May 28 & May 29, 2010
Palace of the Arts ~ Budapest
On Friday night, we returned to the Palace of the Arts for another concert. This one featured Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Brahms with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which also performed Mahler’s 1st Symphony. One of my stepdaughters plays with the Pittsburgh Symphony, so our trip to Budapest was (OK here comes the pun) orchestrated to coincide with the Pittsburgh Symphony’s tour stop in Budapest.
We had great seats, above the back of the stage, with a panoramic, yet close view of the orchestra, and especially of the conductor in action. From where we sat, we could see the brass section’s music sheets quite clearly and could easily imagine ourselves as part of the orchestra. Given our seats, though, we could only see Anne-Sophie Mutter’s back in her strapless gown – but what a back! As if it had been an extension of her fingers, the muscles on her back seemed to be playing with a well-honed technique all of their own.
The audience went wild at the end of the Brahms, clapping away with a crescendo that culminated in a thunderous rhythmic song. The enthusiasm of the Hungarian audience impressed Anne Sophie Mutter enough to comment on it appreciatively, after which she treated us to a little calming Bach.
Mahler’s 1st Symphony was a small delight for me, with 8 French horns playing and all, since I rarely listen to it. In full living sound it was a taste-teaser for me for his other symphonies, as I kept recognizing themes from them. Then again, I might have been hearing things still in the thrall of jetlag, which hit me hard during the day.
It’s more than jetlag. At my most tired moments, it’s like getting trapped in a room in the tower of Babel, since I am the “official” translator for both my traveling and my resident family, the latter of which is my mother. With the shadows of worry over changes in my aging mother’s behavior, there are those moments, too, when both English and Hungarian fail me, leaving bits of other languages, like French and Italian, cropping up like the wrong spice in the stew of words.
Throw in a little comedy of errors with a couple of cell phones my mother and friends lent us so that we could all communicate with each other and them, and things, in the haze of jetlag, turned even weirder, as the phones locked on us, or went dead, because the chargers were inadvertently forgotten, or the pay-as-you-go plan on it ran out of funds. As if the phones themselves had attuned themselves, like good travelers, to the Babelian universe in which I seemed to have landed when the plane touched down in Hungary.
Not long ago, I posted about a dream in which my cell phone, along with my wallet was washed away by the sweep of a tiny flood, which left me feeling untethered, not so much because my means of communications were gone, but because all the important numbers, which I no longer kept in my own memory but entrusted to a machine, were swept away in such an undramatic manner.
Here I was, not in a dream, but in the thick of jetlag, with a flood of phones (so to speak) but no numbers, not even in the phones, because we couldn’t figure out how to find the phones’ own numbers. I think this experience convinced the spouse too, to not leave home this far without a plan for our own and familiar phones.
At the end of the day, and after the concert all was resolved in a single language every tongue understands and speaks without the help of translators or devices: food. We took my stepdaughter and my mother to the duck restaurant we discovered on our last trip here. We had duck with fruit, duck with cabbage, duck with dumplings, and duck with rosemary. We were serenaded by a violin and a piano duo, and also by the chatter of the five Italian businessmen at the table next to us. For a brief time, the cacophony and the effort of shifting languages did not trip up my tongue or soul much.
Still, the next day, on May 29, I spent the better part of the day sleeping. When I woke up, close to 1 in the afternoon, I think my sense of being grounded has finally landed and joined me in body and spirit.