Lutowslawski, Szymanowski, Vaughan Williams, Burlea

A normal evening in the Moldova new music festival. I had warned my colleagues that it would be all 20th century- not quite a Mozart evening, but I'm not sure I would like this orchestra to do Mozart.

It was the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Moldova (I think) playing in the Filharmonica. The Filharmonica has seats from the same job lot as the Tbilisi opera, though they seem to be less well padded. We could see the seats well because most of them were empty - maybe the hall was 30 -40% full.

The concert was sponsored by the Polish embassy, hence the Lutoslawski (Symmphony 4) and the Szymanowski (Symphony 2). There was also Vaughan Williams' tuba concerto which I had last heard at the Young Musician of the Year competition in Glasgow in about 1994 (when Freddy Kempf won the competition), and Burlea's string piece in 5 parts (Burlea is Moldovan). Whenever do you get programming like that?

The Lutoslawski was kind of noise, background noise, though in clear sections; near the end I thought the cat was trying to get in to get a drop of milk. I thought the orchestra did well, under the circumstances, but it was a bit difficult to tell.

The Vaughan Williams was great; fairly British, with bits of sea shanties. The middle movement was probably closest to the danger of cow pat music, but otherwise the music was very pleasant, and it worked well for the tuba. So did the Tubist - name not known. The orchestra was having fun, too, and the cellos were grinning for quite a bit of the piece - a tuba, playing a concerto? It would make a cat laugh! Still the orchestra was doing well.

After the interval the weaknesses in the orchestra started to appear. Burlea's 5 movements were brief and to the point; the violas had wonderful solos but screamed 'fear'! The first fiddle had nice folklorish solos. It lacked oomph, and could have been played with much more intensity.

In the Szymanowski 3-movement symphony a great deal more notes were played than were written, with plenty of dissonances when the different groups had solos (glad they did not attempt Mozart). This symphony did not seem to be going anywhere, although that may have been the problem of the interpretation. It was written on a fairly grand scale, and reminded slightly of Mahler - though the announcer at the beginning of the concert had also spoken about Bartok. Again there were moments of folksy tunes...

The brass and wind in general did better than some other winds I could mention, but the strings were thin and out of tune. You could not really recommend the orchestra for a foreign tour.

Bread!

Can't wait to get back to Georgia tomorrow, to get some real, fresh, crusty, tasty bread I can sink my teeth into! (And then presumably, a week later, in Australia, too). Will stop and pick some up on the way home from the airport!

The bread in Moldova is factory-made and cling-film wrapped. There are different kinds of bread from white to brown, to filled with sweet things like dates, but it's seriously bland. Have not seen a baker anywhere - there was one shop which sells 'piine calda' but that might just have been hot pies, and it was no longer functioning anyway.

Having said that, in Vilnius there are also few fresh-bread bakeries, though you can get fresh bread in most supermarkets - even the mini supermarkets; the large supermarkets usually have an instore bakery.

Restaurants in Moldova have their little quirks, too. Went to Dacu La Varta, a tiny restaurant in Vasile Alecsandri street, and ordered a shashlik. Leaving aside the fact that the meat came with nothing apart from a lettuce leaf, not an onion, a tomato, a little coleslaw from a bucket, nor a piece of bread (which I had to ask for as a paid extra), the price was also, suddenly, double the price it said on the menu. Why? The price on the menu was per 100 grams, and my portion had been 200, they told me (the fact that I had only eaten about 130 grams was probably not a good negotiating point). The price did have a little star beside it pointing to a footnote stating that the portions could have different sizes. Last week's 300 grams of goulash lasted me for four meals...
I thought it was a foreigner rip-off but people in the office said that this could be the case. Be careful out there!

Dinner last night at the Leogrand hotel; very nice, but don't be in a hurry! That applies even to ordering - no-one rushes to your table, on a sticky summer's night, offering you cool drinks - or any drinks....It only lasted 3.5 hours for the six of us.... If you have a life, there are lots of advantages to staying in a flat - where you can do other things while your dinner is cooking! But it was nice to go out for a change.

Here's a recipe for a filo-wrapped mars bar. It's a few millimetres away from a deep-fried one, but only very few millimetres.....

