June 9, 2013

Today was a very busy day for us. We started off early with a two and half hour bus trip into vienna, which most of us slept through. Then as we arrived in the city we immediately went to the koncerhaus for the performance of Concert for Violin, Vionlincello, and Orchestra Op. 102 by Johannes Brahms and Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz by the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The performance was stunning and there were no mistakes that I could speak of. One change in the stage practice though was that the concert master came on with the entire orchestra instead of alone and simply stood to tune, I found this odd. The next thing I learned was that the Viennese like to clap ... a lot ... in fact the applause at intermission lasted 15 minutes, after the show I stopped counting. To go along with that observation they did not stand for this performance, which also perplexed me. Anyway, after the performance we traveled to the houses of Beethoven, Haydn, and Shubert. They were all very nice but the comparison between each spoke greatly to their individual wealth or lack there of. By the time we got to the Haydn house all of us were pretty well fried and could no longer gather the information that was being so eagerly fed to us. I did my best to take in all I could but I am afraid I missed much of the information at the Haydn house. Then we finally went to the hotel where we ate dinner and I crashed.