Here’s an overdue posting on my tour in Spain with conductor Harold Rosenbaum and his Canticum Novum touring choir, in late June/early July. An experience well worth having, though a seemingly renegade planet Mercury in retrograde ruled much of the trip, especially the first half. Whoever thought a small planet that looks like it’s moving backwards for a while, in the mellow sign of Cancer, yet, could be so snarky??
Things began inauspiciously. (But do stay tuned.) The flight from JFK to Madrid took something like 31 hours, not to mention 4 traffic jams on my own way from the stormy Hudson Valley to JFK in the first place. Like hundreds of other planes in the air that night (June 28), poor takeoff/landing weather at JFK delayed flights not only at that airport, but had a ripple effect literally around the world. In our case – “us” being about 25 singers and a few spouses or traveling companions – we missed our connecting flight at Heathrow, and were delayed almost 12 hours till we were placed on another one. Parenthetically, after many experiences with Heathrow in recent years, I decided after this trip that I’ll do almost anything to avoid flying to, through, or out of the place ever again. (For one alternative to using Heathrow, you used to be able to go to Google Maps, I think it was, and ask for driving directions from, say, the Empire State Building in NYC to Westminster Abbey in London. When you got to the Atlantic Ocean, the directions said, “Swim 3400 miles.” Alas, someone seems to have fixed that bit of fun.) Flying British Air’s off my list too, despite their super in-flight movie system.
After exploring the myriad delights of Heathrow instead of Madrid for our entire first day abroad, we deplaned in Madrid around midnight, Spanish time, and watched the baggage carousel turn. And turn. About 6 of our group caught the brass ring that night; the rest of us had to make do with what we’d crammed into our carry-ons. The lost luggage trickled in during the trip, a few pieces at a time, following us from town to town, or in some cases waiting to catch up with its owners till well after they’d returned to the States! But we may have been among the luckier ones after all: the day after I got my suitcase, which was already 5 days into the tour, there was a newspaper item reporting that over 20,000 bags were still languishing in Heathrow from flights on June 28th, waiting to be routed to their owners.
A haiku I wrote at the time, in tribute to Heathrow/BA’s baggage handling skills:
On the BArdo plane
A carousel of lost bags
Twirls, awaiting us.
(© Danielle Woerner 2007)
Our first real day in Madrid was also a concert night. We got a brief overview of the city in the morning by bus. During the afternoon, a number of us went to the main museums. I’d never seen the Prado, and some of the best surprises awaited at the nearby Reine Sophia museum, across the plaza. The Reine Sophia is a contemporary art museum – though housed in an older-style building – with a lovely sculpture garden in its midst. There I gained a new appreciation for Dali, many of whose canvases are in the permanent collection. When I was 12 or 13 I first discovered him, along with Tschelichew, the films of Fellini, and others who were bending the boundaries of perception & logic. Then I “outgrew” the Surrealists, as it were. OK, point made. But at the museum, viewing Dali’s paintings close up, I was arrested by his work on a different level: the flawless technique and exquisite attention to detail. Even in a cluster of ants, every tiny creature is rendered to a fare-thee-well; and his paintings’ surfaces have a perfect eggshell-like sheen that makes the colors glow in a way you don’t see in reproductions. Loved the sculptures of Pablo Gargallo, in which empty space is often as weighty as the heavy metal that defines the shapes. Many are fairly small: head-sized 3-D masks. See a few examples of his work at
http://www.ac-creteil.fr/arp/Pages/2006/C5_MUSEE/PAGES/ETRANGER/ETRANGER.html
Also enjoyed an exhibit of paintings by Le Corbusier. Not so many were architectural in subject matter; more of them were of people, especially of large women. The Spanish do seem to like big women! Botero sculptures in public landscapes also celebrate a much more Rubenesque standard of beauty.
Speaking of Rubens – a painter I’d never spent much time with before—I was blown away by the collection of his paintings in the Prado. His stunning use of light is so different on the real canvases than in repros, again. One of my favorite examples “in person” was a huge canvas of St. George slaying the dragon, in which the horse’s mane flows and glows with supernatural beauty:
http://museoprado.mcu.es/icuadro_junio_2003.html
Then there’s that cliché for zaftig female beauty. In the paintings themselves, “Rubenesque” is not just pinkly rounded in a sort of baroque-airbrush perfection. Since limericks are a tradition of this tour group—traditionally written during the trip and then shared on the last night’s dinner—I’ll include one of mine on this subject.
Some say P. Paul Rubens was bawdy,
But his light-filled palette’s never gaudy,
And his women’s flesh,
Sometimes dimpled and stretched,
Is refreshingly like a real body.
(© Danielle Woerner 2007)
Goya was of course another master of light and shadow, in a starker vein. It was extraordinary to see the Prado’s collection. We were to see other Goyas in one of our later stops on the tour, Zaragoza, where the Basilica of St. Pilar contains a ceiling fresco as well as at least one canvas by this master.
A rehearsal was also squeezed into Saturday, before our evening concert at a lovely old church, the COLEGIATA DE SAN ISIDRO. One of our members was fluent enough in Spanish to announce the program to our audience, since the programs were packed in our music director’s missing suitcase, and to explain to the audience the somewhat rag-tag appearance of the chorus: shirts of many colors mingling with those of us who’d managed to pack the regulation concert black into our carry-on bags; our conductor in sneakers; shared folders of music. We gave a good concert despite not having slept more than a few hours in 2 days.
Our program was an audience-friendly mix of choral, solo and duet material, including sacred and secular pieces: William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices, Spanish folk songs, African-American spirituals, Mozart, and more. This was my first time singing Spanish canciones to an all-Spanish audience – the other soloists were doing Rossini, Purcell and the like – and I’d seen my Spanish-music coach, Pablo Zinger, before I left New York, to “brush up my Cervantes,” as Cole Porter might have put it. My solos on the tour were by 2 Joaquins, Nin and Rodrigo, and they were greeted enthusiastically (no doubt for the effort if not the perfection of singing in the audience’s own language). All our concerts on the tour received standing ovations—our audiences were very warm and welcoming, across the board. After this concert, the choir director of the church came back to greet us and we had a lovely if simple chat amid kisses on both cheeks for us.
People had said to me before I left, as I despaired over having little time to assimilate any spoken Spanish, “Oh, don’t worry; everyone in Spain speaks English.” Hah! Maybe in the south, where lots of Britons vacation and eventually move to escape the rising damp of the UK. I was glad I’d added a little more Spanish to my spoken repertoire, because in the cities we traveled to—even in tourist offices and museums, where you’d expect extra language fluency—very few people seem to habla more than a few words of Ingles. I’m always game to jump in where angels fear to tread, so I tended to persevere with my muy poquito Español, and had some lovely encounters with shopkeepers, passers-by and others.
One thing I found very interesting was that, despite learning the basic differences among Castilian and other forms of Spanish pronunciation, it was tremendously variable within Spain itself. My mouth had just gotten used to pronouncing all my Z’s as th’s, for instance, as a natural speech gesture—quite important in our third stop on the tour, Zaragoza—when we got to Barcelona, and a whole other set of usages with z’s, s’s, c’s and so forth prevailed. Not to mention that, depending on whom you spoke with in Madrid, Bilbao (where Basque is the true native language) and Zaragoza, the pronunciation could be markedly different from person to person. At least that allowed for some “foreigner” variation! Another interesting phenom was that a fair number of Spanish people are French-fluent, so it was sometimes possible to bypass both our mother tongues in order to be understood.
Part 2 will follow in the next couple of days. Hasta la vista! Danielle
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