the two of us.

Jean-Claude is the proprietor of Bryan and Kiana's house, and he lives next door with his wife Mischou... it turns out that one of the big evergreen trees near their house couldn't handle the snow, and fell onto their roof.  The branches were too much for him to handle, and his gardener wasn't answering the phone, so I had to use Bryan's chainsaw to cut away the fallen branches.  I haven't used a chainsaw for a few years, so it was a lot of fun.

Snowy trails

Then it was time to run the dog in the forest... I managed a relatively brisk 4km run on my usual short route into the forest at the end of their lane.  I'm still trying to take it easy, as I haven't had a full diagnosis yet from the orthopedist, and the radiologist last week seemed to indicate that my ankle was still broken!  If that's the case then it's a remarkable painless break as I managed some ascents and descents on modest hills without any trouble, pain or instability.  I have the consult with the orthopedist this afternoon, so hope to have more answers then.

A fire is one the things I miss most in our apartment, so I wasted no time in building one in their fireplace to help warm up.

The view from the balcony there was wonderful... this part of Belgium reminds me a lot of Canada.

Our adventures with ginger continued over the weekend.  This time it was "coins" of sliced ginger, candied and then dusted in crystal sugar.  Definitely a worthwhile project...

The weather has continued to be colder... last night we dropped down to -3 C for the first time this year.  I quite like the cooler weather, as long as the days are bright.  It calls out for warming soups and stews... last night rabbit stew was on the menu; this recipe involves marinating the two cut-up rabbits in five bottles of Sint Bernardus Abt 12 beer, some vegetables and herbs and a half cup of cider vinegar for two or three days, before browning the rabbit pieces and then cooking them in the reheated marinade for a couple of hours.  Very delicious on a winter's day.

This week I'm busy learning my latest Bach Cantata BWV 81 (performance in Brussels on the 29th January), refreshing the Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle (performance in Toronto on the 19th February), and brushing up audition repertoire for my audition tour in Canada (Victoria, Vancouver and Calgary during the week of 20-27 February, with other cities still being scheduled).

So far I have no Bach Passions on the agenda for the period following my return, but I'll be sending out some notifications to conductors just to let them know that I'm going to available in the event of illness or cancellation.  After my last-minute replacement for the Weihnachts-oratorium in December I realise that it's a smart thing to do.  The Matthäuspassion is the one most often done here at Easter, and it's still in good shape, but it wouldn't hurt to also brush up a bit on the Johannespassion.  I've performed it much less frequently and not so recently, so it would need a little work to be fully unpacked from mental cold storage...

Happy New Year 2017!

My first post of the new year....

We are now more than halfway through the first week following the return to school for Maggie and Malcolm and Duncan.  It’s been great to have some quiet time around the house to get some things done here… as I’ve written before I love spending time with loved ones but it’s very hard to focus on anything else when they are around, and there are many things to do to keep the career ball rolling…

We had a lot of happy times together over the Christmas holidays, with a ton of socialising, catching up with many of our international friends here in Brussels.  On December 23rd the tree that Malcolm and I were pictured carrying home in my last blog post was put up, and our English friends Craig and Deborah came over for homemade eggnog, a curry dinner and an evening of tree decorating, followed by a game of Settlers of Catan.  If you’ve never played this amazing strategy game I would encourage you to do so.  Unlike Monopoly, where it’s clear early on who is winning, making the rest of the game a slow, humiliating, and frustrating rearguard action for the other players, in Settlers of Catan it’s anyone’s game right up until the very end.  Even if one doesn’t win it’s still satisfying, because unlike Monopoly, or Risk, one doesn’t win by destroying opponents, but rather by a combination of positive actions.  The base game can be played by 2-4 players but you can double up into teams if you have more players, or you can buy extension sets that allow up to six players.

Here are some photos of a few Christmas decorations:

a creature from Breughel's painting "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (1562)
given to Maggie by a student

souvenir of the Düsseldorf Christmas market
and my first complete Weihnachts-Oratorium in NL 

the TARDIS of Doctor Who

a Delft angel, souvenir of my Christmas 2013 debut

with De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam

Tronna!

