tomleslie.ca

Thanks to Patrick, Molly and Paul I realized this evening that I’d skipped a day in my diary. I’d actually written it down, but forgot to copy it up to the Internet when I got to Helsinki. I’ve now posted it, but backdated it correctly to the right day. For your convenience, then, is the link to the missing day in Tallinn.

I’m back now and have almost got over jet lag. I’ve fallen easily into my normal at home laziness, playing a lot on the computer (Warcraft III at the moment, which came out while I was away). I did get some important errands done yesterday and played tennis with Dave this morning, so I’m not feeling like too much of a slug.

The big news in Toronto this week is the Pope’s visit to town, along with 250,000 youths from around the world. A lot of the downtown streets were more or less closed yesterday for a staged version of the Stations of the Cross, which started at City Hall, went along Queen to University Avenue, and went up University to Queen’s Park for the finale. Quite aside from the traffic disruption (which I have to say was actually pretty nice for a pedestrian living downtown) the most visible sign of the World Youth Day conference are the hordes to youth not actually in Exhibition Place but wandering the streets. They’re all pretty clean cut and I haven’t heard of any kind of incidents, but it’s pretty weird to run into hundreds of people wearing exactly the same one-shoulder backpacks. It’s a pity the weather hasn’t been better for them: it’s been humid and rained a couple of times in the last couple of days. Still, I guess that beats 35 degrees and smog warnings.

We had a Riesling tasting at Molly’s last night, which was fun and had interesting results. We weren’t all unanimous in our opinions, but the general feeling was that the Ontario wines hold their own with the best, and are at the very least very pleasant and very useful wines, which would go well with food. In fact we pretty much all thought that the best wine overall came from the tiny 13th Street Winery in southern Ontario. I really liked the German wines the best after that, though the Ontario Cave Springs wine was nice, too. The Alsace Riesling was very disappointing and we ranked it clearly last.

This evening Joyce and Ian had a little party to celebrate their engagement. Joyce’s ring, an elegant thin gold band with a nice single chunk of diamond, was on display. Paul and Kelly came, though tomorrow Kelly’s off to Vancouver for a couple of weeks and Paul’s back to NYC (via a bus to Buffalo, the poor guy).

Thursday, July 25, 2002 07:30

Location: SAS Lounge, Helsinki Airport

Weather: Overcast

Well, the trip’s basically over so I guess this will probably be my last post about it for a while. I’ve been negligent in writing even my paper copy of the journal the last couple of days, so I may have to gloss over some of the details.

First, a general impression of Finland. Man, this country is a lot like Ontario. Well, the trees, rocks and wildlife are a lot like Ontario. And the lakes. And the highways and farms. Not so much the Finns themselves… and forget about the language. Although since most Finns seem to speak excellent English, I suppose the language isn’t an issue anyway.

Monday we did a bus tour of Helsinki. The weather was scattered cloud, but with rather more cloud than sunshine, and most parts of the city seemed dull as a result. Helsinki’s an interesting place to get a sense for what could have been done in Canada. Most of the oldest buildings were wiped out in various fires over the last few hundred years, so the city is really very young: our guide said the oldest surviving buildings were about 200 years old. The downtown area is a jumble of Euro-standard six and seven story commercial and residential buildings (i.e. high ceilings, rickety elevators and no air conditioning) along with modern monstrosities easily the equal of those in the new world. With a population of 600,000, it’s smaller than Toronto but has a far more appealing geography, low rolling hills with water on three sides. The government buildings and arts facilities are rather more subtle and reserved than most of the other capitals of Europe.

We stopped in the cathedral square to get our first look at the building where we would perform Monday evening, a beautiful structure that towers over the surrounding city, with massive orthodox-style minarets tiled in green and tipped with gold. From there we strolled down to one of the market squares, where fresh vegetables, flowers and fish were lined up for inspection, along with postcard and souvenir vendors. The harbour next door boasts some of the largest cruise ships I’ve ever seen.

Driving through some of the park land further south on Helsinki’s peninsula, we stopped at the Sibelius memorial, a jumble of disconnected organ pipes suspended in a natural park setting. Finally, we drove around to a park museum, an island connected to the mainland by a pedestrian bridge, which served as the bucolic setting for a number of traditional Finnish homes. On the far side of the island we ate a wonderful smorgasbord lunch in a romantic wooden hall.

After a rest and changing into our concert dress back at the hotel, we went back to the cathedral for our sound check. Since we hadn’t sung in four days, but especially since the orchestra improved with every bit of rehearsal time, we ran through the entire Requiem, getting a sense of the acoustic, much more lively and responsive than the halls in Russia. The interior of the cathedral was a stark white, but the organ pipes in a small gallery across from our risers were capped with gold, brightening up the overall impression.

