What Professional Organizations Can Learn from Community Orchestras

Sitting in an internet cafe in a bus station in Tallinn, Estonia, I sent in an entry to the San Francisco Symphony's blogging contest about the future of American orchestras.  And I won!  Check it out:

"Community: it’s not just a polite word for amateur, it is the heart and soul of America’s thriving non-professional symphonies. Community orchestras deftly bridge the gap between classical performance and contemporary life that presents a daunting challenge to the future of classical music in this country. Building community is all about building relationships. The web of personal connections among performers, audience members, and the music itself give these groups a consistent energy and audience that many professional groups struggle to achieve. . . ."  read more

Give It a Taste

Let's talk about some fun things I ate and drank. Gin Long Drink in Finland (sweet G&T on tap or in a can). Delicious "Russian" pierogi filled with fried onions and potatoes in Poland (not quite the same as the blander soggier version they actually serve in Russia). Shredded cabbage baked between sheet of rich buttery yeast dough in Russia (seriously, go to Stolle if you ever have the chance). Carrot cutlets. A salad of beets, walnuts, dates, and enough mayonnaise to make you slightly queasy bite after bite. Sour cream on everything from pizza to curry to borsch to blintzes. Overwhelming amount of dill on EVERYTHING - potato chips, pizza, dumplings, salad, soup, "garnishes" on unrelated dishes, you name it - dill must be one of the region's major cash crops. 


Raspberry and ginger foam served in a champagne glass to cleanse my palate. 


Every country's own brand of pale tasteless beer. Lithuanian Black Balsam, a foul burning mouthful of herbs and licorice - far and away the worst local liqueur I've ever had the bad luck to swallow. Buckwheat fried with carrots and onions. Fresh Finnish bread-cheese (charred disks of semi-soft cow's milk cheese) on torn pieces of painfully sour black bread. Fresh salted cucumber, what I wish pickles were. Juicy strawberries and cherries imported to Latvia from Poland. Caraway studded cheese the consistency of extra firm tofu. Stuffed cabbage with spicy tomato sauce. 


And the crowning glory of it all, Georgian food - by far the best cuisine I've never seen in the States - naan-like bread filled with smoked cheese and baked in the shape of a canoe to hold an egg cracked on top while scalding hot out of the oven, dumplings filled with cheese and potatoes that have a convenient stem of dough so you can pick them up to eat them, spicy pepper pesto, hot red bean and cilantro stew. Someone needs to open a Georgian restaurant in San Francisco ASAP!

Trials and Tribulations, Followed by Hot Soup

Of course not everything on our trip has been easy. For example, it's often been very difficult to resist the urge to walk around shouting: How Lovely! or Isn't This Delightful! From the cafes along Helsinki's promenade, to the cobbled streets and spires of Tallinn's old town, to the traditional music and craft fair that sprang up outside the door of our hotel in Riga, the countries around the Baltic are apparently all cute enough to turn one into a happily blithering idiot.  But Lithuania's Curonian Spit took the prize for most quaintly charming spot we visited.  Until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of the Spit, a sliver of land that parallels the coastline for about 60 miles, separating a long narrow lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Covered with pine forests and sand dunes, it's a paradise of B&Bs with thatched roofs and blue shutters, white sand beaches, and bike paths meandering through the woods.  We stayed in Nida, a small town a mile north of the border with Kaliningrad (I'll admit I'd forgotten that there's a little piece of Russia floating between Poland and Lithuania these days) where Thomas Mann used to come and write.  We got in around 8:30 and drank beers on the marina, watching streaks of high clouds turn pink against the bright blue sky. A lone jet skier flew across the glassy water of the lagoon. Our after dinner stroll was even more striking. A mist gathered on the water, completely obscuring the horizon and turning the world into a smooth gradient from deep blue water at our feet to the palest gray above. Standing at the end of a jetty felt like floating serenely in a void, broken only by a duck and her seven ducklings swimming by in formation. The next morning we flirted with the idea of using the second entry on our Russian visa to visit Kaliningrad, thinking that it might be a long time before we would again be sitting on the border with permission to enter. Visiting Kant's home and resting place would have been interesting, but thankfully we chose instead to rent bikes. We rode through a field of reeds, along the water, through tunnels of dripping woods, and along avenues of tall straight pines with wild red roses growing at their feet. Along the way we climbed a huge sand dune overlooking Russia, so at least we got to see it. At the beach we waded in chilly Baltic waters, snoozed and baked in the sun, and collected mottled stones in the surf. An afternoon downpour soaked us to the skin on the ride back, but a quick toweling off, change of clothes, and light lunch of broccoli soup and sun dried tomato quiche put everything right again. 

