Month: July 2007

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Arrivederci, Italia

So I’ve been back in the U.S. for 4 days now, and I haven’t written anything since the blackout last week because A) there is so much to write and B) I don’t want to admit that I’m not in Italy anymore. I really fell in love with that country, and I definitely want to go back someday (preferably when I’ve gotten a little more fluent with the language).

The last few days of the festival flew by, mostly because there was so much drama in and around the whole town. The Unicorn concert that had been rescheduled because of the blackout went very well, although our clarinetist was ill from food poisoning and did not play the first movement of the piece. Apparently (and this is rumor, so take it with a grain of salt), because the orchestra hadn’t been getting paid, they couldn’t even afford the cafeteria food they had been getting, and so some of the orchestra members, including our clarinetist, ate some tainted food that they had brought with them.

I don’t believe I mentioned this before, but the festival hired a Ukranian orchestra to do the job because they were super cheap and would work with no breaks (man, that irks me!). They drove for 4 days, 24 hours/day, from the Ukraine to Italy. They stayed in the police barracks and ate cafeteria food, and even though they were getting paid less than us (and that’s saying something), they still were getting paid a good half year’s salary by just playing in this little 3-week festival. They endured countless hours of abuse from conductors that only spoke English to them (their only translator was the concertmaster, who sort of paraphrased in two or three words what the conductor would rage in four or five sentences).

(Actually, a side note on that: it really amused me how the conductors would speak slower and louder English as if that would make any difference. At least our conductor, when he had to work with the orchestra, got an Italian-Russian translator, and spoke only Italian to the orchestra during rehearsal and only in small phrases, asking the interpreter to translate phrase by phrase. See, that’s actually communicating, not yelling in a foreign language and hoping that the orchestra will respond)

As if that didn’t make the situation dire enough, the technical staff decided to strike (they hadn’t been paid in 45 days), so our second rehearsal with orchestra for the finale concert was without light for about 20 minutes until someone figured out how to turn the lights on. Our conductor for the finale concert was less than empathetic with the situation, saying at one point to the orchestra during the dress rehearsal, “Are we going to make music, or are we going to strike?” This is after the food poisoning situation, and keeping in mind that the orchestra has been working nonstop since they arrived, with no days off and very few breaks. He made all of us in the chorus very angry, and not just for that one comment.

The day of the finale, Francis Menotti held a press conference in the middle of the day and said that he still didn’t have the money to pay anyone. He then begged those people who hadn’t been paid to do the concert for free, for the memory of his father. There was a little town meeting in which the orchestra members aired their grievances against the festival and some tourists showed support for the festival, and in which Francis blamed the festival for holding the money ransom because they want him to step down. It was a whole political to-do, and although I understood less than half of what was being said, we had a couple people sitting with us translating the gist of the conversations. The press conference came to a close with no firm answer of whether or not we were going to have a concert that night.

In fact, we did not know if the concert was going up until about 20 minutes before the concert started. I was so sure it wasn’t going to happen that I actually bet 5 cents (that’s Euro cents, so it’s about 8 American cents!) that we would have no concert. Alas, the show went on, and I am now 5 cents poorer.

Before the concert could start, though, the stagehands marched on stage and made an announcement in front of the TV cameras that were there to broadcast the concert. They reiterated that they had not been paid for 45 days, but that they were going to work the concert for the memory of Giancarlo Menotti. They wanted to show that they were the bigger people than the politicos that were holding their money to force Francis out.

Of course, the next day, which was Monday, they had clearly still not gotten paid because the stage and all the chairs in the piazza had not been broken down. I had dinner near the Duomo and saw all the stagehands have a meeting on the stage…I sure hope they are able to get paid! The bus company that had picked us up from Rome was now on strike because they hadn’t gotten paid, and so our manager found a private company to take us back to Rome. We were lucky…I believe it’s that same bus company that was scheduled to take the orchestra members back to the Ukraine, and who knows if they made it back?

On Tuesday morning, all the choristers got on the privately hired bus and started the 24-hour trip home. First the bus back to Rome, and then a flight from Rome to Paris (which half of us almost didn’t get on because of a travel agent mix-up and some surly ticketing agents), running to catch our connecting flight from Paris to JFK (we got an escort to make sure we got through the shorter lines at security), and then a bus from JFK to Philadelphia (we got another idiotic bus driver who got lost on the turnpike and decided to take a detour through Newark Airport. How do you get lost on the NJ Turnpike? It only goes two ways!).