Between the sound check and the concert we took a number of group photos on the steps of the cathedral and then broke to go find a quick snack. A cafe across the square served up freshly squeezed orange juice and excellent coffee, and I had a delicious vegetarian wrap, largely filled with chickpeas. The concert was a great success, probably the best performance of our tour, and we had an excellent audience. We left on a high, and went back to the hotel to consume more of the blackberry vodka.

On Tuesday we had another great buffet breakfast and checked out of the hotel to drive to Lahti and Heimola. In Lahti we stopped for an optional tour of the new Sibelius Hall, a 1,250 seat concert and recording hall completed in 2000. It’s a fabulous building, built largely of wood but incorporating some marvellous modern tricks to make it a very flexible space. The outer walls are a metre thick, wood filled with sand to provide total sound dampening, important for a hall that is to be used for recordings. Inside, echo chambers can be used to provide a cathedral-like sound, but acoustic doors and curtains can be opened and closed, raised and lowered to adjust the sound to a great extent. With the curtains down and the doors closed the hall becomes a chamber music space. Those of us on the tour sang briefly on the stage and were quite pleased at the result. The total price of the hall: 20 million Euros. Compare that to Roy Thomson hall, which cost $ 80 million to build and is currently undergoing a $ 20 million sonic refurbishment… (And ok, so Roy Thomson seats 2,500, but still…)

After a lunch in Lahti’s market square we continued our way to Heimola, or rather to a hotel set in some woods 35 k from Heimola. We checked in, and had time for a short swim in the pool before changing and hopping back on the buses to go to Heimola for our final concert. We had a very long and winding road to get there, about 70 minutes, which was pretty but for some of those in the bus, rather nauseating (lots of ups and downs). Before too long, though, we were there.

Our sound check, though, was not to be. The concert venue was an outdoor amphitheatre, covered by a fixed heavy tent-like roof but open to the wind at the sides, and the orchestra, annoyed at not being told they would be outside, refused to play the sound check, citing humidity concerns. The choir lined up and ran through a couple of pages of the first movement a capella to get a feel for the space (zero reverb, of course, but surprisingly good at channeling the sound to the audience) and then took a break. Our subgroup (“les six” as we’d come to be known) walked into town and found a liquor store to replenish our supplies, and a grocery store for water and snacks.

The final concert was to an audience of a couple of hundred. For the first time, we weren’t too hot: indeed, we were actually somewhat cold, since there was a breeze off the water at our backs. But it all went very well, and before long we were filing off and past our evacuating audience into a single-story hall up the hill where we had a celebratory/farewell dinner with the orchestra. For all their dodgy dealings (to whit, not knowing the music, starting rehearsals late, insisting on finishing rehearsals on time, playing out of tune & too loudly, asking for extra money) we’d had a good time performing with them and were happy to buy them some drinks and share some food. A couple of the trombone players (the worst of the bunch) managed to get a kiss from Laura, our soloist. To Ngaio’s delight, they came back to ask for a kiss from her as well. The rest of the orchestra stayed in little groups, munching their food and chatting only to each other, but they responded with pleasure when approached.

Finally we bid them farewell and borded the buses for the trip back to the hotel. This time we took the direct route, and cut the travel time in half. Back at the hotel we had a last boozy night of “Les six” and polished off a bottle and a half of vodka before calling it a night at 1am.

The next morning (Wednesday) we packed up and had a late breakfast, checking out of the hotel at 11am for the trip back to Helsinki. We stopped for a while at a motorway rest station (which had really good coffee) and pulled up at the Ramada Presidentti again at 1pm.

The afternoon was free, and after unpacking I split from the rest of the group to go check out the Museum of Modern Art, nearby. It’s appropriately modern structure had five levels connected by free-standing ramps and staircases, with smoothly effective sensor-activated sliding doors separating the exhibits. It wasn’t bad, but there really weren’t that many different things to see: some pop art, some clever tricks with two-way mirrors and time-delayed closed circuit televisions, a room where a keyboard launched visual images instead of sounds, and some clever Finnish allegorical works that I didn’t understand at all (and couldn’t read the explanation of either). Still, it was a good way to spend a couple of hours.

Following the museum I took a last wander around the downtown area. The Esplanade, a main shopping avenue with a park running down the middle, was packed with people enjoying the afternoon arrival of sunshine and a free jazz concert in a small bandshell at the far end. I wandered down, poked around the dock area, walked up to the Russian orthodox church and took some photos. On the way back towards the hotel I stopped in a couple of stores to try and find some of that famous Finnish design in an easily portable form, but everything looked either large, kitchy, or like I could get it at Ikea back at home.

