Mon métier

On Monday we went back to the Louvre after a week's absence, and spent our time in a couple of rooms containing artifacts from Egypt's Old Kingdom (c. 3000 BC). One of the most remarkable things about Egypt is the homogeneity of the culture over such a vast period of time. I'm sure there are Egyptologists that can immediately tell whether a drawing or sculpture is from the Old, Middle, or New Kingdom, but to the rest of us, the style seems frozen in time. I can tell whether a Beethoven quartet was written in 1810 or 1820, and can see in St. Eustache the line between the Gothic building and the Renaissance interior. But the Egyptians were so insistent on the superiority of their culture that they left it virtually unchanged for 2500 years.

After the Louvre we walked through the gardens of the Tuileries, through the Place de la Concorde, and up to the Palais Garnier. This may be the most extravagant building in Paris, a fitting home for that most extravagant of art forms, opera. The building was designed by Charles Garnier, an architect working for the Emperor Napoleon III, who made it the centerpiece of his vast remodel of the city of Paris in the mid-19th century. Napoleon didn't want any more revolutionary barricades (like the ones you see in Les Miserables) so he had the medieval streets of central Paris widened and straightened, creating the open and airy city that we know and love today. Today the Opéra National de Paris uses the theatre mostly for ballet and 18th century opera.

We saw a chamber music concert there a couple of weeks ago. For their large opera productions the Paris Opéra uses a modern house built at the Place de la Bastille, which is where we saw Aïda on Saturday. Here is a shot of the Grand Foyer. A nice place to hang out during intermission while the wife stands in line at the washroom.

One of my favorite places was the score library. And my students think I have a lot of opera scores…

If you want to see more about this remarkable building, you can check out the film I made for my humanities class. It's on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qVEjkdpslk&feature=youtu.be.

On Tuesday I had the great pleasure of giving a voice lesson to Tara Khozein, a graduate from New Mexico State University in vocal performance. She came to NMSU after I left for Idaho, so I never had a chance to hear her sing. Today we rectified that omission. Tara has a warm and powerful soprano voice and a great heart and mind for singing. Her coloratura is stunning. I hope she won't mind me talking about her, because I have been thinking about a part of our conversation. We talked about her talent and potential and what she would need to do to make the most of it. She told me she wasn't sure she wanted to be a professional opera singer, and I told her it didn't matter, I wasn't talking about what she did for a living. What's important is the powerful and life-changing things that happen to you when you take something you do well and work to be as good at it as you can be.



This got me thinking about the Louvre, and my Foundations of Humanities class, and my life (they're all very connected right now). I have had the great fortune to live here in Paris for two months and buy a Louvre pass and visit as often as I want. Some days I wander all over, trying to master its labyrinth and see all the things I can. Some days I go to a room with Old Kingdom Egyptian art and spend all my time looking at one inscription. For the past three years I have been the dean of a general education program, arguing for a broad exposure for all students to religion, the sciences, and the humanities. But visiting the Opéra and teaching Tara reminded me that I am first and foremost a singer. While it's wonderful to try to be a Renaissance man and learn as much about as many things as I can, my life has the richness it has because of my dedication to the one thing that I do well. I guess what I'm saying is I love the the liberal arts, I love Foundations, I love Paris, but I miss singing and I miss my students.

Quatre Jours

For the past four days I have been a lapsed blogger. Today I take computer on lap and atone for my sloth. Brace yourself for a whirlwind account of half a week's worth of feverish activity.

On Thursday we split up, because Dick and I wanted to see the Army Museum and Jeanne and Ev did not—can you imagine that? The Army Museum is at L' Invalides, which was originally a hospital for disabled veterans. Your ticket also allows you admission to Napoleon's tomb in the church of the Invalides. Even though Napoleon was eventually defeated and deposed, his presence still looms large still here, especially at Invalides, where he is buried in almost overwhelming grandeur, in the center of a domed vault in seven successive coffins one inside the other, and surrounded by the names of his victorious battles. The Army museum includes a medieval armory; an exhibit of weaponry and arms from Louis XIV to Napoleon; a detailed account of World Wars I and II; and an exhibit dedicated to how Charles de Gaulle won the war.

