Lisbon Transfer

You were probably worried that the reason I haven’t updated for so long is because I had gotten immolated and inundated at the end of the Wagner festival in June, but that wasn’t the reason. The reason was because I’ve been off seeing the big wide world, mostly parts of it that I have seen before lots of times. But Lisbon – or the slightest glimpse of the realm of Portugal – I’d never seen before, not even from the porthole of a jumbo jet.

TAP Portugal has a good deal going worth noting – on their Transatlantic trips you can take the multicity option – and stay in Lisbon as long as you like at no extra cost. And their fares were the most competitive in January when I bought the tickets, so we planned in a mini-holiday on the way over. Also, it means makes the Budapest-New York trek much less grueling with nearly a week of grilled sardines and port (not at the same time) and quaint cobblestone streets to break it up.

Lisbon seems like a laid-back sort of place, as far as large port cities go, although I might be deceived by the fact that it was the middle of summer and the economy there isn’t exactly humming. It was fearless explorer Rob who pointed out similarities with Budapest to look out for: the yellow trams (Lisbon’s are mostly smaller and more agile for sharp turns on twisty cobblestone streets), a general sense of faded imperial glory, shared easy-going melancholy and work ethic, missing chunks of architectural record (In Lisbon owing to the earthquake, in Budapest to the Turks and most of the 20^th Century). Both are proud members of the (very large) circle of illustrious cities that have mystically reclassified their eighth-highest hills and lower as knolls.  

Lisbon itself doesn’t have too many must-check-off-before-croaking sites, but it’s a pleasant city – not over-touristed – to walk around in for a few days and soak up the ambience, with friendly if somewhat, compared to the next-door neighbors at least, reserved inhabitants. On the first day got I got dragooned (darn, no photo) in one church into helping a squadron of the faithful very, very heavy 17th century bust of the Holy Virgin from a table – perhaps a test flight for her assumption into heaven three weeks later – and was rewarded with a big bear hug, a hearty “welcome to Portugal” and a lightened purification schedule for Purgatory. And on the subject of opiates, the drug peddlers – which seems to be a common profession in the tourist zones – were also invariably very cheerful – and cheeky – offering their wares in not particularly hushed tones, in not particularly discreet locations. Something to do with Portugal’s decriminalization of narcotics in 2001 – which you’d think the national tourist board would advertise more vigorously – although decriminalisation or no I’m pretty sure, reconciling my – er – hazy – memory of such things with the unbidden fleeting visual inspection of the goods on offer, that the only crime these people were guilty of was committed in somebody’s now blossomless azalea hedge (darn, no photo). No doubt you could bake a nice cupcake from their higher-end products.

Lisbon suburbs have swimmable beaches in the suburbs – except they were very crowded and the water was very cold in late July. Something to do with a precipitous continental shelf, I am told. My Portuguese friend Sofia, who was in town the following week – fortunately we were able to catch up in New York before we returned to Europe – said that even she had never seen the beaches of Cascais so crowded, hypothesizing that the locals were all vacationing at home to save money until the crisis passes. And if it doesn’t pass, then there are worse ways to spend your summer.

What to eat in Lisbon:

1) Grilled sardines (darn, no photo, but they’re really good, inexpensive, and chock full of vitamins. I’ve made sardines more part of my regular diet recently after years of mild aversion, but only the small kind that come in cans. These giant Portuguese sardines would clean those little canned sardines’ clocks in a fight.)

2) Barnacles.  Those little black things go well with cold beer and are kind of fun to shell, which the waiter showed us how to do properly (twist, pull, consume dangling wormlike flesh). Something to try once at least. Now maybe I’ll even eat a snail one day.

3) Pasteis de Nata, these little custard pastries available at any coffee shop or bakery. Everyone says to get them at the little patisserie next to the Monastery in Belem, where they originated from, but they tasted pretty much the same there to me as anywhere else, and everywhere else was much less crowded. But they’re very tasty wherever you find them.

If there is one must-see site in the area it is Sintra, a 45 minute (or so) commuter train ride out of town, where you climb up a good sized hill, or small mountain, have your pick (there’s also a bus for the indolent) on the landscaped top of which is the Pena Palace – a sort of Lusitanified German Romantic summer palace of wild cascading shapes and forms built by King Fernando II, who had a Hungarian mother, of course. It looks suspiciously like some of my undergraduate architectural design projects.

