Concerts at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa

We have season tickets with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Pinchas Zukerman. For several years we have been subscribing first in Rome at the Accademia Santa Cecilia to the symphonic season at the Auditorium del Parco della Musica off Via Flaminia, now back in Ottawa we continue with our attendance at concerts.

This past Thursday 26 April, the night of game 7 between the Ottawa Senators and the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden, we went to the concert. It was presented by Eric Friesen, who has been a host of several musical programs on the CBC. Eric has one of those melodious voices of the classical radio announcers of years gone by and is a very good interviewer and an elegant presenter. On stage with Maestro Zukerman, he interviewed him asking about the pieces we were about to hear. Zukerman did a wonderful job of speaking about the pieces and what to look for in each one. It made the experience all the more interesting. We heard, a first for the Orchestra, Franz Joseph Haydn, Symphony no.70 in D major, followed by Mozart, Piano Concerto no.9 Jeune Homme played by Garrick Ohlsson. During the short interview by Friesen of Ohlsson, the pianist explained that the titled Jeune Homme is not correct, apparently Mozart wrote this piece for a lady who was probably Hungarian and whose family name was spelled something like Gynomie and it became with time Jeune Homme.

Finally we had Mozart's symphony no. 36 Linz which was composed in 3 days. A letter written from  Linz by Mozart to his father in Salzburg explains that since he had no symphony music with him, he decided on the spur of the moment to simply compose this symphony in four movements and present it to Count Thun at a concert a few days later in November 1783. According to Maestro Zukerman, this was a novelty at the time and showed how Mozart was a forward thinker, probably 100 years ahead of his time.

We plan to also get Ballet and theatre season tickets for the Fall. So we should be quite busy all around.
But this is what you have to do here in Ottawa. We are also members now of the 3 big museums, The National Gallery, The Museum of Civilizations, The War Museum.  

chicken, Prokofiev and humanist painting in Venice

You may well ask what on earth has chicken and Prokofiev have in common or paintings from Venice for that matter. Well it was the weekend, I decided to go and get a chicken for roasting with some sage. Again buying a whole chicken in Rome requires some attention, there are several varieties. Some are plump others look skinny, some are called Ruspante (free-range), other bio, some are produced by large companies and then sometimes local farmers sell to butchers directly. What you will see is a clear preference by shoppers for chickens raised in a yard and eating pretty much what they find on the ground, very old fashion. Chickens can like the many variety of tomatoes on the market and all have very different uses, so if you want to roast a chicken to eat you will buy that type description on label, for soup stock another type, I did find out that if you only want to make stock you cannot buy just any chicken and then throw the bones in a pot, the chicken raised for stock making is tough and can be fatty and not tender. So this time I made sure I bought the right type of roasting chicken, in this recipe I simply put a lot of sage leaves under the skin, a carrot and one coarsely chopped onion inside and simply rub some olive oil on the skin. Sage can be substitute for slices of truffle, it is really very nice.

Brunch at the restaurant of the Chiostro del Bramante, very good. In fact I can say after many years in Rome that they serve the best bacon and eggs in the city.

On Saturday evening we went to hear the orchestra of the Accademia Santa Cecilia under the baton of maestro Vasily Petrenko (34) and singer Ekaterina Semenchuk with the Choir of the Accademia performing the work Aleksander Nevsky by Sergei Prokofiev. This is the music of the film by Sergei Eisenstein. What a delight, I wish I could find the words of the work, so I could read what they were singing about, though there was an excellent synopsis of the story in the program.

the tall cypresses around the Mausoleum of Emperor Augustus and his family.

Then on Sunday morning we went to the Chiostro del Bramante on Via della Pace near Piazza Navona to see an exhibit of painting by great Venician painters like Titian, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Bordone, Pisanello, Veranese, Tiziano and Tiepolo. The Chiostro was built in 1500 by Donato Bramante the great rival of MichaelAngelo and the favorite architect of Pope Julius II. A little aside here, did you know that MichaelAngelo only actually designed the drum of the dome of St-Peter and not the whole church as is often said by guides. The Basilica took 100 years to build and MichaelAngelo was very old when he got involved.

Piazza Navona at 3pm on Sunday afternoon.

Piazza del Popolo at 4pm on Sunday.

Again a wealth of riches and very interesting with its mix of religious and lay subjects covering the period between 1460 to 1760, for Venice a period of great commercial wealth and power followed by a period of deep schism with the Papacy in Rome over the appointments of Bishops, creating an isolation from Europe for the Serenissima and finally slowly its eclipse and fall with the arrival of the French army of Napoleon. From Humanist painting to the  mannerist style to the baroque.  It complemented well the exhibition on Il Bronzino we saw in Florence a week ago. With the development of affluent and powerful families who wanted portraits of themselves, painters now had another outlet, previously the Church had a virtual monopoly on painters and what they could paint. It is interesting to see through the late Middle Ages to early Renaissance how taste changed. Technique and style also improved greatly, the exhibit was arranged in chronological order so that you could see the evolution, say between 1480 and 1523 quite a difference, refinements in the work and the subject, no longer the flat austere tableaux.
It is also nice to see painters getting away from the tedium of religious art, seriously how many Madonna and Child or crucifixion can one look at, after a while it all looks the same.

Another beautiful day in Rome.