(Hold on, I'll get to the guy in the picture in a minute....)This weekend ends our time of playing musica di camera, chamber music. We had three concerts the evenings of the 25th-27th to wrap things up, and now we segway into the opera, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which we have five days to put together before the performances next week.
Unfortunately, our Beethoven septet for winds and strings was doomed from the beginning. Due to a combination of a sick horn player and my ridiculously long hospital visit, we had to put off the piece until the last concert, and then we only played one movement after rehearsing three. But, it was enough to get to play it at all, and we pulled it off pretty well, regardless of the fact that the wind was so strong we missed notes trying to keep our music on the stands.
All three of our concerts took place outdoors, and the venues were incredible. The first was at an outdoor ancient-Greek-looking amphitheater, complete with the rounded terraced steps -- I know there's a name for this I just can't think of it. The second, in a large stone building with pillars, statues, and no roof (okay, semi-outdoors), and the third, on top of a hill in a small quiet town overlooking the mountains nearby. Although it's always difficult to perform outside for acoustical reasons, the spaces were beautiful, the audience welcomed us, and the performances all went very well.
The day of the first concert, I ate at a local bar with Caroline while waiting for the bus. The couple who works there has seen us American students often, and usually try to make friendly conversation while we eat, as is customary for the small family-owned restaurants in town. That day the father asked us why we had our instruments with us, so we told him we were musicisti playing a concert that night out of town. Then he told us about his son, an actor in Rome. Caroline and I were both politely impressed, and asked questions about his work. So the father promptly began to pull out publicity photos of his son, a nice-looking 24-year-old acting student, followed by newspaper articles and magazine clippings. While we couldn't quite understand what the nature of his acting career was (it seemed like he played a part on a soap opera type of show as well as a popular cop drama), evidently this kid's pretty big in Italy. The dad offered to give us his email address and let us know when he'd be in town, which he was a couple of days later -- Caroline and Patrick had the chance to talk with him at Mr. Bloom a few nights ago.
Just in case you're curious, the kid's name is Marco Iannitello (the pic above isn't mine, obviously), and here's a couple of links I found to his publicity pages:
Piu presto (more soon),
-Allie
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2 comments:
That dude looks a bit like John Boggs...
I thought the same thing! :)
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