Next stop, New York, caput mundi! I was born there after all.

Half a Ring: Ádám Fischer’s Fantasy Wagner Festival at the Palace of Arts

Each June for the last seven years, Ádám Fischer has run a week-long Wagner festival at the new Palace of Arts with a mix of International and Hungarian performers – high profile enough to be dubbed “the Hungarian Bayreuth”. Despite my great affection for Wagner, I have to confess to not paying too much attention until this year, either being on or saving for a holiday or feeling I was getting enough opera already from the regular schedule, and preferring my Wagner (except Parsifal) in the mindset of bleaker months anyway.

But this year, along with a dramatic increase in my overall opera attendance, I’ve sought to learn a bit more about the wider opera world, and after taking a closer look at the names on the playbill for the Ring production this week – performing the Ring as four one-offs inside of a week, even as a semi-staged production, is an immense project and probably financially unviable nearly everywhere else – quickly realized how much I had been missing.

In this production we had German tenor Christian Franz in the extremely demanding role of Siegfried in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (and as Loge and Siegmund in Rheingold and Walküre, which I now regret not shelling out from my summer holiday fund to see – who needs money in the USA anyway when there’s so many family and friends to freeload off?) Franz, who has worked regularly with Fischer in Budapest, now seems to be one of the world’s top Siegfrieds, standing in at the Met a few years ago to great acclaim. For Brünnhilde we had Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin, whom sang Venus for me in Tannhäuser in Vienna last November, and who also is in there in the top handful for Wagnerian ladies. To exalt these foreign singers is not to detract from our local talent in the least: singing Wagnerian leads at such a high level requires special attributes, stamina, training, and coaching that the Hungarian opera world hasn’t necessarily been equipped to adequately foster over the last few decades, although I have hopes that Szilvia Rálik (who will be taking on Dutchman, a first Wagnerian role – the Waldvogel early in her career doesn’t count) and maybe a few others of the lasses might be able to handle Brünnhilde or Isölde in a few years without destroying their voices). I’m not sure I see a real Heldentenor on the horizon though, despite being mightily impressed with István Kovácsházi.

The likes of Christian Franz and Iréne Theorin, however, culled from a global pool of opera singers with the right stuff, fly all over the world enacting these special roles over and over again, not just a 7-8 performance run once a year. How can we afford to bring them here? Especially for a week long festival? From the interviews, apparently their admiration for Ádám Fischer trumps financial considerations. And they love the 21^st century acoustic technology of the intimate Bártok Béla Auditorium in the MüPa, which one of them described as a “shoebox”. And it’s true too—at only a little over 1000 available seats per performance, since parts of the auditorium behind the stage were closed off, this was about half the size of an average opera house. So the clever people who hustled the cheapest seats (around 10 USD) early on still had very good seats in cosmic terms. I had to pay more (45 USD for front row balcony) but still a fraction of the price compared to seeing the same performers in the same roles in New York or Vienna, or anywhere else for that matter, since opera companies putting on the Ring are out to hear the cash registers clinking. I did manage to score a cheap spot for Lohengrin in 2013 though.

The intro to Siegfried starts. I love the slithering evilness of the introduction, especially in the Solti Ring, which Fischer seems to track somewhat – probably an unavoidable comparison for all the obvious reasons. Mime’s (Gerhard Siegel) opening lines “Zwangwolle Plage… Müh Ohne Zweck” … one of the few sustained operatic lyrical bits that I can bray out at will when sufficiently primed and provoked. It makes for a great party trick, especially if there are unsuspecting German people present.

In comes Siegfried. The production by Hartmut Schörghofer is semi-staged: the singers aren’t really acting out killing each other, dragging in bears, blowing their horns, forging swords, etc. There is a huge LED screen backdrop (huge by my standards at least) that displays such things in a series of stylized montages, in some cases with non-singing actors/dancers pantomiming the action alongside.  This technique actually worked fairly well. The open Müpa concert hall stage isn’t built for hauling heavy scenery around anyway, but while some operas cry out for over-the-top modern or traditional staging, in my opinion, when it comes to the Ring the former is likely to be distracting and the latter dowdy. This solution offered background visual stimulation without unduly sapping the focus of the audience or the singers.