Our current home

A Doctor Who Dalek

The completed tree

On Christmas Eve we had a lovely souper with our friends Gediminas, Rasa, Simonas and also Austeja (who was visiting from Paris) with many traditional dishes from Lithuania.  They even gave me a cookbook by a famous chef and author friend of theirs, so I have a vision of some Samogitian specialities in my future…  

In the later evening we went to our Canadian/Portuguese friends Raoul and Luisa a few doors down for their Christmas Eve dinner… roast pea-hen and truffled scalloped potatoes, scampi, and lots of other wonderful dishes.

with Luisa and Raoul on Christmas Eve

Christmas Day was quiet; we didn’t go out, but had our Scottish friends the Gardners in for a cup of coffee, and then did some facetime conferences and telephone calls with family in Canada to wish them a Merry Christmas, too.  We also played Catan again, read our Christmas books, and listened to and danced to some records, including the Village People's "YMCA" on 45 rpm vinyl...

I cooked a 10-pound goose for our Christmas dinner, and we served it with mashed turnips, brussels sprouts in olive oil and thai fish sauce, and harvard beets, which we enjoyed very much, and I saved a bunch of the goose fat to use for oven french fries sometime in the future.

prepping the bird

my goose is cooked

On Boxing Day Malcolm and I went back to Gediminas and Rasa’s house for the afternoon, first for the fathers to go for a short run (to work off some of the Christmas food) while Malcolm and Simonas warmed up and played for an hour or so, and then we had some liquid refreshment and then joined them for a jam session.  I was really quite nervous about starting up running again since my ankle stress fracture in late September, but fortunately we managed to do a gentle 2.5km at a 6-minute pace without incident, so I am optimistic for my running chances in 2017.

Then it was a quiet couple of days before the Gardners had their early New Year party.  I helped out with mixing the martinis and I think that I have managed to bring a few people over to my way of thinking on this important topic… My martini recipe is a bit old-fashioned (pardon the pun) but I think it has a reliable historical basis, and more importantly tastes good.

A few words on martinis… frequently, discussion about martinis centres around the meaning of the term “dry”.  This word has two possible senses here: dry can refer to the proportions of vermouth, with a dry martini containing less vermouth relative to gin, and a wet martini containing more.  (You’ll notice that I don’t say anything here about vodka: that’s because if it doesn’t have gin in it, it’s not a martini, period.  Go drink a cosmopolitan or a moscow mule instead.)

The second sense of the word applies to the type of vermouth used; French vermouth like the famous white Noilly-Prat (my personal favourite) is “dry” while Italian vermouths are usually sweet.  Keep in mind that while sweet vermouths were historically red, Cinzano, and Martini & Rossi do make a sweet white vermouth (Cinzano Bianco is Maggie’s favourite).

For those fundamentalists out there, keep in mind that the oldest surviving recipe for Martinis (from 1888) indicates a sweeter-tasting drink, using not only equal parts gin and sweet vermouth (45 ml each) but also 2 dashes of simple syrup, 2 dashes of bitters, and a dash of orange curaçao (Grand Marnier).  Try that one on for size!  My recipe is simpler than that, and is tuned to drier modern palates:

Place a few ice cubes in a tall glass or small pitcher. Add a few grains of salt, and two ounces (60 ml) of gin, followed by one half ounce (15 ml) of dry vermouth*. Stir with a glass rod or the handle of a long spoon for at least 30 seconds. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an olive.
*variation: Maggie prefers a sweet martini with the same proportions, but made with Cinzano bianco sweet vermouth instead of dry, garnished with a slice of lemon peel.

Sufficient stirring is something many people neglect, and it’s one reason their martinis aren’t to my taste.  The martini tastes so good because of the marriage of botanical elements in the gin and vermouth; without sufficient stirring, these elements aren’t properly mingled.  As well, stirring for 30+ seconds allows for more complete chilling of the drink, and allows for just a little bit of meltwater to be released from the ice, which means that one will taste more than just alcohol.  The same is also true for adding the olive, or a few grains of salt; these act as flavour intensifiers.