Friday was our opera day, so we took it a little easier. Evelyn and Jeanne did some shopping, and in the afternoon we went out to the Luxembourg Gardens and sat and talked and enjoyed watching the children play with their toy sailboats.

 We have been planning our opera visit for a long time now. For those of you who don't know, the four of us were deeply involved with opera in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when Evelyn and I lived there from 1987-2004. Dick frequently appeared in our shows, and both Dick and Jeanne were dedicated fans, friends, and supporters of our Doña Ana Lyric Opera. So you can imagine a visit to the Paris Opera was a grand treat. We saw Verdi's Aïda. This year is the 200th anniversary of Verdi's birth, and Verdi is as good as opera gets.  We decided to go all out with this one, bought tickets on the first day they were available, and got seats on the second row. We could see every bead of sweat on every singer's brow. Once I caught a glimpse of the tastebuds on Radames' tongue.

The Paris Opera lived up to its reputation for musical and visual splendor.  Radames (the tenor) and Amonasro (the baritone) were astonishing, as was the chorus and the orchestra. Aïda was not stunning but negotiated the difficulties of the role gracefully. Her performance didn't deserve the boos she got at her curtain call. Amneris (the mezzo) had a romping chest voice and a ringing top, but she fell back and disappeared in the middle of her voice, which unfortunately is a lot of the role. The staging was appalling, with a big metal set, Fascist symbolism, tanks, naked rubber corpses, minstrel dancing, and the Ku Klux Klan. But in the end the opera was able to stand the abuse, and the show came down to a few fine singers, a great orchestra, and an incredible score. My reaction was encapsulated by a group of students in the second balcony, who when the curtain came down on the first half, shouted "Bravo Verdi" for the composer and his music, and then a loud chorus of "Boo!" for the director and the unfortunate decisions he made.

On Saturday we visited the Cluny Museum, which holds an exquisite collection of up-close and personal medieval art. So much of this kind of thing decorates the vast cathedrals and churches of France, and is so high and far away, or in the dark, or submerged in the riot of decoration that surrounds it. It was wonderful to see these works displayed individually and well lit and right before your eyes

In the afternoon we had lunch with Tara Khozein, a former vocal performance major at NMSU, but who attended after I left so I never got to teach her. She is here studying acting and movement. We ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, a new treat for Evelyn and me.

Sunday morning Dick and Jeanne went him and left us, so to assuage our sorrow we went for a long walk, down the Boulevard St. Germain, down the Seine to the Eiffel Tower, and back by the Invalides and the Government Quarter. Here is a figure from the Alexander III bridge, built in to commemorate a treaty between Russia and France in 1892.

And here is a Dixieland band that we heard playing next to St. Germain des Prez. They were so good I bought two of their albums, then made a movie with one of their songs. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJk6ofoqCN8. We miss Dick and Jeanne terribly, but we're glad it was them that had to go home and us that got to stay.

École des Arts

It's been wonderful traveling with Dick and Jeanne, since they both know so much about so many things. Jeanne's perspective as an artist, especially as I navigate my way through Modernism and Post-Modernism, has been invaluable. Art of course is not just dead relics from a bygone era, but the creative life-force of humanity. Artists simultaneously seek self-expression and a way to make a living.


On Tuesday we set out to see the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, in what used to be the Japanese Pavilion. We saw a marvelous set of Matisse murals, but the rest of the museum was closed for some kind of social event, so we shifted gears and hopped a 69 bus right through the middle of Paris to the Place de la Bastille. There we bought wonderful sandwiches and made our way to the Place des Vosges for a picnic.

This was originally built as a summer home for Henri IV, but he never used it. Now it is a lovely park and neighborhood for people with more money than me. One of the most important pilgrimage sites is the home of Victor Hugo.









Yesterday's main event was a visit to the Pompidou Centre, which houses Paris's largest collection of modern art. The galleries on the fourth floor has art from around 1970 to the present, and the fifth floor from the turn of the 20th century to around 1970. So much modern art is about originality, as artists seek to do something that has never been done before. Part of the story is the journey toward abstraction, a a journey to make painting less about likeness and more about paint and the nature of painting itself. With the advent of photography in the later 1800s painting lost its traditional job of representing nature. Artists ever since have struggled to find a purpose for their work. The Impressionists took a first crack at it by focusing more on the light that strikes objects than on the objects themselves. Van Gogh expressed his emotions on canvas, Picasso reduced objects to their geometric forms. Kandinsky abstracted his figures to the point that they become like music, a disembodied representation of pure emotion.