Although it could get confusing at times, like in the video excerpt below above from the 2008 festival (same production, same Christian Franz, but otherwise a different cast) where we can see a childishly-drawn dragon getting disemboweled by an equally prepubescent sword, which is cool, followed by somebody’s underwear flying off into outer space, which I don’t get, unless that was the Tarnhelm or even the ring itself, which come to think of it I didn’t see represented anywhere else. Serves me right for missing the first two, which would have set me straight.

This production introduced a couple of other interesting visual motifs I hadn’t seen done elsewhere. Loge shows up more often than called for in the text, looking for all the world like the pyromaniac Dauphin in Quills dressed as Eric Idle singing the Galaxy Song. A pair of skinny, dour guys with big noses and black feather boas are Wotan’s ravens, which is particularly effective in Götterdämmerung, when perched up on various balconies they remind us that Wotan, though no longer present, is still watching the action unfold together with the audience. There are bits of humor added in careful measure too. Siegfried interacts comically with an onstage oboist and horn player while devising his signature call. The audience chuckling at a performance of the Ring? Two-faced Mime ventriloquizes his sweet falsetto blandishments by way of a monkey hand puppet – presumably a long-standing device of Siegfried’s adopted boyhood. Clever! But not overboard.

Franz was amazingly fluid, skipping deftly from register to register in Siegfried, a role that often gets key bits shouted rather than sung (which I didn’t detect) or transposed (which my untrained ear probably wouldn’t pick up anyway). His voice was showing signs of strains on a few notes toward the end of Götterdämmerung (whose wouldn’t?), but he put in back together and soldiered on, no doubt relieved to be finally stabbed by Hagen.  

Iréne Theorin is a true goddess, or demigoddess, or whatever – the total package of a dramatic soprano and looked fabulous in a glittering long dress. The third act of Siegfried was brilliant, with perfectly modulated power coming through at each pitch. The first act of Götterdämmerung, with the O heilige Götter bit, even if the singing was technically there, didn’t gel quite as much as it could, as if Siegfried and Brünnhilde were talking the talk but starting to harbor secret doubts about their eternal passion, although this kind of slow start often happens in first acts. Or maybe it was me in Sunday afternoon mood getting worked up trying to figure out how to diplomatically shush a nearby one-legged elderly lady in a wheelchair who had trouble unwrapping a steady succession of those little peppermint candies from the dispenser that the Müpa leaves outside the concert hall so that all and sundry may fill up the finest acoustical space in Central Europe with crinkling noises.  Why don’t they just dispense cherry bombs? (She stopped later though.) Anyway, Theorin was back to form for the remainder, losing a bit of color on a few notes but then delivering an utterly chilling and convincing Immolation scene to send us all home to bed with.

Bass-baritone Juho Uusitalo made a fine Wotan: I liked the idea of a Finnish Wotan, played mostly with a sense of wry Scandinavian detachment in his reedy baritone range as the Wanderer, compelled as his power ebbs to achieve his ends by trickery rather than his own authority, but then he manages to summon up the old mojo again, and he’s the King of the Gods once more, for a few minutes at least, reveling in the full glory of that which has given him his power, so many children, and that fine bass voice.  This Wotan seems to be the semi-retired founder of a once-flourishing enterprise that has since gone bankrupt, partly through his own misdoings, and he’s using what art he has left to him to manage the liquidation as best he can: a much more complicated Wotan than the thwarted and misguided paternal figure we usually see.

An even more famous Finn, Matti Salminen was a super Hagen (and Dragon) – playing the character with a sense of winking slyness and self-deprecation, rather than the charmless mass of lugubrious bitterness we usually see, revealing how he could come to be a charismatic leader of men and also the true extent of his treachery.

The Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra did a fine job, even though they don’t regular work with operatic singers, as far as I know. The horns wobbled in places, but I’m going to stop complaining about brass playing Wagner and Strauss until I’ve heard an orchestra that supposedly knows how it’s done (I believe this means Chicago or Berlin). Hearing the funeral march, and later the immolation music performed live is always an awesome thing, but in this chamber, under Fischer’s baton, it was truly transcendental.

More Cricket in Belgrade

The view from fine leg

After keeping this blog for more than a year now, it seems this is the point in the blogger's life were we realize that our lives are essentially cycles within cycles and all we can do is keep on dressing up the mutton as lamb and pray no one catches on. But at least we have the now annual Belgrade trip to throw a little fun into the banality of existence.

