Nijinsky went mad

I didn't know that until today, when I watched The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.

He also told his wife that she was the first woman he slept with - this was very very not true. He wrote in his diaries about chasing after coquettes on the streets of Paris, visiting prostitutes and having a 5 year affair with Diaghilev. But he also wrote that he loved his wife, sensually and spiritually. I wonder what their relationship was like? Was she really the calculating realist who drove him to madness?

He lived for another 30 years after he was committed to an asylum when he was only 30 or so. What was that part of his life like?

Instant house?

If I had a block of land, I would put one of these nifty little things on it.

Photos - Brugge part 2

The amazing Kamermuziekzaal in the Brugge Concertgebouw. The seats around the outside are all on a ramp that spirals around the room three times.



Just a normal street in Brugge!



Me on a boat.



A swan!



No prizes for guessing this one :)

Photos - Brugge part 1

Now that I'm safely back in Oz, and the jet lag is finally passing (why is it so much harder coming East than going West?) I can post some photos of my trip! The first installment - Brugge and the Harpsichord Competition...



Sunrise somewhere over Eastern Europe



The day I arrived in Brugge - a lovely Belgian summer's day!



The sign outside...



... the Provincial Hof - where the first and second rounds of the competition were. This is probably the biggest and most fancy building in town - right on the main square.



Some of the amazing harpsichords in the instrument expo.

Update

I'm standing at a free internet terminal at Singapore airport, having just arrived on a Turkish Airlines flight from Vienna via Istanbul.

I arrived in Vienna late on Wednesday night, after a 10 hour train journey through the Alps, which was amazing, but long. Before Vienna I stayed one night in Friedrichshaven, a small town in the very south of Germany, on the Bodensee (Lake Constance). I was visiting my friend Kathy, another mate from Melbourne. It was really great to hang out with Kathy and Thomas, her German boyfriend (and the reason she moved to Germany), and chat, drink beer and play pool. The evening was only marred by a rather angry young local, who for no reason at all tried to pick a fight with Thomas, who then ended up with a bloody nose, but no real harm.

My internet is about to run out here - I'm going to see if I can connect with my pda wireless... stay tuned...

Space - Europe vs. Australia

Another thing I really like about what I have seen of Europe so far is the positive benefits of living in small, high density spaces. For an Australian travelling here for the first time this is perhaps one of the most striking things - used as we are to sprawling cities, more space than we know what to do with, and the mythological ideal of the quarter-acre-block. Some of my thoughts, in no particular order, are:

~ Having so much space has made Australians lazy when it comes to urban and residental design. We don't need to come up with interesting solutions to space issues, so we simply spread out.

~ There is such a thing as having too much private space, which is to the detriment of public space. Australians on the whole live more of their life in thier private space than Europeans, and I think we're missing out on something.

Köln

I am sitting in the 'Bordbistro' dining car on the train from Köln to Friedrichshafen, drinking a cup of rather mediocre Geman coffee. I flew back to Amsterdam from Sevilla with Georg on Sunday evening, and yesterday caught the train to Köln, where I stayed the night with Gus, an old mate from Melbourne.

Gus and one of his housemates invited me to one of their friend's places for dinner. I borrowed a bike from another housemate and the three of us set off on a half-hour ride across the city. The preponderance of bicycles and the casuallness and freedom that they give to the life in the cities has been one of my favourite things about Europe. In Amsterdam I rode on the back of Georg's bike, sitting on the luggage rack as we sped along the Amstel. Last night I enjoyed a bike all to myself, riding through the streets and parks, the latter filled with locals barbequeing and picnicing in the evening sunshine.

Portugal...

...is hot!

And sunny... and the food is very cheap and quite yummy.

I´m sitting in a little internet cafe in a small town on the south coast somewhere near Lagos. We´ve been travelling through the hilly countryside of Algarve for the past few days - countryside which is surprisingly similar to Australia, actually. It is very dry, rocky, red-brown earth, with orange and olive orchards in amongst the scrub. There aren´t really any big trees, and the few sizeable trees around are eucalypts, which all the Europeans think are very exotic, but for me is quite normal! Everything else about the place is very different from anywhere I have ever been, though...

