Just Like Old Times

by Karl

Last Wednesday morning I went to hear a public dress rehearsal of the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Smetana Hall at the Municipal House. Walking away afterwards, I noticed a poster on a lamppost and—WHAT?! I’m not sure whether I first recognized the picture or the name, but it was indeed Ben Zander conducting the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra from New England Conservatory.

That’s my youth orchestra (1982-85). In my day its name was Youth Chamber Orchestra, but that was about the time that Zander started having the group play things like Mahler and Bartok, so calling it a chamber orchestra was getting to be ridiculous.

In 1985 we played Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Zander wisely told us to get hold of a recording and listen to it before rehearsals started. The first time I heard it, I was crushed. It didn’t sound sweet, like the Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Beethoven and Mozart I was used to playing with the orchestra. There were so many harsh sounds and discordances, and I was not at all looking forward to spending the season working on that noise. But as I listened more, I started to hear it differently, and as we rehearsed it, it really made sense.

I had the great pleasure of being second trumpet to Rich Kelley. Many of the kids in the orchestra (like me) were from well-off suburbs of Boston, but Rich was from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston itself, and if I remember the story right, he started taking lessons with a clarinet teacher, because that’s who was in the neighborhood. After three years, he was good enough to win the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concerto competition for high school students. After that, the principal trumpet player of the Boston Symphony started giving him lessons for free. At first I was disappointed not to be first trumpet—it was my last year in the orchestra, and part of me felt like I had earned it—but Rich was much better than me, and anyway, doing a good job on the first-trumpet part of the Bartók was not quite within my abilities. I was comfortable playing second, and I hope I didn’t make the section sound bad for Rich.

(On my left, third trumpet was covered by Bijon Watson, who, like Rich, has gone on to do a lot more with his trumpet than I have.)

In Spring, 1984, we toured Austria and Poland. In Vienna, we played Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Musikvereinsaal, where Mahler himself had stood at the podium as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic.

I remember this view (though I found the picture here).

An Evening with Derek, Junot, & Albert

The Prague Writers' Festival is underway and last night the American Center hosted an event with the two headlining authors, Derek Walcott and Junot Diaz. A poet, playwright and author, Walcott is the 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Diaz, who writes novels and short stories, has won numerous literary awards including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both authors were born in the Caribbean, Walcott in Santa Lucia and Diaz in the Dominican Republic. Diaz moved to New Jersey when he was six.

The facilitated discussion touched on what impact they each felt as a result of being separated from their countries of birth and how they felt when they or their work was defined by predictable modifiers relating to ethnicity or citizenship status. (Diaz answered this second question even more eloquently than he did in this 2008 Newsweek interview, but that's an interesting read also.)

And yes, I sat this close to them.

Derek Walcott, moderator Jay Tolson, and Junot Diaz

Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre

by Kate, with musical critique by Karl

I've got a whole bunch of posts to catch up on, including some photos and stories from events that happened last fall. Given that this blog is kind of our family scrapbook from Prague, bear with me as I wade through the backlog.

Prague's oldest theater, Stavovské divadlo (Estates Theatre) is in the heart of Old Town. You can find it at the end of Ovocný trh (Fruit Market) -- just as Mozart did on October 29, 1787, the night he conducted the world premier of Don Giovanni. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro was staged here in early 1787, albeit not with the maestro at the helm, and was reputed to have been as popular in Prague as it was scorned in Vienna.

Next to the building, Don Giovanni's Il Commendatore commemorates
the lasting connection between Mozart and the Estates Theatre.

"My Praguers understand me," Mozart said.

Mendelssohn on the Roof, Martinů in the House

Karl and I joined friends last week for dinner and a concert at the Rudolfinum, yet another stunning Prague edifice. In so many cities, it would be the go-to example of neo-Renaissance, drool-worthy architecture. In Prague, however, where it's a chore to find a boring building, the Rudolfinum has to be content with sharing the glory. So it never hurts to have a little lore to lean on in attracting attention. A girl's gotta know how to use her assets. More on that later.

We met up with Madeleine and Vašek for dinner before heading to the concert. There's a future post percolating about Vašek, but suffice to say he's been an instrumental figure in our Prague landscape.


Fat and happy, off we went to the Rudolfinum, which looked nothing like this last Thursday night. Just wanted to show off these pretty pics I took in November. Back when the sun shone.


Details for the music lovers ~ the program included Rhapsody: Concerto for Viola and Orchestra by Bohuslav Martinů, Philharmonic Dances by Jan Novák, and Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 6.

While I found the music engaging, if you asked me to expand on that, I'm not sure I'd come up with more than, "it was real purty."

Let's call the professor in, shall we? Karl?

The Martinů struck me as surprisingly lush and warm, which is an interesting choice, since the tone of the viola is inherently warm, and you might expect the composer to set up the orchestra as more of a contrast. From today's vantage point -- a week after the concert -- the main thing that sticks is the way Martinů plays back and forth between minor and major, somehow having one tonality fade into the other and then back again.