The Serbian guys (and a few gals) we first met last Spring came up to Budapest to play a couple times last summer, so by now they seem like old friends rather than new friends already, even if I misplaced a few names I should have remembered. Belgrade still has a sense of unselfconscious fun - at least the parts we see - that in Budapest seems to have gotten in large measure drowned in Hungarian cynicism and insularity and post-communist consumerism. And you can still smoke in the bars there. Not that I smoke anymore. Much. I don't usually eat big chunks of red meat either, but hey, this is Serbia.

Here we have from left to right, Tim, who only revealed himself to us that morning, as we bought our train tickets, as being back from a six month visit to Oz, and then immediately realized he had forgotten his Oz passport at Adrian's hostel and had to do a taxi-borne Chinese fire drill with just minutes to spare for the train. Adrian, looking regally simian, the only leftover from last year's trip besides me. Slightly touched Stokie Kevin - the less said the better. And Dávid, smugly thinking, "I might have lost my train ticket 90 seconds after purchasing it and had to buy a new one, but at least I'm not the goat who forgot his passport." Not shown are Gareth, Kevin's long-suffering son-in-law and, for obvious reasons, Hungarian slow-bowling wunderkind Disappearing Dani who mesmerizes opposing batters out of a pre-determined number of wickets and then vanishes from the corporeal world until the next match. So, not counting second passports and Dávid's various fantasy nationalities, it's two Brits, two Aussies (a third, Andrew was already in Belgrade for his business recruiting the people of the Balkans to settle the Outback), two Hungarians and me. Typical DCC diversity, but with some typical DCC last-minute party pooping, not enough for a team, for which we'll borrow a few Serbs. Morale is high in the photo because the Hungarian border guards have just let me and Kev run across to the pub to replenish our dangerously low beer supplies before doing the passport check.  

And a long trip it is as we go into single .... click..... track.... click.... mode..... click..... between Subotica and Novi Sad as we got to enjoy the unblurred beauty of every cornstalk in the Vojvodina, the same way God sees them when he's not in a rush to get anywhere. And then we get to Belgrade and find the queen of all hostels, furnished with oversize kitsch tables and chairs made from old egg cartons, shopping carts and bathtubs and with one wall full of illuminated mildly homo-provocative paper illustrations and a balcony and a bar downstairs. Just the thing for a cricket team free from the womenfolk for a few days.

Tim and Adrian show their affection for gay Balkan kitsch

For supper we had our first round of pljeskavicas for the weekend on cobble-stoned Skadarlija street, where Kevin found a back-up band to replace the one that got his single played by John Peel in 1983.

When the old cricketer leaves the crease

Sadly no audio/video exists of this startlit serenade. And then the night dissolved into a quick tour of Kalemegdan Fortress, which first-time Belgrade visitors Gareth and Dávid pretty much ignored in favor of attempting the hopeless task (for Europeans - even Canadians get hopelessly muddled) of teasing out the metaphysical themes of the Dukes of Hazzard. Tim has a funny story: he's been to Belgrade before but his visit was restricted to a transfer on the train up from Istanbul to Budapest with a bad hangover - just like the Orient Express but with no food or water and about 36 hours longer - and scouring the streets for something to eat. Who knew the best pizza in the whole world was to be found in a Belgrade side street?

The next day it turns out we have to play cricket. With help from Luka and Nenad at right we put in a respectful showing against a mostly mixed Belgrade XI. Partnered with Luka I manage to stay in for 3 overs, which isn't so bad for me, but then I'm fooled by a tricky spinner for an LBW. Dani, putting in a brief social appearance at left from the astral bowlers plane was really man - er, entity - of the match with 3 wickets taken, just as foreseen by the oracle.

Then more pljeskavicas at the very same place on Skadarija, with the whole of Salix CC, the London-area team we'd be playing the next day joining us. Here we have smart-mouthed Andy flanked by Serbs Haris and Vlad, the main organizers of Cricket Serbia and two of the nicest guys you will ever meet. Andy and I have a bonding moment when buying smokes we get separated from our unit on the way to a Serbian wedding party on the Sava side of town (I don't think large groups of strangers (to the bride at least) get impromptu invitations to wedding parties in other countries, even if it's not the official formal dress-up party) but I get us there in a route that was about 200m longer than optimal, which wasn't good enough for Andy, who is former royal artillery and knows maps backwards and forwards. So why didn't he find the place for us instead of griping? Because Her Majesty didn't teach you Cyrillic, did she Andy?