Unexpected Amusement

Want to know how to get to the most creepy, grand, historic, random, and all out fun amusement park ever? Just take Line 6 to VDNKh - six stops north of Red Square in Moscow. The All-Russia Exhibition Center has everything from a giant missile to miniature pony rides; from Soviet Realist statues of heroic farmers crumbling atop the boarded-up Ukrainian Pavilion (the place used to be All-Soviet) to inflatable hamster balls floating in kiddie pools for your children to play in; go-kart racetracks; a monorail; an old jet painted with triumphant soviet youths and red stars with a "Freezelight" display inside (I didn't feel like paying ten bucks to find out what that was, so your guess is as good as mine); a radioelectric pavilion that once housed the world's fastest supercomputer, now filled with schlocky camera stores; a fountain with a gilded figure for each Soviet Republic; a monorail; a machine for stringing high tension power lines; a 78 ft tall statue - Worker and Kolkhoz Woman - that originally stood facing the Nazi Pavilion at the 1937 Worlds Fair in Paris. You can buy pizza from a vending machine and fur coats and a portable personal sauna to take with you to work (if you're imagining a brightly colored human-sized garbage bag with a hair dryer attached, you wouldn't be too far off). And even on a Tuesday with rain threatening, thousands of Russians had turned out to take it all in.  By a happy google maps user error, we came upon the Exhibition Center through it's neglected back entrance. From the rear, the Music Pavilion seemed closed. We swore we saw two men go inside, but when we tried the door it was locked. Perseverance paid of though, as the front not only had a glittery hammer and sickle over the unlocked door, but also led us inside to the English-fluent and enthusiastic curator. For half an hour he taught is about Russian Bard Music, and it's biggest star, Vladimir Vysotsky, who looks eerily like Paul Simon. About how after "Comrade Stalin died, people began to play guitar and and write songs in their kitchens without going to jail." About tens of thousands gathering in the woods to camp and play and sing. There was even an example tent set up in one corner against a photo of lakes and mountains with two mannequins wearing uniforms and vests displaying patches from the festivals they had attended. Kind of hippie and kind of Boy Scout. The curator turned on the lights in the back room too to show us a historic music bus, photos of a famous Russian Jewish poet he had known, and a map of the world with pins of all the sites explored by Russia's Jacques Cousteau. Finding such a warm and personal and quirky connection in such a bizarre place in the harsh urban jungle of Moscow is what keeps me traveling. 

July 4: The Kremlin

Nothing says vacation like spending July 4th with Lenin in Moscow. Heading off to Red Square today, and hoping to add him to my posse of embalmed leaders alongside Ho Chi Minh (sadly, the 4 hour line for Mao was more than I could handle). Touring The Kremlin and fairytale perfect Saint Basil's will round out the morning. Of course we'll need to relax after our heavy regime of Communist history, and for that there's the banya. Having bathed in Saint Petersburg last weekend, I can't wait to get back into an unbearably hot wooden room with a bunch of sweaty naked Russian guys wearing felt hats and beating each other with wet birtch leaves. Incredibly relaxing and definitely not a pleasure I can experience at home.