Piazza del Mercato
But besides the actual travel part of the trip, I really enjoyed myself in Italy. Now that I am back, I’ve been busy organizing and storing all my photos onto my computer, so you finally get to see some of the places I’ve been talking about.

This first picture shown is the Piazza del Mercato, where I stayed. The building on the far right side of the picture was my apartment building, and the open window above the awning was my window. Every afternoon, a group called Concerto Strauss (or as one of my roommates called it, “The Lawrence fricking Welk Orchestra”) would start playing cheesy opera tunes and fun waltzes, making me feel like I was living on an opera set. I thought that maybe if I looked out of my window, perhaps I could see Musetta in the cafe across the street, or perhaps the commedia troupe would be coming around the bend, with Canio and Nedda at the fore.

Caffé Collicolla
This next picture is of the Caffé Collicolla, where everyone always gathered before rehearsal. The people who ran the cafe were so sweet, and I’m sure they were happy to have us spend all our money on coffee at their shop. Too bad they didn’t have gelato, because we would have bought it there!

There were some high school exchange students who also spent some time at Collicolla early in the morning, and one of them painted a picture very similar to this photo. I was inspired so much by her painting that I decided to take a picture of the porch of the cafe, empty because it was riposa (nap time) and at the heat of the day. The cafe stayed open through riposa, which was great, but they did close their doors and turn the AC on.

So that concludes my adventures in Italy. Actually, there are many more stories, but I think I must keep my eye on what adventures are to come. And I definitely know I want to go back to Italy, only next time I’ll bring Ray along with me.

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Blackout

A couple of nights ago, one of our concerts was postponed because the entire town of Spoleto lost electricity.  The concert (which is now rescheduled for tonight) was actually one of my favorite pieces we’ve been working on here, and all of us were extremely sad to have it canceled, so we are very excited to be able to perform tonight.

The venue for this concert is at the Rocca, a castle at the top of Spoleto where Lucrezia Borgia lived, and also where one of the popes in the Renaissance was also rumored to have lived for a time.  The Rocca is gorgeous!  Not only do you have a fantastic view of Umbria, but the walls are full of frescoes (mostly intact) and several lovely courtyards, one of which we are using for the concert.  Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain!  I don’t want the concert to be canceled again!!

When it became clear that night that the electricity problem in Spoleto wouldn’t be solved any time soon, we gathered in the Piazza del Duomo and sang an impromptu concert on the porch of the Duomo.  TV cameras were already there because of the blackout, and they ate up the fact that we just spontaneously started singing.  I have to admit, it was pretty cool.  We could only get a couple songs out before the sun finally set, and then we just couldn’t see anything, so we had to stop.

After that, we all dispersed to go find something to do in the dark.  A couple friends and I went to a restaurant, where they had torches and candles brightly burning on the deck.  The kitchen obviously wasn’t fully working, so they gave us large portions of everything that was going to go bad due to lack of refrigeration:  huge hunks of cheese, mixed vegetables (raw as an antipasto, and then grilled veggies for me as a first course).  My friends had the same, only they had grilled meat for their dinner.

The electricity came back sometime around midnight, and there was much rejoicing outside my window at the Piazza del Mercato.

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A Roman Holiday (senza Audrey Hepburn)

Yesterday, I decided to use my day off to go to Rome with a couple friends (for the purposes of this blog, I’ll call them the Canadian and Georgia Boy).  We planned to go to the Vatican Museum in the morning (one of my friends had a brochure that advertised a tour starting at 9:15, before the museum is open to the public), so we got up really early to take a 5:57 AM train into Rome.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at 8:30, at the meeting point advertised in the brochure, there were no tour guides at all (this actually didn’t surprise me, since I had checked out the website on the brochure, which was nonexistent, and I had tried to send an email to the address listed on the brochure and it bounced back to me).  Undaunted, we started walking around the line that had already spanned about two city blocks, even an hour and a half before opening.  We figured there had to be some tour guides hawking the crowd, getting people to skip the line and go in the group entrance.

No such luck.  We arrived at the museum entrance and found another line going in, this one clearly of tour groups, since many of them were dressed alike or had little walkie-talkies around their necks so to better hear their tour guides.  That line wrapped around the city walls from the opposite direction than the general public line, so we decided to try to find the end of that queue and possibly get onto a tour there.

