The mess will expand to fill the space available…
Archive for the ‘Architecture’ Category
The Law of Mess
24
Mar
The Yurt in Hana
05
Dec
Jane and I headed out to Hana for the weekend at the yurt. With our faithful, fat gaurd-cat standing watch over the home fortress we took off on Friday morning and returned late Sunday…
Click to enlarge -our yurt
Click to enlarge -Our view
Italian opera, set in Italy [finally] and performed in Czeck Republic
27
Mar
Conductor's Score -click me
We didn’t intend it but we ended up saving the best for last. Tosca was fantastic, the opera hall was magnificent and the staging, sets and seats were the best yet! We had bought the tickets while still in Hawaii so had long forgotten they were the fabled third row center seats yet again. This time center meant that the conductor was exactly 8′ in front of my seat! So close in fact that I could resist walking up front between acts and taking a picture of his score. It felt like quite an honor to be able to see it, setting on its lit podium, baton at the ready just to its right. Click the image and scroll to the side [if needed] to see it all, I thought it was way cool -to use a particularly non-opera-like phrase… What the picture didn’t really capture well enough were his margin notes and like, also way cool!
Neo-Rococo baby! you got to click it to dig it
Anyway, the theater, built in 1888, has had music directors such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and hosted untold numbers of “meistersingers” . The interior was quite elaborate and in every direction features some carving or relief of angels on high. Neo-Rococo to be precise, over-the-top.
And then there’s Puccini! He was being roundly toasted across Italy in 1895 for his success with the opera Manon Lescaut while at the same time ignoring some friendly gooses from his peer Giuseppe Verdi urging him to move forward with Tosca. Why, because he was up to his ears finishing La Boheme. He finally wrapped that up by the
click 4 detail
end of the year and started in earnest on Tosca in 1896. It took him 4 years to finish the score and get it to the stage where, in its first performance in January of 1900 – in Rome, it was hailed as an instant success. To this day it remains the most performed of all of Puccini operas and is right up there with Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Aida… La Boheme will always be my favorite opera but Tosca is indeed absolutely wonderful. Right from the start of the first act there are glorious melodies that Puccini carries through all three acts [click the speaker icon below to here one], better still, if you don’t own it buy it or, at the very least, buy the highlights of it. You’ll be surprised how much of it you recognize, even if you’re an opera newbie… Many of Puccini’s scenes in Tosca are not sung at all but rather expressed musically -with no vocalization. These melodies are of course familiar as strains of them are from the duets that populate the entire opera.
While the pictures of the stage are not worth it, they save me at least 1,000 words on set design, the shots there are from the final bows by Conductor Martin Otava, Tosca [Jordanka Derilova] and Cavaradossi [Tomas Cerny] Click here to see some pictures of the interior and the set…
What a wonderful part of the trip these operas have been and this really was the best of them all!
- Recondita armonia from Act I of “Tosca”
and after that, it was our last day 
Prague Castle
26
Mar
Construction on Prague Castle started in 870A.D. and has found Kings of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperors and presidents of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic using it for their offices. The Bohemian Crown Jewels are kept here, though what was on display here today were replicas from 40 years ago… According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Prague Castle is the largest coherent castle complex in the world with an area of almost 70000 m²! The Prague Castle has been rebuilt so many times over the centuries, it virtually represents every architectural style of the last millennium. There are some pictures here and a bunch more in 3D coming soon to a screen near you…
We also took in a special museum for Cailey Brooks and Bill Laufman, the Barbie and Toy Museum. Cailey you would have LOVED this place, it had 1,000 Barbie and Ken dolls, I tried to take some pictures of the ones I knew you would have liked the most, especially the Princesses! Bill, you would have loved this place too, I spotted a number of things you’ve got and perhaps another thousand you don’t. Those are all in a Barbie gallery here
Finally, today’s bonus attraction is a small collection of stained glass windows from the Prague Castle and from Bruges..
We’re off shortly to meet a friend of mine from Scottsdale for, what sounds like it might be an off-the-menu feast prepared by a Pakistani friend of his, Mafooz, that has a restaurant here. We’ll see… either way it is always nice to see Mike…
Lovin’ Praha!