I was particularly fascinated by an untitled painting by Mark Rothko. It's easy to dismiss  this as pure pretense. It's nothing but two rectangles, black on red, not even precisely drawn. And yet the artist has labored over this work, laying on layer after layer of paint of various shades and consistencies. Little by little it draws us in, and the more we look, the more we see. Art like this takes some patience, and an open mind. It's also much better in person, and in the company of someone who already loves it and can tell you why.

Tonight we ate at the brasserie next to our house and wandered the streets looking at local galleries. Jeanne found some pottery she liked, and as she was shooting pictures of it through the window the artist came by and let us in. Jeanne bought one of his pieces, they exchanged cards, and a professional friendship was born.

L' Amitié

Those of you from Las Cruces won't be surprised that I haven't posted for the past couple of days when you hear that the Rundells are with us. We've been too busy talking to write anything. Dick Rundell is my best friend in the world. I met Dick my first year of teaching at a meeting where we started talking and never stopped. We have been known to go to breakfast and sit and talk until it was time to order lunch. One day we started conversation at breakfast in San Antonio, drove to the airport, flew to El Paso, drove home to Las Cruces, and sat in the car in the driveway and talked for another hour. We couldn't hardly remember ever getting on a plane. Over the years Evelyn and Jeanne have become almost as close as Dick and me, so we all have a lot to talk about.

I met them on the Metro stairs on Saturday afternoon. They had been in Vienna for a week and Munich for two days, so they were a little tired when they got here. We spent most of the evening in a restaurant eating steak and fries. When you're down nothing beats beef for dinner.

On Sunday morning we went to St Sulpice, attended high mass, and heard Daniel Roth play the great organ. After mass he played a 40-minute recital, which was extraordinary—Frescobaldi, Froberger, and, of course, Bach. Afterwards we had roast chicken and new potatoes in our apartment. Dick took a nap, but Jeanne and Evelyn and I went for a walk along the Seine, past Notre Dame to the Île St. Louis, around and back again. For supper we went to a sidewalk boulangerie for an eclair and hot chocolate. The chocolate was about the consistency of Jello pudding, and we found that you can have too much of a good thing. We're not sure if we slept that night or if we were all just in diabetic comas.

Monday we got up early (for us) and got in line at the Eiffel Tower. None of us had ever taken the time to go up in it before. It was a wonderful experience, and worth the time and money. It helped that we were there early—the lines moved quickly and we were at the top within about half an hour of getting there. You can't do that at Pirates of the Caribbean.

The views, of course, were spectacular.

For lunch Dick and Jeanne took us to the restaurant atop the Pompidou Centre—more gorgeous views. Maybe even better, because you can't see the Eiffel Tower atop the Eiffel Tower. This was far and away the poshest restaurant we have been to yet. The food and service were great. We planned to spend the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, but half of it was closed today so we are waiting for Wednesday.

We did enjoy the Stravinsky Fountain with sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. The fountain commemorates works by Igor Stravinsky: here is the Firebird. Jeanne is an artist, painter, and potter, and it's delightful and instructive to see Paris through her eyes.

Since we couldn't see the museum we wandered the streets and visited a couple more churches—St. Merry, which was in a shabby state of repair but had a lovely Italian Baroque marble chapel; and St. Eustache, a Renaissance church in a Gothic shell. Much of its lower reaches, and many of the chapels behind the altar, are hand painted in the medieval style, and the detail work is breathtaking.

I also loved that the choir was open in the back allowing the light from the big chapel behind to stream in. It was a beautiful effect.















Tonight we ate leftovers and talked till bedtime. Actually we only stop talking to sleep and chew our food, and we don't stop long for that.

Au Cimetière

Once again we were blessed with a sunny day, and all I had was my iPhone. But we got some decent photos anyway. Light doesn't just enlighten your mind, it enlivens your camera. This afternoon we decided to climb the Montmartre again. It's one of my favorite places in Paris and worth the climb. Whenever I see this view I always think of Professor Fate and Max coming down these steps in their car. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry for you (hint: watch Blake Edwards' The Great Race.)

