Nov 17 to Dec 5

Happy Chanukkah!

Last night, we pulled out our how-to-be-Jewish book, lit our first two candles, and had chinese sweet and sour chicken for dinner. Hurray! In the past few weeks, we got to go to a concert by the touring Duquesne University Chamber Singers (And meet the famed Mrs. Jordanoff and Ben Murray, people Melanie knew from PA but I did not), and see the inside of Karlskirche, a really neat, large church that tends to charge admission to see inside. We sang Happy Birthday to my mother over Skype (Happy Birthday, mom!), and we had a few Thanksgivings and met some of the expat community.

In Music land, we went to Tiefland at the Volksoper (Not so hot, 0-1-0 Volksoper), L'Elisir D'Amore (traditional staging, funny, great acting, great singing, just great, 7-3-2 Staatsoper), most of the final dress rehearsal to Boris Godunov (Feruccio Furlanetto is pimptacular, and an insanely complicated opera in Russian about Russian history is very difficult to understand without subtitles, but we'll probably see it for real next week, and so it gets a premature good rating, 8-3-2 Staatsoper).

We saw three concerts at the Musikverein, one including Berg's 7 Early Songs (Good singer, bad together-ness with orchestra, 0-1-0 Musikverein), one with Strauss's 4 Last Songs (Good singer, good orchestra, not alltogether blown away, but still 1-1-0 Musikverein), and one of a weird benefit concert for a Japanese choir where they sang Wiener/Japanese songs with a famous Japanese soprano (weird) and then Beethoven's 9th (good! 2-1-0 Musikverein).

Melanie sang a concert with the students in her studio and did an excellent job, I have an audition today for a baroque opera that goes up November 2008, and I have a masterclass next week with Malcolm Martineau, where I shall sing Schubert's "An Silvia" (woot), and we both have a Christmas benefit concert for kids with Down Syndrome next week (our first paid gig in Wien!). In school, we're hacking away at getting our scenes staged (6 for Mel, 4 for me), and learning rep for our Lied/Oratorio class.

Last weekend, Meredith came over from Berlin and we had a blast. We went to a concert, to a couple of cafés, went through a few packs of second-hand cafe smoke, ate foods, had some Christmas punch (Wien is full of little advent markets with hot punch stands everywhere), went to the zoo (Vienna's zoo is *GREAT*. A+ gold star. Highly recommended), and generally had a great weekend. Yay Meredith!

We're going home (both of them) in 2.5 weeks. Come say hi!

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