Noticed a few older men with faces that would have graced the back of a bus, accompanied by young women whose mothers had clearly run out of fabric while making their daughter's dresses.

An urban village

Quiet weekend in Chisinau - could have been livelier if I had discovered the Friday night concert at the National Philharmonic in time - looks like there is a concert every Friday, and with interesting programming, too. Next Friday we will have Szymanowski and Vaughan Williams' Tuba Concerto....

Instead went off to the market for my food. At the beginning of the week I had mentioned the difficulties of buying small quantities of food, especially meat, for my tiny household. 'Nooo', said my colleagues, 'there won't be any difficulties at all!' They should have seen the face of the shop assistant in the supermarket when I asked for 300 g of goulash. 'What? You want less? And even less than this?' it seemed to say. Unbelievable! This was the same shop which displayed 500g packs of dried rosemary - it would last me for a lifetime of roast lamb. So while I bought several kilos of tomatoes, I also bought 3 garlic bulbs, which looked like the minimum. One whole bulb promptly went into the goulash, together with plenty of tomatoes, onions and a very good lashing of Moldovan Cabernet, of which I bought a carton of 3 litres (for about 8 nights....). There may need to be red wine soup with something else....I've gone off buying wine in fancy bottles....

Out for a run on Saturday (and Sunday). Found, quite near my flat, a park with three lakes, heavily in use even at 9.30 in the morning with people getting ready for their picnics, taking walks, the odd runner etc. Moldovans, like Russians and probably Ukrainians, don't seem to like to travel heavy on their trips to the lakeside, so their bikinis and swimming trunks are nearly always tiny. Unlike the bodies they often have to stretch over.

Another walk round the town confirmed my earlier impression - while there are plenty of Soviet apartment blocks, there are also very many little houses with nice sized gardens, chickens and all, right in the middle of the town, no more than 5 minutes from the main thoroughfares. The town centre is arranged in a grid, with only a small corner or two of irregular little streets. But these are just like village streets, with houses that don't look particularly old; unlike Vilnius' old town, or the old town of Tbilisi which have been 'town' for a long time. I thought, therefore, that Chisinau is like Dushanbe, which was a village until about 1919 when the Soviets took over.

In fact, no. This wikipedia article suggests that Chisinau has been around since the 15th century, and already in the mid-19th century had a population of 92,000. Following pogroms elsewhere, many Jews fled to Chisinau in the late 19th century, ending with a 43% share of the population by 1900. Alas, that was almost the end of that, and in 1903 and 1905 two major pogroms took place. I wonder how many of the Chisinau Jews participated in the beginnings of the state of Israel. Then in the second world war Chisinau was rolled over three times, with the Soviets taking it from Romania in 1940, by the Germans going east in 1941 and making it part of Romania again, and the Soviets going west in 1944, with the Germans addressing the Jewish population in between.

But where's the history? It seems that not only was the country rolled over all those times, but shortly after the first invasion by the Red Army it suffered a devastating earthquake (Richter Scale 7.3) and between this and the multiple invasions the town was almost completely destroyed. The wikipedia talks about Stalinist architecture but of this so far I have seen only very little. It is true, though, that Chisinau is one of the greenest cities of Europe. Wherever you look you see trees, forests, little parks....

Stalin may not have done much good, but his town planning people were quite talented - always allowing for much open space, wide roads, and underpasses to cross those roads safely. In the former Soviet Union people were quite happy to move into flats because they had (at least the pretense of) modern conveniences, such as running water and indoor toilets. Unlike in the UK where everyone needs to have their own house.

Talking of running water reminds me - during the trips to the countryside I noticed lots of modern, purposebuilt wells with buckets thoughtfully provided everywhere. On enquiry I was told (code for 'I don't believe') that these were built because often the water supply fails and this way families can get water. Well, of course. But why then are these fancy wells a good mile or two outside the village, often near busy road junctions? Is it for watering the animals that are tied up everywhere, or for the many horses and carts?

The other noticeable thing about Moldovan roads is the amount of roadkill that you see. A reasonable amount of dead animals, but in particular the high number of crosses remembering people that have died in accidents. Be careful when you drive here! What are the drink driving laws here?