Somehow we make it back to the hostel in the appropriate numbers and the next day it is more cricket, another loss, in which I didn't get a bat, this time against eventual champions Salix. The Serbs are very proud of their new grounds on part of a major sports complex that was slated to be a water park, but the Italian developer ran out of financing, so they got it on the cheap. A little bit of grading and a refreshment kiosk and it will be prime cricket territory. We'll be back next year to see.

Mladen, the taxi driver who has been ferrying us between city and grounds suggests a Serbian folk tune we may like:

On the night train home, herded into a common carriage without compartments, we're the group of loud guys that you hate sitting next to on the train as Kevin expounds on his severe distaste for puppies, God, anyone from the South of England and for all members of the various socioeconomic classes oppressing the pottery workers of Stoke - he actually has an MBA from a respected (the kind where you actually go there and study stuff) university in the US, which I try to point out automatically makes him an upper-middle class American even if he never earns another penny in his life, but he wasn't having it. But somewhere around the border, after conversation has lulled around less heated topics like the state sport and motto of the State of Maryland (jousting and Fatti Maschii Parole Femine, and it wasn't me who brought it up) it's sleepy time and dreamy resolutions of our return next year and at least, say, three days, without beer or red meat. Goodbye Belgrade, we'll see you again.

Wines from the Great Plains at the Agricultural Museum

Over the long May Day weekend the City Park is given over to the simple springtime delights of the proletariat, so Rob suggested we go sample some hardworking plebian wins from the Alföld (the "lowlands" or Great Plains of south-central Hungary) at the one-day tasting at the neo-neo-Baroque Agricultural Museum, which looks like this on the outside:

Possibly the most grandiose venue for a wine venue I've ever been to, if you don't count the exterior of the Buda Castle, which contrasts nicely with the humble workaday wines that the Alföld tends to produce - not because the winemakers don't know what they are doing, but because of the sandy soil and dry climate it's hard to grow grapes that pick up a lot of interesting flavors and acids, although they make lots of perfectly good table wines. Also, they are spread over a giant wine-producing region which is mainly given over to crops and grassland and probably have difficulty establishing a collective market persence - which presumably is why they are having this showcase event in the capital, as most of them, smaller producers, are priced out of the more important wine festivals.

So we three, intent on uncovering hidden gems after the spectacular 2011 harvest were admitted for free: Rob because he is a wine-maven-about-town and knows everyone in the wine world, me because I am evidently a celebrated gastro-ish-bogger (see, it's not a complete waste of time and might even have tax benefits) and Dougal because he's from Scotland via Australia and claims he's moving to Trieste (and was duly warned: Trieste is near the top on my short-short list of cities to visit).

We started out tasting the range of the Gál winery from the southern tip of Csepel, roughly Budapest's equivalent of Long Island, except it's in the middle of the Danube. Light and airy whites and rosés -good for those who like such things on a hot summer day when a beer just won't do.

Frittman, probably the region's closest thing to a major known producer of premium wines, winning the highly politicized winemaker of the year award a few years back, had his youthful marketing machine out in force. He has a solid selection of white and roses, but I've noticed lately that the taste of the steel tank technique tends to come through more than that of the grapes themselves. Occasionally he comes out with a compelling red at a reasonable price. I have to see if I can find some of his kadarka - kind of a Magyar analogue to pinot noir, and equally fickle, before the sweet cherry season starts in a few weeks: two very distinctive Hungarian flavors that for some reason complement each other very well, at least for me.

Top prize, by general consensus of our pan-anglophone cohort went to Köpcös Pince, which not only had a full bodied Harslevelű: Rob and I had a good row as to the perceived and fundamental elegance of Harslevelű vis-á-vis Furmint, its overbearing stepsister in the crucible of Tokaji Aszú-making, from under whose shadow it only occasionally gets to escape. I say Harslevelű is an intrinsically finer wine and is widely appreciated as such. Rob agrees on the first point but holds that it is a minority view, which is why there is so little of it. Anyway, dry Harslevelű goes very well with a freshwater fish, especially trout. Köpcös doesn't seem to have a website, but this is what the winemaker, Zoltán Léder looks like:

A walking testament to the quality of his own product. If you run into him on the streets of Csengőd, ask him to sell you some. Also he had some excellent Kékfrankos, the 2008 vintage of which accompanied the following day, to great effect, Móni's and my last roast duck breast until the autumn leaves wither and die once again.