25
Mar
Firstly, Thanks DE, Andel Apartments is great and in a great neighborhood! So far pretty typical touisty kinds of stuff, 
but, true to form also found some good eateries and last night’s score, the oldest Jazz club in the world, from 1200! Not sure how they figure it to be the oldest jazz club in the world, as it predates the invention of jazz by 800 years! But that’s OK, it was fun. No cover, and not pushy wait staff. The 4 piece band was really very good. They played a George Benson tune –even though none of them played guitar so during their break I told them a friend of ours make GB’s guitars and the drummer got all excited and starting saying, George Benson it is number one, and Earth Wind and Fire, it is number one too!!
Also fun, we ordered a Multipuciano last night, we watched as the waiter conferred with 3 others when trying to find the bottle and they brought us a 2001 Brunello di Montalcino –perhaps a $100 bottle, I asked the price and he said 690 Crowns –about $25 then he asked if that was OK or that was too much, we told him it was OK and ordered two — Left him a huge tip to settle off the karmic tab
Italian Opera, set in Egypt, performed in Austria
21
Mar
The tickets for Verdi’s opera Aida were listed as sold out.. Our only option was to buy a pair from a street vendor. Clearly this was a safe bet, the scalpers here dress like Mozart or Hayden, how wrong could it go?? There is a small cadre of these vendors lurking under the arches of the opera house and in the shadows of all the more venerable churches around town willing to help put you in a seat at the concert, symphony, opera or requiem of your choice… It is the free enterprise system, alive and well, capitalism.. buy low, sell really really high! Laugh all the way home…
No matter, it lent to the adventure and they did indeed turn out to be legitimate tickets — just about 100 meters from the North Pole. It was still magic and the acoustics were superb! The opera hall itself was very nice, not as lavish or stylized as others we’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy, but certainly grand in its own way. That said, the front of the opera house, the lobbies, the grand salon, the main stairs and lounges were all on par with the nicest houses anywhere. Marble, ornately carved, flowing up to ornate ceiling treatments and wall portraits of the great musical patriarchs of Vienna adorned most of the lounges and mail hall… There were no shortage of frescoes either and gold or crystal chandeliers hung everywhere. The chandelier in the hall itself was easily 30′ or more across, each piece looked to be the size of a baseball!
There are a handful of pictures here, but my favorite of them all is below. I thought the folks in the box across the theater looked right out of a painting and indeed was able to capture the effect perfectly!
click to appreciate
Vienna
19
Mar
Vienna is nothing if not resplendent with churches. First we saw yesterday was St. Stephan’s Cathedral was built on the site of two old churches, which is so often the case and has been a regular place of worship since the early 1100s! It is this insanely ornate mixture of Romanesque and Gothic architecture. I think it is the Gothic that floats my boat so much… I am reading a pulp fiction type novel that has, like Dan Brown, made great use of real information on churches and architecture. Just about 50 pages ago it told me that the word Gothic comes from the Greek work Goetic, which translates to magic. Such architecture was considered magical -at the time, like nothing ever seen before, with thin ribbing, flying buttresses, the impossible heights… It gave the impression of weightlessness… Well, that’s exactly what it is like wal
king through these giant edifices. They reach halfway to heaven and the waste nothing during the trip. The columns are used like alters them selves, see some of the first few pictures.. Pictures here
Lunch at a Greek place was great, but way to much food!
Then St. Peter’s in Vienna, amazingly ornate and again built on the site of older and long gone churches going back to pre-Vienna days when this was but a Roman camp called Vindobona. They have held daily high mass here for over 1600 years! Check out the bones of a martyr they snagged from the Roman catacombs in 1733 in the glass reliquary! This is not painted wood either like some of the other churches here, this is all carved marble and granite.
Dozens of fresh handmade pastas in the Naschmarkt
Then we remember the Naschmarkt that was right in the neighborhood Still a fun stroll, but wished we remembered it before going Greek…………