And finally I was told (see above) that much of the population is of the orthodox persuasion, either Romanian or Russian. How come then that many of the crosses are of the normal catholic variety, and that at many roadsides (not accident spots) there are little shrines with crucifixes, as you would find in Austria? But maybe Romanian orthodoxy is different.

Wikipedia also tells me that Chisinau has 36 universities - wow! I wonder if that is the highest rate in the world, for the population of about 650,000?

Tornadoes and other countries

Off to Soroca in the north of Moldova today. Leaving Chisinau on the very nice road to Soroca, I am startled to see a road sign to Odessa showing a distance of only 175 km. Moldova is really quite far south, isn't it? My suggestion to go to Odessa instead is not taken up. I wonder if there is a train to Odessa? Those steps? Potemkin, or is that the villages?

It's a city of formerly 40,000 inhabitants, but now only has 29,000, it is estimated, what with having no work. Interestingly, the richest people in the city are the Roma residents, whose richly ornamented houses overlook all other houses in the city. I am told that in Moldova the Roma are mostly settled (but so they are, actually, in most other countries?? - but usually their settlements are dumps) and that they are amongst the richer part of the population. Good for them!

After work we climbed, no actually, we drove to a monument at the edge of town, it's a tower in the form of a giant candle, supposed to be a national symbol, put up by the communist government. No-one seems to know what it is a symbol of....

From it, you have a stunning view over the ???? river, and across the river lies Ukraine. Wow! The village we saw in Ukraine looked very organised, with neat gardens, good houses, but pretty much at the end of the place. Talking of very organised - I was amazed by the huge fields I saw in Moldova. The explanation I got for this was rather muddled and I'm not convinced. Basically the land was privatised afte de-communisation - and then? This happened everywhere; in Poland the strips of land are the size of Germans' beach towels, and even in Lithuania they are quite small, though not as intensively farmed as in Poland. When the Scandinavians came to Lithuania after independence, talking about farmers' cooperatives, the Lithuanian farmers threw up their hands in horror - 'we are not having that again!'. So how have the Moldovan farmers managed to organise these huge fields? In one case I even saw a huge modern combine harvester, though there were also plenty of horses and carts on the roads.

On the way back, idly glancing across some fields, I suddenly spotted a little tornado whistling along quietly. It was too little to pick us up - we met it on the road - but it was interesting to watch it picking up little bits and pieces and swirling them through the air.

At home, in the evening, the piano tuner appeared - it was the fastest tune I've ever seen (not that I have seen any, but I thought it would take a few hours). Fairly painful to listen to, but now the notes are in tune. Not all of them work well...but for me it's enough. And the landlord even paid for it - wasn't that nice?

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Woke up yesterday morning...

... feeling like sh*t. Heid was louping all day, as we say in Scotland, but blamed that on dehydration. Recently I have run more, and it's been hot, and often I got a stoater of a headache a few hours afterwards, probably because I had not drunk enough. Anyway, drank lots (difficult in a flat where the biggest container is a small tea cup), took the paracetamol, in the evening it occurred to me to take my temperature... which was nicely up. No idea why!

Tried to do a bit of studying, concentrating on Bach's 4-3 suspension - total soup in my head (I only grew up with it, and had in fact used bits of it in harmonisations months ago, without realising)! But a good night's rest - bounced out of bed at 5.30 (the new mattress is so hard that you can't do anything but bounce!), did my suspensions test, the piano practice, and off to work. The piano in the flat is seriously, seriously out of tune - you get two notes for the price of one in some places...

In Moldova everything has to be bilingual, in Romanian and Russian. Romanian is much more pleasant on the eye and ear - you can read it, and work much of it out. 'Intenzione' - you know what I mean? Bizarre moment then in the cafe where I was ordering lunch, and found the waitress talking in Russian and pointing at the Russian text in the menu.

The Ministry, like all social ministries everywhere, is probably not the poshest in the city; a variety of small businesses have established themselves in the ground floor. There is a sort of security at the entrance, but it's not taken terribly seriously. (In Georgia it's extremely serious - you need your ID, in Tajikistan people just wander in and out....) Renovation appears to be happening at the moment, but it'll take a while. The department for human trafficking has a very fine new front door, though - USAID paid for that. This kind of business is big here

My apartment block's lift is out of order today - I stay on the 9th floor. Quite a good reason to stay in, really!