vol. 38: winter lady, stay awhile
reflections on competitions, wandering Graz, & cardamom lattes
Well, I lived with a child of snow When I was a soldier And I fought every man for her Until the nights grew colder
Here we are in mid-February. As usual, I’ve gone around the world and back and am recovering in my little Montreal Plateau apartment from my jetlag. I’ve learned that jetlag is really not my friend, and it’s more important for me to take a few days of yin than to try and power through. My partner is coming to visit me on Monday after an interminable seven weeks apart and I’m cleaning my apartment/resting up so we can have a nice visit.
Last week was spent in Graz, Austria, competing in a Liedduo competition with my wonderful pianist-collaborator friend. I’d kind of forgotten what competitions were like, and was drawn to this one for its innovative programming and the way it seemed to encourage unique artistry. We worked hard to prepare an hour of really challenging works by Olivier Messiaen, Matthias Pintscher, Igor Stravinsky, György Kurtág, Schubert, Georges Enesco, Harry Somers, Karol Szymanowski, and Lili Boulanger. I was proud of how we performed, even if our performance didn’t have the perfection a winning-competition program might require, and we ended up being eliminated. It meant a lot to me that people commented on our unique programming and one person in the music world I admire a lot and who was one of the judges told me he was heartbroken we didn’t go further, as he’d rated us very high.
a little song we did on the snow-themed program by Romanian composer Georges Enesco - Présent de couleur blanche, recorded by me and Alex a couple weeks ago:
I’m not sure I’ll try my hat at any more competitions, as I don’t love the energy they bring to music and that they bring out of people (a friend of mine was in tears following her feedback session, citing the competitiveness of her colleagues and cruelty of judges’ comments). My fellow musician boyfriend reminded me, “It’s music, not a basketball game.”
Following our elimination, I could at least spend a couple of days wandering Graz. Graz is the second-biggest city in Austria, and looks a lot like a smaller Vienna, full of cobblestone squares and ornate palaces. I ate my requisite Knödel, drank some delicious local Steiermarck wine, and made myself a nice Bircher Müsli every morning in my Airbnb. Here are a few pics of my wanderings:
Otherwise, 2025 has already been full of beautiful musical adventures. My recital at the COC in January was super rewarding and fun to put together, and in late January I returned to Toronto to record the soloist movements in Toronto-based composer James Rolfe’s “O Greenest Earth.” Rolfe’s work (composed in 2019) juxtaposes texts by Hildegard von Bingen with those by Ephraim of Bonn (12th century) and Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), translated from Hebrew to English. It was an intense few days of rehearsal with the wonderful David Fallis conducting, culminating in an 8.5-hour recording session produced by Cullan Bryant and Carol Gimbel, who came in from New York. James Rolfe and I also really connected during the process, and have been in talks about future collaborations since then. :)
NOW! To get to what you all are here for… Books and breakfasts!! As I’ve been obsessed with knitting for the past few months, I’ve been listening to audio books. I’ve listened to most of Miranda July’s buzzy All Fours, which is the type of millennial fiction my mother would describe as “navel-gazey.” Normally that’s a genre I enjoy, but this book isn’t quite hitting (perhaps I’ve finally finished my divorce-fiction-reading era). I’ve been enjoying Andrew Martin’s Early Work, which looks at the same classification of millennials but manages to poke fun at our neuroses and not take itself so seriously. I’m on and off reading Every Valley by Charles King about Händel’s Messiah, as well as my most recent Paris Review and my parents gave me Renée Fleming’s new anthology, of which I’ve been dipping in and out.
As far as breakfasts goes, yesterday I experimented with making a delicious cardamom syrup for lattes/Old Fashioneds. Instructions: bring 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water to a boil over the stove, then mix in 1.5 tbsps of lightly crushed cardamom pods and lightly simmer for about 15 minutes. Strain and place in an airtight container. I mixed in a tsp. to my afternoon latte yesterday and look forward to combining it with bitters and Bourbon when my bf is here. :) Bon appétit!!
