8/2 The Britt Classical opening last night went smoothly and Teddy Abrams lived up to expectations – it is going to be an exciting season. I didn’t go but went to the dress rehearsal with Sooney, and again this morning with Pat and Nan. Beethoven’s 5th sound different from the first note, with no pause between the opening dat-dat-dat-dums. In rehearsal around the middle of the 2nd movement he gathered his music, hopped off the stage and went half way up to the stands and listened. The orchestra played smoothly to the end, like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He told them, on return, that he wasn’t goofing off but working, seeing how they sounded from up there. Teddy (everyone calls him that, from stagehands to Angela, Britt’s program director) has chosen to do several repertoire classics including The New World Symphony, Brahms 1st, Tchaikovsky’s 4th, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, along with contemporary works like Bela Fleck’s Concerto, Bernstein’s Prelude-Fugue-Riffs and his own composition. The season ends with Mahler’s 1st – I don’t think Mahler has been played since we moved here. It requires 20 more instruments than the usual 90. The orchestra sounds fabulous, the strings are vibrant and every solo is excellent. What a treat to have 1st class music like this every summer. Teddy is great to watch, very athletic and wholly IN the music. The orchestra has long been fine but now seems to have an added and exciting dimension.
And last night I watched an absolutely delightful movie on Netflix which I recommend without reservation. It’s called “If I Were You” and stars Marcia Gay Harden. She is one of those very special actresses whose films are always a treasure, like Joan Allen and Patricia Clarkson. A really entertaining movie and she turns in a bravura performance. It has a slow start but when it begins to move, it is full of unpredictable turns, funny and engaging.
8/10 The week has been so full and fast and wonderful I am both exhilerated and exhausted. Charlie arrived Friday in late morning and we got to rehearsal to hear the last 15 minutes of Brahms’1st . Then I had to rush off to Talent to see ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ because Annika was in it and Frances invited me to join her. Annika was in the chorus and sang and danced with vigor but it was hard to judge the range of her talent. She will be in ‘Fiddler’ and perhaps have a bigger role. A long first act was enough as it was pretty bad – hard for Phoenix Middle School to compete with the OSF!
Bela Fleck was the soloist that night, playing his concerto, and the hill was packed and everyone seemed to think it was great. But I found it disconcerting – a non-concerto, with a long banjo riff, then an orchestral interlude and this pattern repeated many times. There was no engagement between the soloist and the orchestra. I learned later that he doesn’t read music and the orchestral part was a translation through some guitar program. But the Brahms 1st was glorious, and made the evening thrilling.
I did not know that Charlie was on a gluten-free regime until she arrived. There was little in the house she could eat, and I am so ignorant I wouldn’t have known what to get for her. She scrounged and survived, spent the night with me and we went to rehearsal in the morning. And what an experience – Augustin Hadelich playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. We heard it again in the evening and both times it was indescribably wonderful. Being totally transported by music is a rare event, and both Charlie and I were in a daze, this artist is like no other. From the first lyrical theme we were caught in a magic aura, it is not possible to express what we felt in words. At the end there was a brief pause and then the audience roared, rising as one – what an ovation. After 5 curtain calls he played an encore – a Paganini Caprice that is a showpiece for violin, terribly difficult and in his hands it was superb. (Now 3 days later I still have that experience in my head, I simply can’t describe how singular it was.)