Back at the hotel, we gathered at 7:30 and walked south along a lake, passing a concert hall and the new opera house, both set attractively next to a lake in a park threaded with pedestrian and bicycle pathways. The restaurant was a gleaming work of art itself, low and stereotypically Scandinavian in its pale wood and bright steel construction. We were greeted on the way in by one of our tour guides, who handed out roses. Inside, a glass of pink champagne was compliments of Perform America, the arts tour company who’d planned the trip. We had a wonderful meal: a fresh salad, an entree of salmon and tasty potatoes and beans with a cream sauce, and ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert.

We walked back through the dusk to the hotel, where we gathered in Howard and Maggie Dyck’s suite for one last bash. Since I’m flying home by a separate route from the rest of the choir today I said my goodbyes as the evening finished, and returned to the room to pack. Yet another great trip finished, and for my leave of absence, a great way to cap it all off! To everyone who came along or who otherwise made my 10 months off a wonderful experience, THANK YOU! It’s been a great year.

[The missing post! Forgot to write this one up at the time…]

15:50

Location: Sun deck of the ferry m/s Romantika

Weather: Overcast & cool

Saturday morning we got up at 8 a.m. and went down for a wonderful breakfast buffet in the Hotel Viru’s restaurant. I delighted in a hardboiled egg and some tasty meatballs, along with a couple of glasses of reasonable orange juice and a cup of strong coffee. Leaving the group, I went down to the lobby to write some postcards and continue working on the diary.

At 9:30 we assembled and split into two groups for a walking tour of Tallinn’s old town. Our guide was a young man with a gentle deep bass voice, rather unsuited for a large group as it didn’t carry very far, but he was very nice and knowledgeable and had some very witty lines so he was quite acceptable.

Tallinn is a very pretty town. At least, the city centre where we walked is very pretty. Set on a hill, with the town hall and a couple of churches lifting spires up to the sky but otherwise a consistent three to fix or six stories in height, the town features an elegant market square, quaint alleyways, a robust but not overbearing set of walls, and a fresh pastel paint scheme. It’s a popular holiday spot for the Finns, with lots of little boutique stores selling local arts and crafts, including glasswork and woolenware, woodwork and pottery. We pointed Howard and Maggie in the direction of the one of the antique stores that feature the type of orthodox gilded icons they collect. [They later went back and had some successful shopping!]

The tour wound through the downtown, stopping for short visits into two very different churches, the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevski Cathedral, opposite the parliament building (Toompea Castle), and the Dome Church, Lutheran, just down the street. The guide told us that the parliament has 101 deputies and almost 30 political parties, since it only takes a couple of thousand signatures on a petition to start a new party. (The joke is that any three Estonians will be members of four political parties.) From the old fortress’ viewing platforms we had a great view across the city and the port, and we took some pictures before walking down to meet our buses.

The bus tour took us past some city fortifications below the old town, featuring the squat tower “Fat Margaret”, destined never to attract her love, the castle’s tower “Tall Hermann”. From the old town and the port we drove east along the waterfront, then cut inland past some Soviet-style apartment blocks to the Song Festival Grounds. Here, a huge bandshell with hundreds of rows of seats holds some 30,000 singers during the annual Song Festival — that’s 2% of the Estonian population in the choir — while 100,000 more crowd onto the hillside facing them for the concert. Really. They have pictures to prove it.

From there, we continued east to Saint Bridgedine’s Monastery, a ruined catholic monastery whose walls have been recently reinforced to prevent further degradation but whose floors and roof are long since gone. Finally, we returned downtown and scattered from the buses. I was content to spend much of the rest of the afternoon at the hotel, updating my diary on the Internet and writing more postcards.

In the evening the whole group reconvened and walked back up the hill to the market square, where we had a great dinner at the Karl Freidrich restaurant. For a change from the beer my table ordered red wine — Sangre del Toro, a familiar bottle much appreciated at home — to go with our beef stroganoff entree.

Back at the hotel after dinner we assembled for martinis and wine in Lanny and my room, using olive juice sourced from the hotel bar to make Ngaio’s martini dirty enough for her taste.

Saturday, July 20, 2002 9:14

Location: Lobby, Hotel Viru, Tallinn, Estonia

Weather: Sunny & hot

Falling behind in the diary is stressful: it feels like I have a terrible weight of recent wonderful experiences to commit to words before my sieve of a memory forgets all the details.