The tour group line was even longer than the public line, spanning about 8 city blocks.  By the time we found the end, we were halfway around Vatican City from where we had started, and there were no tour hawkers to be seen.  Frustrated, we decided to just walk the rest of the way around the wall to St. Peter’s Square (where the Pope comes out and blesses people on Wednesdays).  We realized that since Vatican City is a different country than Italy, we actually walked around an entire country.  What an accomplishment!  But we still weren’t inside the Vatican, which irritated us.

When we reached St. Peter’s Square, we stopped to take lots of pictures.  I remembered all my Western Civ classes in high school, where we learned that Bernini ushered in the Baroque era by building this oval piazza, a far cry from the classical straight lines and perfect circles.  We decided while we were there to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, which houses Michelangelo’s famous Pietà (the first sculpture to actually show emotion on Mary’s face).  After going through the metal detectors (we were entering another country, after all!) and passing the clothing police (those wearing tank tops and skirts or shorts above the knee were not allowed inside and had to wait sheepishly against the wall for their friends), we waited in another line to get into the church itself.

The Canadian saw a sign pointing to the tombs of the popes and noted that there was no line to go there, so we followed him down the stairs.  We passed all sorts of sarcophagi and marble plaques of long-dead popes (and even not-so-long-dead:  we walked by John Paul II’s headstone, decorated with fresh flowers and flanked by two guards who had roped off an area for folks to pray and mourn).  We were kind of wandering from room to room until we found one room that had no sarcophagi at all, but whose walls and ceilings were painted with all sorts of Baroque pictures and designs.  At the end of the room was a tiny, almost hidden, marble staircase, and the Canadian (those Canadians are so resourceful!) said, “Hey, this staircase isn’t roped off.  Let’s see what’s up here.”

We walked up the stairs, and lo and behold, we were in St. Peter’s Basilica.  How’s that for a back entrance?

The basilica took my breath away!  Everything in the church is made either of bronze, gold, or marble.  They allowed us to take pictures in the church, and it was hard to actually find one thing to photograph, since every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling was a work of art.  I did manage to get some nice pictures, though, and I can’t wait to get home to put them all on my computer.

When we got out of St. Peter’s, we took a look at the public line for the Vatican Museum and saw that it had nearly tripled in size since we had seen it at 8:30 (it was close to 11 at this point).  We regrouped and although the Canadian really wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, none of us really wanted to wait in line for hours for it.  We decided to go across town to the ancient part of the city, since I really wanted to see the Colosseum.

Since the Canadian had already seen the Colosseum last week, he decided to hang out in the shade while Georgia Boy and I took the tour.  Our tour guide was terrible!  She spoke English, but her accent was so strong (I still couldn’t place it…it definitely wasn’t Italian) that even with the little walkie-talkies they provided, I couldn’t understand half of what she said.  And whenever she tried to get dramatic, her accent got even stranger, and Georgia Boy and I kept giggling at her speech patterns.

Language barriers aside, I also feel like she was going through the motions in our tour.  Having given tours myself when I was in Newport, Rhode Island (granted, I was in costume and in character), I know when someone is tuning out and just parroting facts.  And boy, was she doing that.  And most of the facts she gave us was stuff I already knew from taking 3 years of Latin in high school, so I was really bored.  We had the option of getting a tour of the Palatine as well (that’s Caesar’s palace, the original one before Las Vegas), but both Georgia Boy and I had had enough of our tour guide, so we just wandered off to find the Canadian.

The sun was so hot and we found no relief in the shade, so we were all pretty cranky and not interested in walking around very much.  We walked over to the Circus Maximus (where the chariot races were…think Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur).  Unfortunately, the structure of the Circus Maximus is completely gone because in the Renaissance, the Roman citizens dismantled it to use the stones for houses.  All that’s left now is a grassy knoll with a huge track, but if you’ve got a good imagination, you can figure out what things might have looked like.  We took some pictures of the racetrack and Palatine Hill, and then we decided to call it a day.  It was time to take the metro back to the train station and get on the next train back to Spoleto.

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Concerts and more concerts

They have been keeping us busy here in Spoleto.  I am definitely working very hard for my money, and although this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes I wish our schedule could be a little less stressful.  The last three days have been full of rehearsals and concerts, all with only one or two hours of rest in between.  The worst of it was when we sang a concert at midnight and had to get up the next morning for an early morning mass.