Novák's piece was loud. The Martinů had used a limited orchestra, sort of a chamber orchestra. Everybody else came out for the Novák, and they played loud. After the first of the three dances, Madeleine remarked that it were as if they knew she'd been up early that morning with her grandchild. Kate commented more simply that it was "bombastic"--but in a good way. My overall impression was of orchestration with a broad brush, sort of a textbook approach to getting a large, "philharmonic" sound, far from the subtleties of Ravel or Mahler. But it was effective after its fashion. And the insistence of the odd-meter rhythms in the last dance finally has its way with the listener.

The Dvořák is an old friend of mine, which I first learned by playing it with the Evansville (Indiana) Philharmonic in 1991. I was so taken with the piece (particularly the coda of the first movement) that I quickly went out and got a recording of it (London Philharmonic, Istvan Kertesz conducting). The interesting thing when you hear a piece you know well from one particular recording is to see how the performance you're at interacts with the version that's been ground into your head by repeated listenings. One danger is that you'll react to any deviation from your expectations as a flaw. Another possibility is that the new performance reveals aspects of the piece that you had never noticed. What was surprising in this case was how much the piece played out ... just like I expected it to. But that didn't make it disappointingly routine. Maybe I just like the piece so much that I was satisfied to hear a good live performance of it. There was one big difference from my familiar version, in that Altrichter (the conductor) started off much slower than I expected, switching to the tempo I knew after the introductory theme statement; he went back to that slower tempo at analogous parts of the first movement, switching right back to the main tempo when the underlying character of the music changed. In recordings from the 60's, 70's, and 80's this sort of thing is rare, but if you go back to recordings of Wilhelm Furtwängler's conducting from the 40's, it's all over the place. I thought Altrichter used it well. Madeleine commented, "To nebylo málo muziky za peníze," which translates roughly as, "That wasn't just a little music for the money." She was right.

Thanks, honey. Like I said, real purty.

The Rudolfinum opened as a "house of artists" in 1885 with the Czech Philharmonic taking up residence in 1896. The building served as the provisional seat of the Parliament of the Czechoslovak Republic after the country's founding 1918. In 1920 they went and made the whole thing legal, with the Parliament using the building as its permanent seat. But once the Nazis came to town in 1939, well ... there was no need for Parliament. Back to concert hall.


"House of Artists" has an egalitarian ring to it, and the Rudolfinum is home to a gallery as well as a concert hall. Prominent composers and artists peer down from the roof's perimeter, although the musicians seem to have the best real estate.

Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Handel enjoy the southern view at the front of the building.


On the east side, looking out toward Old Town and the Jewish Quarter, are Weber, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Schumann.


We tried mightily to identify these four on the west side but couldn't find anything in books or online. They survey the Vltava river for a water view. Why wasn't Handel placed here?


As to the aforementioned lore, it is said that during the Nazi occupation in World War II, orders came down from German headquarters to remove the statue of Mendelssohn from the Rudolfinum. Writer Jiří Weil had some dark fun with this premise in his 1960 novella Mendelssohn Is on the Roof.

In it the SS officers who trudged to the roof didn't know their Bach from their Beethoven, let alone Mendelssohn from anyone else. And so intending to dismantle Felix Mendelssohn, who was raised Christian but "tainted" in the eyes of the Nazis due to a Jewish bloodline, the officers found the statue displaying the most prominent nose. And down came Hitler's darling, Richard Wagner.

We don't know how much of this is apocryphal, but a few things are certain: there never was a statue of Wagner on the roof of the Rudolfinum, and Mendelssohn stands solid today, looking out at the Jewish cemetery. It's possible that the statue was brought down and then replaced.

But I love the story. It makes me chuckle, not just because of the obvious irony, but also because it conjures thoughts of Bugs Bunny and the Blues Brothers.

(Hey, I had to show off my cultural knowledge, too. Remember? A girl's gotta know how to use her assets.)

Parting shot: Prague Castle at night, taken from Mánes Bridge as we crossed it to catch the tram home. Purty, ain't it?

Dining with Cavemen

Here's the thing about caveman food: our kids don't like it.

As I suspected, Ben and Garrett both earned the requisite checks to go out for dinner tonight at Restaurant Pravěk. Off we went to enjoy a meal with our well-mannered progeny.


When mammoth tusks greet you inside the door, you get the sense you're in for something different.


But despite the great decor, it was a disappointment as dining experiences go. The food was so so. The music was all wrong.* And the service was ambivalent. I mean, our server hardly had a pulse, nevermind a bone in her hair.

We realized a little too quickly that this wouldn't be the wild night with cavemen we had envisioned. But you know what? The boys, while bummed, took it pretty well. Who knew this "reward dinner" would provide its own opportunity to demonstrate a mature response to a lesson about life's inevitable disappointments.

We've moved on. Garrett has already put in his vote for our next reality restaurant. Any guesses?



It figures.


* Really. If you go to the trouble of painting the primitive sketches and hanging the bones on the walls, you might reconsider the 80s and 90s mix. "If You Don't Know Me By Now" and animal skins should share a venue only if Ricky Gervais is involved.

Although, on second thought, Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" probably did have a place on the hit list.