Honorable mentions go to Birkás and Balla Géza, the latter right over the Romanian border, both with a range of quality products.

The exhibits were closed because you can't have tipsy people learning about sugar beet cultivation processes, but from around behind the corner was peeking Kincsem, the greatest racehorse of all time.

One of these days I should have a look around when they're not slopping out booze.

Parsifal and Winter Opera Round-up (2)

Last night we had the Easter production of Wagner’s Parsifal, the titan of all operatic works, at least for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It’s a special part of the operatic calendar here, performed only twice each year – in keeping with the theme – on Good Friday and Easter Monday, a tradition dating from 1983 when the gradual communist thaw allowed Parsifal to be played again for the first time in many years, in spite of its quasi-religious themes of compassion and redemption. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was also banned here during the war years, as it was in Germany owing to its pacifistic message: the Wagnerite’s best rebuttal to the silly charge that the Master, along with his other admittedly poor character traits, was also a Nationalist Socialist – half a century or more before the Nazi party was formed  – or would necessarily have been sympathetic to most of their aims. I always go to the Monday performance (except last year, when I was in Belgrade).

The cast stays relatively stable from year to year, although some have moved on to retirement (András Molnár) or more distant destinations (goodbye László Polgár). This year we had a good mix of the old and the newish, with Judit Németh as Kundry (a little shrill at times, I liked her performances in previous years better, just as I thought István Beczelly’s Klingsor might have lost a degree or so of impotence-related menace, but both were perfectly competent) and masterful Béla Perencz as the wounded Amfortas, the Wagnerian analogue to the Fisher King (At the performance two years ago Perencz himself was a wounded king, muted by a bad cold. Fortunately, the announcer announced, they happened to have an American baritone-bass, Allan Evans, at hand visiting the company who had sung Amfortas when studying at Bayreuth years ago and who had volunteered to step in and lend his voice at the last minute, but not to act the part, which Perencz evidently could still handle. So we got the marvelous juxtaposition of the wild-haired half-mad priest-king lip-synching the words that were emerging from the mouth of what appeared to be, from three tiers up, Louis Armstrong in a tuxedo, who was booming out some pretty impressive Amfortas from a chair placed on the side of the stage.)

The new included guest Austrian bass Albert Pesendorfer, who brought the right gravity to the difficult role of Gurnemanz, although he did manage to get drowned out by the orchestra for a few seconds around the climax of the Good Friday Music. And there is something thrilling about having a native speaker of German singing about 30% of the non-choral lines of the opera, which also probably helps keep the Hungarian performers on their enunciative toes. In the title role, tenor István Kovácsházi’s, except for a few key moments, subdued take on the lost knight seemed an improvement over András Molnár, who played Parsifal more or less the same way as he played Siegfried and Siegmund, and Tannhaüser for that matter: lots of shouting. Special applause reserved for János Kovács and the orchestra, for whom the 5+ hour performance is no doubt extremely grueling, and in which they show that they are one of the main strengths of the opera company.

For the audience, composed mainly of die-hard friends of the Hungarian State Operas, this is an Easter rite in itself. The tourists and students who didn’t know what they were getting into mostly depart during the first intermission, and almost all of them by the third act, when the grandest of the music ensues, which lends a sense of both intimacy and spaciousness to the rest of us. Given the minimalism of the conservative set design and the sporadic nature of dramatic action, as well as the fact that I’ve seen it plenty of times, I’m happy to pay 2 euros to sit, with plenty of legroom and nobody nearby, next to a column in the last row of the upper tier, and stand up for a better view at the key intervals. I wasn’t completely hypnotized into am advanced spiritual state, as I’ve been sometimes at past performances of Parsifal, but then, I’ve got a lot on my mind these days, so this might have been the strongest Parsifal I’ve seen, even if I wasn’t fully receptive.

I won’t review all of the other operas I’ve seen this late season. But highlights were Gyöngyi Lukács’s Tosca with Attila Fekete as Cavaradossi and Alexandru Agache as an excellent Scarpia, played with more louche-ness and manipulative sanctimoniousness than usual, as well as somewhat less physical aggression (I am pretty sure God in fact intended for a Romanian to sing this role, which is probably just about as much fun as you can have on an opera stage). In a few weeks I’ll see Szilvia Rálik take on Tosca again. Szilvia or Gyöngyi? Gyöngyi or Szilvia?