Last night we stayed in a little town called Silves. Like most of the towns in the area, it has a moorish heritage, little winding cobbled streets, different coloured houses with shuttered windows and thick walls, old churches and lots of British tourists. After securing accomodation for the night in a little guesthouse run by a local Portugese equivalent of an Italian nonna (with whom we had to communicate via a mixture of sign language, random English and Spanish words and a lot of nodding and saying of ´si, si´) we discovered that this was the week of the Silves medival fair. I was quite entertained by the little stalls run by people in assorted styles of medieval garb, which ran the gamut from belly-dancing attire, through biblical shepherd costume, to a very convincingly made up ´leper´ outside the castle gates.

Oh yes, there was also a castle in Silves. A red castle! Unfortunately the buildings which once stood inside the castle walls were long gone, but I enjoyed walking around the ramparts and peering out at the surrounding countryside through the battlements...

Must finish up now before I run out of time, but before I go I just want to set the record straight... sorry to disappoint you, Becky, but no, the reason I haven´t been posting is because of a distinct shortage of internet facilities in this little corner of the world, not because of anything else more exciting!!

Free internet in Brussels

I am sitting in the cafe Mort Subite (sudden death) in Brussels using some lovely fast free wifi.

Brussels is completely different to Bruges - for starters it is much bigger, more modern (yet still old in the centre, but a different type of old), and less obviously charming, although I think probably ultimately more satisfying. Many of the streets run in straight lines, which is much easier to navigate than Bruges' constantly curving and taking you in a completely different direction to the one gou wanted to go in streets!

I am waiting at this cafe to meet Georg, with whom l will travel to Amsterdam this afternoon. So this is my last day in Belgium, where I have eaten delicious waffles and way too much bread (bread seems to be an indispensible part of every meal), drunk cherry-flavoured kriek beer, and meandered along medieval cobbled streets.

It's Cold!

Bruges is not the warmest place to be, even in summer. Today it's raining, as it has just about every day, and the forcast is for a top of 16 degrees - it feels like Melbourne in winter, except it is much prettier! I didn't really plan for it to be this cold, and didn't pack enough warm clothes, so I might have to go and investigate some shops and see if I can get a couple of warm things.

The semi-finalists were announced last night - and I was not surprised to find that I was not one of them. Out of the 60 entrants in the competition, only about 10 made it to the semis. I only heard a couple of their performances in the first round, but I think they all would have been pretty amazing. I am looking forward to hearing them perform tomorrow.

I am not at all disappointed to not be in the second round. I am quite happy for the pressure to be off, and to be able to listen to as much as I can and absorb as much as I can. In a way I feel that it is more useful for me to listen and learn while I am here, rather than practice and perform. I can practice and perform at home, but I can't listen to some of the best musicians in Europe at home!

Better... Worse...

I listened to several of the other participants in the competition this afternoon, and came to the conclusion that:

1. My Bach and Buxtehude were better than many, and

2. My Scarlatti was certainly no worse than quite a few.

So now I'm not feeling so bad!

Now, off to find something for dinner...

Performance

Well it's over.

I just played my first round performance for the competition. I felt pretty good before I went in, and had a good warm-up, playing slowly through the fast pieces and settling as much as I could.

I waited outside the hall while they introduced me and announced the order of my performance, then walked in to sporadic clapping, took my bow and settled down at the instrument.

2 days ago I had a rehearsal in the hall, when I chose which one of the two harpsichords I would play. There was a dark green one and a light green one - I chose the light green one because it had a nicer touch that I felt was easier and more natural for me to play.

Back to the performance: the first piece was a Buxtehude suite, which I really enjoy. I was really trying to listen to the music and I am happy with my performance. Two Bach sinfonias were next, which I am also mostly happy with - I felt that my playing was expressive and there was one little mistake in one of them which I didn't really worry about.

Then disaster struck: the final part of the program was two Scarlatti sonatas, which for some reason I have a complex about. I can play them very well when I'm alone, but in front of an audience strange things seem to happen. All of a sudden I became really nervous, and didn't trust that my fingers knew what they were doing. I felt out of control, and there were quite a few mistakes - I even left a bar out at one point! The bits in between the mistakes were pretty good, but I don't feel so great about that performance.

I'm pretty sure the Scarlatti debacle will knock me out of the running for round 2, but I'm going to keep practicing until I know for sure, rather than admit defeat now. I don't really mind about not going through to round 2, but I would like to have felt good about my round 1 performance. I feel good about 60 percent of it, but not about the rest. I guess that's how things go, sometimes, though...

Brugge - at last

I am in Brugge finally! But it was a bit of a saga getting here...

