Saturday 24 April 2010

Basel, bei Catherine Motuz
The journey turned out to be trouble-free after all: I particularly enjoyed the way you have a choice of three countries to enter when you get off the plane in Basel.Arriving on time meant that after the brief journey by bus and tram into town with Catherine, there was time both to eat, and to enjoy the essential combination of Beer, dangling your feet above the Rhine, and Sunset (henceforward abbreviated to BRS) before going to the Predigerkirche for a concert of 17th-century Italian music given by various classes from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis including no less than 11 trombones. Any concert that includes the Monteverdi Sonata on Sancta Maria is fine by me, and any concert that features that many wind/brass players actually playing together and in (meantone) tune rather than trying to blast each other out as might be the case on this side of the English Channel, is good too. What a great noise. We stayed up late with Bruce Dickey who’d been conducting, and sampled some of Catherine’s precious 30 year old Highland Park after liberating it from ‘sa propre petite guillotine’ in its wooden coffin.  

This morning it was just a short bike ride to the early music geek heaven that is the Schola, where we met Alison who’d come over from two weeks of Feldenkrais in Bern. We had a choice of several fortepianos surrounding the quiet courtyard – what a blissful place this must be to be a student. After an essential afternoon nap it was back to the Schola by ferry, for a bit more fortepiano-neurosis-alleviating practice for me, then to the river for BRS before Alex Potter supplied us with his excellent asparagus risotto.

the ferry coming to get us

halfway up the stairs on the other side

the BRS view