Got to go to a great Mozart concert last night. We were invited by one of the musicians as her guest in a lovely guilded theatre- (tickets were about $100 each!). It was not only great fun, but they were really good. Impeccable! Turns out most of the players in the 40-some piece orchestra have been together for 20 years, playing 4 times a week between tours around the world. Surprisingly, their expressive and very funny director is not permanent. In fact they don't have a regular director- they change every few nights, like underwear. Tonight we go to a Japanese theatre with this woman, and another concert on Sunday in a small town north of here, after which we walk to the home of an excentric artist who lives near.
Yesterday after a meeting with the head of the Stephansdom Museum we were invited to an unveiling of a new sculpture in the main cathedral; an hour of standing crammed in a very small chapel listening to speeches we couldn't comprehend surrounded by photographers (the record for flash photos from one camera of a talking head was 7 within one second!) Finally the sculpture was unveiled, a large bronze wall piece. I thought there was nothing remarkable or even very good about it, yet it is a big deal, probably because the much-cooed-over artist is Austria's most well-known and at the end of his years. (He did a show at this museum last year that stirred world-wide controversy, mostly from American conservative Christians, oddly. That's the reason I picked this museum, because they were not put off by that.) We left singularly unimpressed– as with most Austrian contemporary art I've seen– but again it's nice to be greeted by officials, we strange newcomers to the world's most livable city.
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