Light was streaming into the basilica, where mass was being performed by a couple of priests and a small ensemble of sweet-voiced nuns. Sacré Coeur is at the top of Montmartre hill, the highest point in Paris. It is the most recent of Paris's landmark churches, completed in 1914 and dedicated after the end of World War I. Yet with its onion domes and mosaics it has a Byzantine quality that speaks of a time long before modern civilization. The church was built as an act of penance for the excesses of the Second Empire and the Commune. Perhaps it implies a rejection of the intervening centuries as well.

So here's a question for my learned friends. Sacré Coeur is generally disparaged for its gaudiness. It certainly is eclectic, with its neo-Byzantine Romantic Gothic Classicism. In many ways it represents civilization on the brink, a culture facing a stylistic quandary. I told Evelyn that it is the architectural equivalent of a Strauss opera or a Mahler symphony. Everything has already been done—there is nothing new under the sun. 20th-century modernism would soon reject all history and insist on unrelenting innovation as the primary artistic value. And yet we love Sacré Coeur, almost like it's the last deep breath before the abyss. So I guess the question in all that is just, "Does anybody else feel that way?" What do you think? Discuss. (Here's where my blog's readership stats take a nosedive.)

We also visited Montmartre cemetery. Before the late 1800s Montmartre was relatively unpopulated, and it was a good cheap place to bury people. Many cultural luminaries were buried there, more or less on top of each other.

We had the intrepidity to search out Hector Berlioz's grave and pay homage. I sang a quiet rendition of "Le Spectre de la Rose" and hummed a few tunes from Symphonie Fantastique and The Damnation of Faust. I'm sorry, all you violists, I can never remember anything from Lelio.

Tonight we went to the bookstore of my dreams, Shakespeare and Company. Run by Left Bank Englishmen, it has more books than three Barnes and Nobles in a space about the size of grandma's house.

After we got home we caved, bought the streamed seventh season of 30 Rock on Amazon, and watched the first three episodes in bed. So much for La Vie Parisienne.

Hameau

I came down with a cold on Tuesday and by Wednesday was feeling droopy, so I spent most of the day in the apartment working on my Humanities course. We did go out and shoot some footage at our local bakery in the morning, and in the afternoon we went over to the Louvre and visited Napoleon III's apartments. This Napoleon wasn't the military genius that his more famous uncle was, but he certainly had taste.













Thursday I wasn't feeling any better and resting didn't help much, but we had a beautiful sunny day so we got on the train and went out to Versailles. This time we skipped the palace and the hordes of tourists and lost ourselves in the gardens.

Louis XIV's Versailles was a visible manifestation of his manly prowess, as he imposed his will over tree and brook and fountain, as well as over France. But a century later, when Marie Antoinette came here to marry Louis's great-great- grandson and become his queen, she wanted something a little more sensitive, a little less grand. Her father-in-law had given her a country house near Versailles called the Petit Trianon, but she wanted the gardens remodeled in the newly fashionable English style.

Marie's gardens look more natural to our eyes than Louis's sternly manicured beds and hedges. And yet everything here is carefully calculated to please. In the 18th century landscape painters took nature and ordered it on their canvasses to make it picturesque, conforming to the rules of form and balance that painting had long embraced. Now gardeners planted their gardens to recreate the pictured landscapes.  A renewed love of things Greek required the tasteful placement of Classically-inspired statues and fountains. Even an artificial ruin was required, as if some idyllic lost civilization had once stood here and magical gardens had grown up around it.

I was surprised when we first got here not to see many fall colors. But they are coming on now, and we had a full-blooded Indian summer day. A day walking in the sun wore me down to a nubbin, but when I went to bed I slept like a baby and feel much better. The exercise, the gardens, and some miracle elixir that I picked up in the pharmacie did the trick. 