Also, Budapest had its go at Tannhaüser, where the male leads of János Bándi and Tamás Busa, as Tannhaüser and Wolfram, if not up to Vienna standards, were still moving in the right direction. Of the females, Erika Gál gave us a delightful Venus after warming up for the first few minutes. Not to insult a grande dame of the Hungarian stage, but human typhoon Mária Temesi’s volume and presence was maybe about right for Brünnhilde at the Met, but was simply much too much for Elisabeth in Budapest. Big chunks of the audience ate it up though, presumably assuming that having to stick your fingers in your ears is the hallmark of a great dramatic soprano. And once again, the orchestra proved its magnificence, particularly the strings, with only the occasional hint of dodginess from those mischievous horns.

And finally, a Traviata that blossomed into greatness after starting out a little directionless in Act I, with Klára Kolonits as Violetta and Peter Balczó as Alfredo, not to mention the chorus, seeming a bit unsure about what to do with themselves. Even the dinner party scene seemed a bit like a too-early Sunday brunch. But then comes Act II, and out steps my man Anatolj Fokanov, with his magnificent booming, slightly nasal baritone, as Georges Germont, whereupon suddenly everyone realized they were on a stage and the whole thing clicked into a much higher gear as the other singers and later the chorus took up his lead. Act II ended up being one of the best bits of opera I’ve ever witnessed, and the audience also knew they had seen something special, demanding 6 or 7 minutes of curtain calls before the second intermission. The shorter and more melancholy Act III doesn’t have the same tension and drama as Act II, but the singers were in their groove now and I teared up a bit when Violetta finally left this unhappy world, which means they were doing something right. So this Traviata, together with Don Giovanni and Mefistofele, have been the real highlights of the season in Budapest this year So far, that is. The season doesn’t end until June, but with the improving weather even I can have too much of a good thing.

General Strike and Palm Sunday in Madrid

This January marked the sad end of Hungary’s national airline, Malév, which most people thought was a perfectly good airline with the disadvantage of being financially mismanaged in a tiny and equally financially mismanaged national market. Within minutes of the semi-sudden announcement, before even securing a deal with the recently expanded and now near-empty Ferenc Liszt airport, our new national carrier, Ryanair was advertising some rock bottom getting-to-know you rates to a large number of attractive European destinations. So I did a quick kilometer from home/forint calculation factored by average hours of sunlight in late March vis-á-vis the price of a beer in the destination city, and it turned out we would be visiting sunny Madrid for a long weekend for about 80 USD round trip each. And just in time too! I hadn’t been anywhere in ages, although an early spring in Hungary meant we wouldn't be experiencing a significant improvement weather-wise. 

This is our third trip to Spain, and first to the capital. Today it’s one of my favorite countries to visit but I might come from an American generation of liberal cultural establishment snobbism that once worshipped France and Italy, not caring so much for vitality, and looked at Spain with a bit of distaste as simultaneously the unreformed land of the Falange and a slightly less downscale version of Mexico. I’d always meant to go, but even though I’d read my Hemingway and always had a thing for Spanish wine, for some reason I never got really excited about the idea until I moved to Europe and heard glowing recommendations from various ex-pats who had lived or holidayed there. Also, a number of Hungarians of around my age or a few years older have fond memories from the late 80s, when they were free to leave the country but could only take a very limited amount of foreign currency with them, so they would buy a Eurail pass in forints and ride it to the end of the line in Spain, which was still a relatively cheap country, and live off bread and the knapsack full of sausages they had brought from home. Now Spain doesn’t seem cheap at all, especially Madrid, and especially if you are paid in forints!

Our first full day starts with a tour around the center. The first thing we notice is that Madrid is overrun with garbage. The second thing we notice is, what are all these cops in riot gear doing around the Puerta del Sol? And what does this word “Huelga” that everyone is chanting mean? “Huelga general” answers a friendly barman serving us cáfé con leche, in response to Moni’s “Che paso en la calle?” (she actually speaks some Spanish, whereas I just babble in my surprisingly effective pan-Romance mishmash peppered with bits of the Tijuana Toads). And there it is on the TV new scroll line “Huelga general” in Seville, Barcelona, Valencia… holy cow! the whole country’s on strike. 