8/13 Last night there was a dinner party for 10 at Ilene’s, and what a memorable evening. Besides Jenny, Mac, and me there were viola players Monica and Mary, violinists Eric and Sandra, and horn players Shawn and Michael. I arrived around 6:30 and Ilene and Jenny were zipping around the kitchen preparing a feast. The wine began to flow and by the time dinner was served we were all slightly cockeyed, even tho we had already snacked on raw yellowfin tuna (flown in from the coast by her meat procurer), sliced very thin and served with pickled watermelon rind and shaved something. Somehow our chefs managed to do all the prep AND shower and dress and serve dinner outside around 7:30. We started with a creamy avocado confection that was really a cold soup topped with crab morsels. The main course was brisket roasted with beans and cherry tomatoes and accompanied by a marmalade with a ??? base, and veggies also roasted but very crisp and well seasoned. Dessert was a sort of ice cream-based chocolate mousse topped with figs. It was a gorgeous feast and rivaled Chez Panisse. The conversation started conventionally but somehow by dessert we got to experiences with ‘flashers’ and Mary recounted 4 or 5 hilarious ones, and was dubbed queen of flasher incidents. She called it ‘engaging with themselves’ and we took this phrase and played games with it. And then the conversation deteriorated further as they got into the foibles of the orchestra. Joseph, long-time friend whom Jenny first knew in Tucson, was the first subject. He is a comic, is gay, has no inhibitions and the stories about his antics were very raunchy and funny. This led to a discussion of the bass section, 7 strong and 6 of them males, whose first stand is 50ish, bald, big and paunchy and a marvelous player. But he has led them astray.They are into farting games while playing. And last night they were all attending their annual bean feast, prepping for the weekend concerts, and one doesn’t even want to know what the ambient air was like. The reason this came up is that the last row of violas is right in front of the row of basses and they are trying to come up with a shield of some sort against the stink emanating from the basses. Seems it’s bad enough to be a strong irritant and distraction for them. If that isn’t the most astonishing insight into orchestral monkeyshines. Who would ever think? The one woman bass player does not join in, which confirms an opinion we all have as to which is the superior sex. I left around 10:30 and they probably went on long after, as they were just warming up. I thanked them all for an elevating evening and got a roar of applause.
Mac arrived next day and it was lovely to see him back in good health and moving without apparent pain.
8/14-8/17 Lolly, Keith and Sam arrived Thursday in time to get to the Green Show and ‘Time for Three’. Then to supper on the creek at Sesame. I had soft-shelled crab, delicious. We did a ton of catching up and it was sooooo satisfying. At the rehearsal next morning Storm Large was very good and accompanied by 4 very fine baritones, none under 60. But a lot of the lyrics to Kurt Weill’s Seven deadly Sins got lost. Too bad, as it is quite a script. On Saturday ‘Time for Three’ did a fabulous concert, that sold-out, the first in Britt Classical history. The tickets were $5 and not $36, which probably helped. They did their own compositions with the orchestra and it was absolutely brilliant. This trio just gets better – they have fun and do some antics but musically they are faultless. One of the two violinists joined the orchestra next night for the Mahler 1st – his regular job is concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony. And that was a triumphant end to the season. Teddy is a truly marvelous conductor and seems to be able to handle any kind of music from Bach to Cage. And he is also an improv enthusiast and was out often at the local pubs after a concert playing with some of the orchestra members. He is Bernstein reincarnated.
8/15 The other big event, for me, was the installation of the EcoPost at North Mountain Park, my 90th birthday gift from family. All of us plus Jim and Vicki managed to fit in a visit between journeys to Jacksonville and were impressed. Thank you, family, for doing such a nifty thing. So let me tell you about it. Jim volunteered to engineer it and if he hadn’t, it would not have been done. He is a marvel with electronics and took it home right after it arrived, checked it out, said it was well made and that he could make it work. Each chip has 4 buttons, so can take 4 entries of up to 90 seconds, and we have two chips. So I decide to make on for year-round birds and the other for breeding migrants. The resident birds I chose were Northern Flicker, Song Sparrow, Black-capped Chickadee and Robin. I found the Macauley Sound Library at Cornell and that was a big bonus. It has multiple songs and calls of all the North American birds online for free. And they are starred according to their worth. I chose only 4 star recordings and Jim downloaded them. Then I wrote a short script for each one. Jim knows sikkum about birds, I am a dunce about anything that plugs in, and we are both very fussy about our fields. So working together went very smoothly as there was no crossover! Then we tried to record in his studio. It did not work, even after he draped me and the door and windows with blankets there was a hollow sound. So he called his friend Jim Abdo who lives a few blocks away and is a recording artist with a world-class studio. He and Jim used to work together and apparently he thinks he owes Jim heavily (not at all surprising, don’t we all ???). So even tho he was working somewhere he dropped everything and said to meet him at home in ½ hour. His studio was awesome, bigger than his house, and I felt like a movie star recording a book. The two Jims were behind glass at a huge console and we had the whole thing done in 20 minutes, corrections and all. Then Jim C. put it all together and we delivered it to the park in late June. Then came the local bureaucracy of the city’s Parks and Rec. Dept, ultra-fussy about the plaque and the mounting post, so it took two months to get it up. And it was worth it. Jen and Lol were especially delighted to hear my voice come from the box! Now we will do the breeding birds and replace the chip in the spring. It tickles me to play it while I am there and think of all of you thinking about me.