Saint Denis

 Today we rode the Metro about as far as it goes out to the town of St. Denis to see the cathedral there. St. Denis is one of the most important cathedrals in France for two reasons. The first is that it was the birthplace of the Gothic style. The man who pioneered it was Suger, abbot of the St. Denis monastery from 1123-1151, and friend and confidante of the French kings. It was his idea to remodel the abbey church in a grand style, fitting for the burial place of St. Denis, the apostle to the Gauls and the patron saint of France. Suger was enamored with the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth century philosopher who blended pagan philosophy with Christianity and took the pseudonym Dionysius, claiming to the be the Athenian convert of Paul the Apostle mentioned in Acts  17:34. As if this wasn't confusing enough, Suger was under the impression that the real author of Dionysius' writings was St. Denis himself (he wasn't). Nevertheless, Suger dug his philosophy, especially passages like the one I saw posted in St. Denis's crypt: "For whosoever exercises his powers of reflection, manifestations of beauty become the figures of an invisible harmony." Dionysius, and Suger, believed that beautiful things were signs from God that led humans toward a communion with deity. "This stone or that piece of wood," Dionysius wrote, "is a light to me," because all visible things are "material lights" reflecting the infinite light of God. For Suger, this was a justification for his love of ornamentation and richness, for beautifully worked metal and stone and glass.

Suger worked closely with his architects to create a space that captured the grand counterpoint between gravity and aspiration. His cathedral would be made of stone, yet it would aspire to the heavens. Both the narthex (entrance) and the chevet (the area around the altar) were completed under Suger's watchful eye. Here we see the Gothic arch used consistently for the first time to create a dizzying ribbed vault. All round the altar is a string of chapels, which in Suger's words "shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows, pervading the interior beauty."

The second reason St. Denis is so important is because it is the burial place of most of the French kings. While there we visited the tombs of Dagobert and Charles Martel, of Louis XIV the Roi du Soleil, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their children. I was especially moved by the tomb of Francis I, the king who brought Leonardo to France. Unlike most of the tombs which feature formal effigies, Francis's tomb has life-like carvings of  him and his queen lying nude on a slab, a fitting monument for a humanist king.

I was also touched by the praying statues of Louis and Marie Antoinette, commissioned by Louis XVIII, Louis XVI's brother and the king of France, restored after Napoleon's exile. After Louis's and Marie's beheading their bodies were dumped into a mass grave outside the Church of the Madeleine. Twenty-five years later Louis XVIII had their graves opened. A few remains were identified and deposited in the church along with their children that died before and during the Revolution.

Of course St. Denis is there, or rather he isn't. According to legend this 3rd century missionary was beheaded on Montmartre hill, then walked seven miles, carrying his head and preaching all the way. He finally collapsed on the present site of St. Denis cathedral, indicating the spot he wished to be buried. According to a slightly more credible account he was buried here by Dagobert, a seventh century Merovingian king who built the first chapel in St. Denis over his remains. Archeological digs under the church has revealed a burial pit with animal remains, but nothing human yet. They venerate him here all the same, and a projector casts an eerie image of St. Denis lying in his grave, his head firmly attached to his shoulders.

La VIme Arrondissement

Now that the company is gone and we are falling into a daily routine, this place is starting to feel more like home and less like a vacation. We are living in Paris, in Sixth Arrondissement, in the neighborhood known as St. Germain des Pres. Welcome to my neighborhood.

Paris is divided into twenty districts, or arrondissements, kind of like New York's boroughs, only smaller and more intimate. The Sixth is on the Left Bank of the Seine, which along with the Fifth Arrondissement is known as the Latin Quarter. It got its name because ever since the Middle Ages it has been the home of the University of Paris, also called the Sorbonne. In the Middle Ages students came from all over Europe to study here, and the common tongue was Latin.

Our neighborhood, St. Germain des Pres, takes its name from an old church, St. Germain of the Fields. It was once a monastery church, but much of the monastery was destroyed in an explosion during the French Revolution, and only the church remains. What was once a little monastery village is now a bustling university neighborhood, full of cafés, bookstores, and art galleries. Down the street is the famous café Les Deux Magots, the stomping grounds of existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and a favorite watering hole of Ernest Hemingway.