Thursday I spent the whole day at the Hermitage Museum with Mary Jo. We got in line a few minutes after 10, had some truly horrible coffee from a nearby vendor, and were in the third group of people to be admitted, at about 10:40. Once inside we were able to avoid the crowds by heading right, through the cloakrooms and into an Archeological exhibit area that had Russian artefacts prior to the 7th C. B.C., including some spectacular finds from a burial mound, such as a finely embossed gold shield and a mummified horse!

From there we proceeded up to the Impressionists section, which had an amazing collection of Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Gauguin and Kandynski. We broke for lunch in the rather bad cafe in the basement, and then went to the Large Hermitage building, through the Egyptian and Classical sections and up the Grand Staircase to the core of the collection, 17th and 18th century Dutch and other masterpieces from across Europe, presented in truly awe-inspiring rooms with soaring ceilings, gilded doorways, towering lamps and massive chandeliers, and marble vases and bowls.

After a few more stunning hours we had to stop for another break. Mary Jo was feeling a bit worn out so I headed off on my own and covered the second floor of the Winter Palace, which had 19th C. paintings and the Royal Apartments. Almost every room seemed to have a writing desk of ever increasing size and sophistication, many of them with clocks, mechanical music works and ornate gilded temple and castle models as decorations. The core of the Romanov apartments included a beautiful English-style library, oak-panelled and -ceilinged, with a huge array of massive books.

I met up with Mary Jo and we started heading back to the hotel for what we thought was a 7:30 meeting for our celebratory festive dinner. We stopped on a bridge over one of the canals, where I bought a nice little painting featuring a couple of cats in dark streets. As I was finishing the purchase, Michael, Virginia and Marg passed and let us know that the meeting time was set at 6:45. (This had only been announced to one of the buses that had headed off for an optional excursion that morning, so it was rather poorly planned.) We were suddenly in a hurry.

More later…

Wednesday, July 17, 2002 09:30

Location: On the bus

Weather: Cooler, sunny again

Oops. Missed two days of the old journal. Time to get cracking!

Monday we trucked off to Novgorod for the day and for our first concert of the tour. It’s a three hour drive south of St. Petersburg, but it was a pretty dull trip, basically flat with trees and farms on either side. Our tour guide yammered non-stop on the way down, probably good info, to be fair, but not fully appreciated by our card-playing group, still tired from the night before. The bus was a quasi double decker with a small cabin stuck in the back below the main deck, where we sat for the trip. It was quite warm, and after a while we started noticing that the back smelled of fuel fumes, so we didn’t feel all that well by the time we arrived.

We pulled into an Intourist Hotel in Novgorod, where we had lunch. We then drove to the Novgorod Philharmonic Hall for a dress rehearsal of the Brahms. It went really well. The orchestra has dramatically improved over the last few days, though the horns are still occasionally astray.

After the rehearsal we had a delay before a walking tour of the town, but I was so exhausted that by the time we were set to go I’d decided to bail out on the tour and get some rest. I’d made a lot of mistakes during the rehearsal and needed to get some energy back.

After a light snack (a banana, some bread and cheese, and water) we changed for the concert. Because of the heat we decided to skip wearing the tuxedo jackets, which turned out to be a great decision as even without them we were sweating profusely. The locals came out in force (tickets ranged from 15R to 30R, i.e. from C$0.75 to $1.50) and went very well.

We returned to the Intourist Hotel for another meal, then got back into the buses to go back to St. Petersburg. We got back to the hotel at 1 in the morning, and went straight to bed.

On Tuesday morning (yesterday) I had planned to get up and downtown fairly early, but was still very tired and had to do some laundry so I didn’t make it out of the hotel until after 10. I was just leaving the driveway on my way to the Metro when one of our buses went by on the way downtown. They stopped to pick me up, and I hopped on. Mistake: it took over an hour to get downtown, versus about 30 minutes (including the walk) by subway.

I went to the Internet cafe and updated my diary, then walked back to the Shostakovich Hall (Bolshoy Zal — “Big Hall”) and on to a blini kiosk, Teremok, in a little park nearby. I had a delicious ham and cheese blini for 40R ($2).

Back in the hall our recording engineers were scrambling to get their equipment set up for our recording session in the afternoon. They’d been locked out for two hours in the morning, so had lost a lot of the time they’d planned on using to get everything set before our arrival.

The recording session ran into almost every conceivable problem, but was still judged a success. On top of our late start, we had some construction hammering outside, people walking through the hall, dishes clattering from the cafeteria overhead, a couple of delays for missing orchestra members, and finally a rain storm which ruined the last 20 minutes of recording time. We only completed tape for 3 of the 7 movements of the Requiem, so we’re going to have to do a good job in the performance tonight!