I turned up at Melbourne airport on Saturday evening, joined the Thai Aiways queue, and went up to the check-in desk in due course. The man checked my passport, put a tag on my suitcase and asked for my ticket. `Oh, it´s an e-ticket, you just need my passport´ I said...

Apparently, despite telling me that I had an e-ticket, my travel agent had actually booked me a paper ticket. I thought I had an e-ticket, the airline had no e-ticket in their system, and my travel agent, despite being a large national chain, no longer had a 24 hour phone service. So I couldn't get on a plane on Saturday night.

Sunday morning, I rang the travel agent - they couldn't help me because their ticket office is not open on weekends... In the end my mum booked me a completely new ticket with Qantas, ringing them as we were on the way to the airport at 1pm. At 1:30 I picked up my ticket and checked in for the 3:30 flight to London. When the plane finally taxied down the runway, I almost couldn't believe that I was actually on board, going to Europe.

I arrived in Brussels on Monday morning, welcomed with a lovely grey, rainy Belgian summer's day! After catching the slow train to Bruges (I later found out that the L on the train timetable stood for Local (stops at every two-bit, one horse, three cow village)) and sharing a compartment with assorted Flemish farmers, dressed in pullovers and gumboots, I finally arrived in Bruges, where it was still cold and raining and grey. But at least I got there!

One week to go!

... or more precisely one week and one day to go before I leave for Europe.

I guess this is the time for the big announcement: I'm going to Bruges to participate (I hate the word compete!) in this year's Harpsichord Competition. This is why I have been so quiet over the past coupla months - I've been practicing my ass off! Oh, and the fact that I'm still having a fight with the computer repair people, who didn't fix my computer properly, and still have it sitting in their workshop... yes, that might have something to do with it as well...

Amazing art

I played at fortyfivedownstairs the other week, when they had a great exhibition called Natura.

I saw what is now one of my favourite works of art - this painting by Christopher Beaumont. If I had had a spare four grand in my wallet (and if someone else hadn't already have bought the painting) I would have bought this without hesitation.

This is ridiculous!

Computer troubles are still in full swing. Too complicated to go in to.

Boring boring boring.

I still don't have a computer that works. And now I dislike Apple repair people and insurance people.

So sorry for the uber sporadic posts!

Quiet Music Festival

I heard about the Quiet Music Festival today. It's being held on Sunday. Maybe I'll try and go.
I really like the idea of a festival "dedicated to the celebration of detail, timbre and musical expression", and I am glad there are people like Leo Dale in this world, who know that

The beauty and skill in slow, quiet music can be such that you suspend your breathing and you can almost hear colours and textures in it.

Our PM expects us to be selfish

I just heard our esteemed prime minister say that Australian voters should ask themseves: what policy is "best for me and best for my family?" What about what is best for the community as a whole? Best for society?

Obviously we are all expected to vote as selfish myopes, fortifying ourselves from the nasty big wide world that lies ouside our white picket fences.

This makes me feel a little strange

So I googled myself. Come on, admit it, we all do that occasionally!

There's all the usual stuff - concerts I've done, that kind of thing. But one thing caught my eye. This was a discussion on the Eques Forum (which is a horse magazine website - strange!) regarding an email that I had sent someone when I was doing some temporary office work over summer. I was working for an accountancy which recovers lost super and the like for people, and we got lots of enquiries from people who thought we were trying to scam them, which we weren't. It makes me feel quite weird, being talked about on some forum in connection with something which is really not anything to do with me, just because I happened to do some temp work over summer.

I'm back

... and back to me!

A word of warning: be very, very, very careful when using headphones in your laptop and simultaneously trying to carry the laptop across the room. In fact, don't even try at all. Because headphones have wires which get caught on things and make computers jump out of hands and crash on the floor.

So yeah, I dropped my computer, and then it didn't work. And I am a poor postgrad musician with no money to buy a new one. I really just wanted to turn back time by about 30 seconds.

Anyway, to cut a long, and rather boring, story short, the next day I had a brainwave and realised that my insurance covers 'accidental damage'. So there was a week of phone calls to the insurance people and the computer service people, to get quotes, and decide exactly who was going to authorise the repair. Then three weeks for the parts to arrive at the service centre. Apparently Apple was out of stock of some essential part.

Finally it was all repaired and ready for me to pick up on Tuesday. So now I have a computer again!