Vienna Philharmonic; head ache

Busy couple of days, compounded by a nagging headache, which I think is due to the poor weather we have been having the past few days.

Let's see...Thursday night Dan and I went into Ann Arbor for dinner and the Vienna Philharmonic concert at Hill. We parked  at a bank where he does a lot of work (so they give him parking rights) downtown. We walked in the rain about a block to an Indian restaurant. Now, a lot of the Indian restaurants in Ann Arbor (or at least most of the ones we have previously eaten in) are Hindu. This one was Muslim, so we got some treats we have not previously had, such as this wonderful mellow Indian cheese. The appetizers were quite good. I got these pastries stuffed with spiced ground lamb and peas; Dan got the veggie version stuffed with spiced potato chunks and peas. Since we each got two, we quickly switched so we had one of each. Both versions were great! We also ordered this wonderful very buttery nan bread. For dinner Dan had spicy lamb and potatoes over a bed of rice. I got chunks of cheese in a spinach based sauce over a bed of rice. The food was excellent!

The concert was...different. It is hard to evaluate, in fact. It was like two different orchestras showed up that night. Most of the first half was technically brilliant but completely lifeless. There was no emotion at all in the music; they were utterly and completely flat. I was sorely disappointed; the New York Philharmonic had played so much better than that last winter when they came to town; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had played even better in December with a guest conductor when they did Beethoven's Ninth.

I must not have been the only one to feel let down. After the first piece, the Schubert overture, the audience started coughing loudly. After each movement in the Mozart symphony more and more people got into the coughing thing, and they giggled as well. It was horribly rude, and from the stage is must have sounded like an avalanche of angry noise.

The crowd must have either angered or woken up the orchestra, though, because all of a sudden during the last movement of the Mozart piece, and for the full second half of the program (a Schubert symphony and a wonderful tone poem by Strauss) and for the encore they played with a lot of passion and fire, and you simply could not hope to hear better playing. They proved that they are amongst the best musicians in the world.

It was sort of a weird night; the poor initial playing (music without feeling is really not worth listening to...), the horrid rudeness of the crowd (I have heard of that before when a classical concert is not going well, but have never experienced it), and then the orchestra catching fire like that.

Today I still had that nagging headache, so did not get much done other than laundry and napping. I did go down to Ohio with Dan and Steven this evening so he could weigh in for tomorrow's wrestling tournament. Afterwards we went to the Krispy Kreme. It has taken me months to track one down even remotely close to our home...Steven was very pleased.

Tomorrow if I can get out of bed in time I will head down to Ohio with Dan and Steven. Otherwise, I will get a quiet day at home with Bill and the bills and laundry. Then back to work on Sunday, hopefully the weather will clam down a bit, and the headache will go away.