MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC

This morning we had a fascinating lecture on Czech music from plainchant to the present.

Our instructor was wonderful. He's an American who moved here in 1992 or so for a year to study early Czech music and forgot to go home. I learned a lot. 

Since we are going to see Don Giovanni tonight, our guide asked  that he spend extra time on Mozart. Yawn. This group is really a bunch of music lovers and they already know everything they ever wanted to know about Mozart. They are mostly all opera fans. When the talk turns to opera, everybody has their favorites, they know singers, conductors, scores, libretti, and probably costume designers. 

They all know I'm a musician, so the other day they were talking about opera and there must have been some REALLY obscure fact that no one in the group knew, (I wasn't in the group) and I heard someone say, "oh, Alex probably knows."  I'm the least likely person to have a clue about it. Apparently, though, it proves the point that if you keep your mouth shut, nobody knows you're an idiot. 

I walked up to the castle hill in the afternoon which is not very far from our hotel and listen to the musicians and checked out all the tsachkas vendors were selling on the bridge.  

Don Giovanni turned out to be a lot of fun, and someways and very interesting and others. It was done in modern dress sort of nouveau Italian. Very sparse scenery and people dressed all alike. You know how easy that makes it for me to tell people apart. But I did manage to stay through the whole thing and even enjoyed the second half. Of course there were things I missed since I had a couple of naps during the first half