Today we visited the church of St. Germain des Pres, one of the oldest churches in Paris. It is also the burial place of René Descartes, the rationalist philosopher who is famous for his dictum cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Descartes, a great mathematician as well as philosopher, understood that one may well doubt one's existence. But for there to be doubts there has to be a doubter, which thus proves the doubter's existence. Good to know. I'd hate it if "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" has the true meaning of life, and life really is but a dream. (Descartes' tomb marker is the middle one. The bust on top is not his.)

We also visited a bigger, grander, and more famous church. St. Sulpice is a little smaller than Notre Dame, and is thus the second largest church in Paris. It is mostly in the Baroque style, and has what Albert Schweitzer called the best organ in the world. The church's organist, Daniel Roth, gives recitals after high mass on Sunday morning. It looks like we're going to have to be Catholics at least one Sunday while we're here.

St. Sulpice is also famous as the site of the climactic scene in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It has  an undeserved reputation as a haven for heresy, thanks to a set of documents known as the Dossiers Secrets that were explored in detail in a book called Holy Blood Holy Grail, one of Brown's primary sources for the Da Vinci Code. According to the Dossiers Secrets much of the history of Europe has been determined by a secret society known as the Priory of Zion (Prieuré de Sion). This group claims to possess evidence of a great secret, that may or may not be that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, that this child was brought to France by Joseph of Arimathaea, that this child was the father of the original Merovingian line of the kings of France, and that an heir to the throne, a descendant of the House of David through Jesus and Merovingians, is alive today. Among other things, the Prieuré de Sion built St. Sulpice, as demonstrated by the P and the S in the north and south rose windows, and the fact that a line that bisects the altar of the church runs right down the middle of Paris.

Heady stuff, huh? The only problem is that the Dossiers Secrets are likely a hoax. The P and S stand for the patron saints of the church, Saints Paul and Sulpice. And the line running down the middle of the altar doesn't come anywhere near the center of Paris. These are facts, Dan. The church leadership vehemently denies any historical association with heresy, and refused access to Ron Howard when he was making the movie version.

But I still think I live in an interesting neighborhood.

Dimanche

By 6:30 this morning everyone but Ev and me were in a taxi headed to the airport. Sunday mornings are quiet in Paris anyway, but with everyone out of the house the place was like a tomb. It sunk in how far away from home we are. But my morning croissant gave me comfort.

This morning we went to church at the Paris Ward, located in an old building right next to the Pompidou Centre. The chapel was packed with people from all over the world. The bishop told us that there are 44 different nationalities in his ward. The biggest presence were the missionaries—it seemed that there were around a dozen in the meeting, shepherding investigators, translating, keeping things going. A very different vibe from Rexburg. Evelyn used the English headphones while I sat there and pretended to understand French. I loved singing the hymns—I'm very good at it.

This afternoon I did some writing, then went over to the Louvre while Evelyn took a nap. This time I went directly to the Franco-Dutch Renaissance section. It's all the way on the top floor of the most distant Richelieu section, and I have always gotten there at the end of a long visit. Today I made it a priority and spent a lot of time with each individual painting. And yes, J.C., they do have a Van Eyck in the Louvre. We just gave up too soon. You can't tell from my iPhone photo, but the detail in this is extraordinary. You can actually see each individual bristle from the stubble where he has shaved his head. And the detail goes on from there. First you notice how lifelike the faces and hands are. Then you notice that he has painted every warp and woof of the fabric. Then you see the dwarves and the peacock at the next level. Then you see the intricate town and ramparts on the river. They you see the forest. Then the mountains. You need to go over the thing with a magnifying glass to see it all, something they don't let you do.

On my way out I visited the sculpture garden of French masters, and paid respect to Houdon's bust of Voltaire. It makes a great companion piece to his Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. Too bad you can't see them side by side.

Tonight we went to Opéra. Well, at least we went to a concert in the Opéra. Called the Palais Garnier after its architect, it may be the best building of the 19th century. Its opulence certainly is fitting for opera. Today it's used mainly for the ballet, and the operas are performed in the new opera house at the Place de la Bastille. The theatre is exquisite, although I found to my discomfort that I am quite a bit larger than the typical 19th century opera goer.

 Tonight's concert was of Post-Romantic and early Modern chamber music, and featured some talented young musicians from the Paris Opéra Orchestra. The highlight was a quintet arrangement of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, performed on one violin, one bass, clarinet, bassoon, and, of course, horn.