Here’s a photo of Jim, me and the box. Unfortunately the dedication plaque doesn’t show, nor can it be read on the portrait of the box on the right. It says “Honoring Barbara Massey from her family”.
8/18-25 We left on Monday morning for Bandon and Jenny and Mac went separately from Jacksonville. What a week, in fact, what a month! We beach walked, first at Bullard’s Beach where the photo below was taken, and subsequently at Devil’s Beach, Bandon with its famous sea stacks, and others. Swam at Sunset Bay, visited the glorious formal garden and incredible rock formations at Shore Acres, saw 4 species of pinnipeds on offshore rocks, and every day was different. We attended the Blackberry Festival in Coos Bay and bought blackberry mustard after tasting it. Then we were joined by Ruth and John Forrester (Jenny’s hosts in Coos Bay) at the new 7-Devils Pub for lunch. They are working on meeting our whole clan and so far love them all. I painted every day but only got one keeper. I loved the stacks on Bandon beach but could never get the right proportions. They are huge but need to be minimized or they overwhelm, and I finally realized the smaller they are depicted the bigger they look – even in the vast ocean. I took lots of photos and will try in my studio. Here is one I will keep.
Our house became home, so comfortable and what a kitchen! We worked on a very hard jigsaw but quit when the big blue sky stopped being fun. Waded in the Sixes River and saw dippers and big red/brown salamanders again. Not sure what they are – there are two possibilities. Sam and Keith played tennis and we even did some grasshopper identifying. Sam’s biology class is going to be covering grasshoppers and he wanted to get a head start with them. Two summers ago he was introduced to the art of netting when I took him up into the Cascades with Alan and Carol. He loved chasing them but was not much interested in what he caught. This time was different. I had my net and books along but never dreamed we would be able to find them right on the grounds where we were staying. Lolly got involved too and we caught and identified about 6 different species. With that small introduction he will be ahead of everyone in the class, as I doubt any of them has a 90 year old grandmother who knows how to chase butterflies.
Beach walking was our very favorite pastime. At Bullard State Beach Jenny, Mac and I had not gone too far when I had to flop down in the sand and listen to the waves. They took this photo, which is so evocative of how I felt. It was early and the marine layer had not yet burnt off. I dozed or was in a daze, completely heavenly. I sent this photo to Pat, who added it to her collection of shots of me prone, taken at the ends of hikes in the desert. Two other walks were against furious winds, with sandy gusts stinging our eyes. Another was on a bright, still afternoon and the tide was low – such an unusually gentle ocean.
Keith and Sam had to fly home on Sunday from Coos Bay as Sam’s orientation for high school started next day. Lolly and I drove back to Ashland and got up early on Tuesday to leave with Sooney at 7AM for a day in Klamath Basin. It was a very long day but fabulous. We logged 62 species including some new and unexpected ones like Sage Grouse, Swainson’s Hawks, and warblers on their way south. Lolly left early Tuesday morning and I spent the day catching up on house and garden and had a good nap in the afternoon. It was a stellar month and I love the fact that I can have such a marvelous time at a very old age. How lucky is that??? Love you all.