More information on the history of martinis can be found here:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/29/martini-recipe-classic-perfect

http://www.ginfoundry.com/cocktail/martini-twists/

sabreing open champagne on NYE

aftermath of the fireworks

We had a quiet couple of days at home after the Gardner’s party, before heading to our American friends’ home in Bousval for their NYE celebration, which involved carbonnades, frites and salad, the sabreing open of many champagne bottles, fireworks and more musical jam sessions.

Malcolm playing bass guitar with Kenzo

The next morning we all had a nice breakfast and then set out for a trek in the forest, with a contingent of runners and another of walkers, making a tour of about 7km.  A high point was the visit to the exotic animal sanctuary on the route, which includes a pack of grey wolves, a pack of white wolves, and a couple of tigers.  Very impressive!  We were lucky to even had a little bit on snow, enough for the kids to do a little bit of sledding on the hill behind the house.

As Christmas Day fell on a Sunday this year we had what felt like an extra-long school holiday, and had a pretty lazy first week of the year, and pretty much kept to ourselves.

On Thursday we went to the home of our English/Belgian friends Simon and Marjan, and said hello to the family's two kittens...

everything is better with kittens

The Gardners were also invited, as were our new American friends Daniel and Katy and their four children, and we all drove to the the nature reserve of the Doode Beemden between Brussels and Leuven for a nice long walk. This is really quite a beautiful place, and there are many observation places to view wildlife, particularly migratory birds. 

Afterwards we warmed up in the kitchen with Glühwein and tea and soup, and a nice meal next to the fireplace, followed by an impromptu sing-along, with Malcolm on guitar and Marjan at the piano.

I'm very happy to report that Maggie made ginger marmalade and orange marmalade this past week.  I found a couple of antique copper jam pans at the Troc a few weeks ago, and have been itching to use them; Maggie had a big can of already prepared orange peel sitting in the pantry, and I forced the issue by coming home with two kilogrammes of ginger root.  Maggie peeled about half of it and decided to have a go using the Joy of Cooking recipe for making stem ginger.

first boiling of the julienned ginger root

This requires some patience; while not particularly difficult, it involves four stages of boiling and cooling the julienned ginger in sugar and water, spread over four days.  But in the end you have a wonderful preserved ginger in syrup, which can then be used with boiling water as a base for a delicious warming drink, mixed in with your morning oatmeal, or boiled up with pectin and more sugar to make ginger marmalade.

We made half of the ginger into marmalade, and today the second half is in the process of being made into candied stem ginger slices for use in baking or as snacks.  I don’t think we’ll buy candied ginger again; I think the 2kg of ginger root cost me something like 2,39 EUR.  Add the sugar and pectin and fuel cost for the boiling and you’ll still be well ahead of the commercially prepared stuff.

orange marmalade

Other cooking fun involved breakfast... I'm particularly proud of Maggie's successful double boiler hollandaise sauce from this past weekend... with smoked salmon and poached eggs, homemade bread (hers, from Edna Staebler's Food That Really Schmecks Mennonite cookbook) and oven broiled cherry tomatoes and salad it was fantastic.

This week I picked up my new Canadian passport.  It’s the big ten-year one so I hope to get onto filling it with stamps shortly; I’m in the process now of planning my next visit abroad, to Canada in mid-February to sing in Toronto, and then afterwards to audition in Western Canada.  It promises to be a whirlwind of travel and auditions, but that’s something that is unavoidable in this profession…

That’s about it… I’m going to warm up and sing through the Bach Cantata that I will perform at the end of this month, and have a look at the Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle that I perform in Canada on the 19th February.  Then it’s to the clinic, as I finally have an MRI this afternoon just to confirm that my ankle is ok for longer runs.  I haven’t done much more than 5 km since resuming on boxing day, and there’s no pain yet, but I want to make sure.