Date Night with an Italian

Last Thursday was date night. Clerg put on his nice tie and took me to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with its First Italian - the famous Riccardo Muti. The evening started off with a world premiere of Space Odyssey by a Belarus composer Smirnov (sounded cute, like old versions of Tom & Jerry, or as the gentleman on my left put it, a space movie from the fifties) and continued with a rather emotional 3rd Symphony by Schubert.

We were by far the youngest in the audience on the sixth floor Gallery of the Symphony Center, the elderly couple on Clergs left both fell asleep and snored loudly throughout the Allegretto and even before Muti could put away his baton for the intermission, several older gentlemen climbed up the stairs to get to the bathroom first.

The second half, Carl Orff`s Carmina Burana, was especially overwhelming for me because I still knew some words from performing it three years ago in Solothurn, Switzerland! It was of course performed by the full 100 member orchestra and both the 200-singer Symphony Chorus and the Chicago Children`s Choir. Altogether a great evening followed by the Museum Day on Friday. Chicago residents get into all museums for free until mid February so we decided to follow up on the eighteenth century European music with European arts until nineteenth century. Here are some examples to give an idea of the mood of Schubert`s contemporaries. Then we went back to the twenty first century life, grocery shopping.

That image and in general, the insides of the Chicago Art Institute reminds one of The Thomas Crown Affair with Brosnan and Russo. Although the museum is a home for several great works by both Manet and Monet, the movie was not shot here. I checked Wikipedia.