Now that we have gotten several concerts under our belt, one would think the rehearsals would let up, but that is simply not the case, because we still have two more concerts to prepare for, each with different repertoire.  Today, though, we have only rehearsals, and I intend to relax a bit.  Tomorrow is our second day off, and I am going to go to Rome and take a tour of the Vatican…and hopefully I will get a chance to see the Coliseum as well.

In the meantime, though, I must away to another rehearsal and hope I still have some brain cells left to learn more music.

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Musings

On Monday, I went to Assisi, the home of St. Francis of Assisi, the guy who renounced his wealth and talked to animals.  My friend and I took Rick Steves‘ suggested walking tour of Assisi, which took us to some back roads and some gorgeous views of Umbria (I’ll post the pics when I get back home and put them all on my computer).

In addition to the St. Francis Basilica, there are several other churches of note, including the Santa Chiara church, dedicated to St. Clare, who started an order of nuns who are called the Poor Clares.  They also own an olive grove next to the church, ostensibly to provide them with a living.  I want to find the olive oil that those nuns are producing:  wouldn’t that be super extra virgin olive oil?

We weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside the church, but the frescoes (mostly by Giotto) were amazing and incredibly moving.  I walked up and down hills all day, so I was incredibly exhausted by the time I got to bed, and I managed to sleep the night through, despite the hordes of drunkards outside my window that make noise until 2 in the morning every night (I am living in a huge apartment with a gorgeous view of the Piazza del Mercato, which is incredibly centrally located, and has several bars right there in the piazza.  I can’t really complain about anything except the noise, which is excessive, but I guess that’s the price I pay).

Yesterday, we had our first concert, called Umbria Segreta, or “secret Umbria.”  It was about a half hour bus ride away, in an isolated church attached to a deconsecrated monestary-turned-hotel high atop a hill.  The view was gorgeous, and the church (not deconsecrated, so still no pictures were allowed) had some gorgeous frescoes as well (definitely pre-Giotto, though).

Spending the 4th of July outside of the United States is a very interesting experience.  I remember the last time I did so was in 1982, when I was with my dad on a cruise ship, and we were in Leningrad on the 4th of July.  Granted, yesterday’s experience could not be nearly as freaky as an 8-yr-old spending the 4th of July in the USSR (before we docked, I had a vision of the Russians angrily waving nuclear warheads at us on the docks…the only scary thing that really happened was that one of the guys in my dad’s band got strip-searched by the KGB on the way back to the ship because he exchanged his money on the black market).

But I think I kind of took for granted how special the 4th of July is to me until yesterday.  Yes, all the hoopla is a bit much, and sometimes it really seems more of a reason for stores to have sales than to celebrate our history.  But yesterday was just another day for the Italians.  Apparently in previous years, the festival had set up a big fireworks display in the field for the Americans in town, but they did nothing of the sort yesterday, and all I felt was alone and out of place and slightly homesick.

But today is a happier day…and I think when I get back to the U.S., I am going to celebrate my own Independence Day, even if it will be a couple weeks late.

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Sunday in Spoleto

View from the stage door of the Teatro Nuovo (where we rehearsed every day)

I have now been in Spoleto a week and am fairly comfortable wandering around the twists and turns of its steep and narrow streets without getting lost. Once again, I am on a little bit of a time crunch, but I wanted to give some of my impressions of this lovely Italian town.

The Spoletini (that’s what you call the natives) are incredibly friendly and warm. They don’t mind it a bit when you butcher their language while talking to them; they are just happy you are trying to speak Italian, unlike the other brutti Americani who think that if they speak English slowly and loudly, the Italians will understand them. I managed to purchase an international prepaid SIM card for my cell phone all by myself and entirely in Italian. The shopkeeper didn’t speak a lick of English, and I had forgotten to put my Italian-English dictionary in my bag, so we communicated with lots of hand gestures (the polite kind) and writing numbers down on paper.

Some of the shopkeepers, especially once they get to know you, will gently correct your grammar if you get it wrong, which I really appreciate, because I am in a constant state of absorption and learning while I am here. The other night, I was trying to get the check, and instead of saying, “il conto, per favore” (the bill, please), I thought I’d change it up by saying, “posso pagare?” (may I pay?). Unfortunately, I had had several glasses of wine, and I ended up saying, “posso piagare?” (may I whip?). Luckily for me, the waitress brought the bill. I hope she wasn’t scared of me.

Well, my time is up, and I must go to rehearsal now. I am hoping to write much more while I am here, because there is just so much that I am experiencing, and I just don’t want to forget a single thing!