Continuing our walk past the palace and back to Plaza Mayor, mobile units of strikers are calling the proletariat to arms, with a chant of "Hoy no se consume, hoy no se trabaja!" and towards noon (Spaniards don’t seem to like getting out of bed early, but I suppose that’s the whole point of a general strike) larger bands of communists, anarchists, and other malcontents were roaming the streets.

It’s surprising to see such a massive strike in a country with around 24 percent – and much higher for the young – unemployment: instead you would expect to see a general give-your-boss-a-hug day. But the strikers are, indeed, mostly young people, presumably university students, and they are protesting, it seems, not so much their working conditions, since most of them wouldn't have any work, but instead a set of no-doubt much-needed reforms instituted by the current government that will make their jobs, if they ever get one, much less cushy than they would have been in the past. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing all over Europe, I think, if not elsewhere, as the current situation unfolds. In general, I think the reforms are probably necessary, especially in a country like Spain whose real economy, no matter how far it has come, is still not that of a Denmark or even a France, but on the other hand, the kids have a point: this is more Generation XYZ funding of baby boomer profligacy.

The strikes are getting a little ugly now. The marchers are plastering red Huelga General stickers on storefronts and hectoring shopkeepers to shut their doors, which they almost all do, with an occasional scuffle breaking out in the process. McDonald’s, committed to feeding the masses, stands bravely open, covered with stickers, but KFC never even opened that morning (coz they’re chicken, hehe).

Then a horrible thought crosses our minds simultaneously: what if, on our first day in Spain, we get nothing to eat? We decide to hightail it from the center. 

At the Banco de España, there’s some graffiti but no real protesting, except some shouting cyclists. I think in most countries if you deface the reserve bank you would probably instantly have all of your identification numbers deleted and would spend the rest of your short miserable existence wandering the financial districts as a financial non-entity, searching the gutters for the odd dropped call option or bearer bond to keep body and soul together, but apparently in Spain they take such things in stride and this graffiti, like most of the stickers and other scribbles, was gone two days later. In Budapest you can still find political graffiti directed against Ferenc Gyurcsány, two prime ministerships ago.

In the Parque del Buen Retiro, people and squirrels are hard at work relaxing in spite of the strike, and on the far side of the park, where the residential neighborhoods start, everything is functioning normally, from what we can tell. We enjoy a pleasant (and inexpensive) lunch at a local café where the customers watch the strike on TV, shaking their heads disapprovingly as though it were taking place in some distant country, and not 2 kilometres away.

So we spend the rest of the day exploring the outer belt of downtown Madrid, where regular people live and play, up past the Plaza de España where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (we would see the two of them again in Budapest a few days later in Budapest dancing with members of the Bolshoi in Minkus’ eponymous ballet) guarding Franco’s bizarre Edifio España luxury apartment building.

And some old-timers attempt to explain to us the joys of pétanque.

We walked the length of this elongated park that crosses the Príncipe Pio, the hill housing the French barracks during the Napoleonic war, and the site of Goya’s masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, one of the more impressive sights in the Prado, all the more so for being painted in 1814, and not 60 years later.

And then a well-deserved glass of fino as evening set in with sore feet. Except for a cheerful gang of anarchists, the protesters were now disbanded and, banners slumped over their shoulders, were scouring the streets hoping to find an open place to have their supper.

The next day we complete our tour of now peaceful old Madrid. One advantage of the strikes is that most people seemed to have taken Friday off too, making a long weekend of it, sparing our lungs quite a bit of exhaust fumes.

This is the place to have chocolate and churros, as the wall full of autographed international celebrity photos attests.

The now-demilitarized Plaza Mayor.

The palace (this isn’t the front façade, but I am a thrall to plinths).

And various pleasant streets and views. That evening we dined at Javier Bardem’s restaurant, Bardemcillo. I didn’t know who he was but Móni says I’ve seen him in lots of movies. I know who Penelope Cruz is though. She’s his main squeeze. Anyway, Javier and Penelope are fairly good cooks, although I wouldn’t say we tasted anything truly remarkable there, except maybe for the plate of elvers with garbanzos. And the staff is friendly.

Spanish blood pudding tastes exactly Hungarian blood pudding! Except we don’t dice it up like this or gussy it up with watercress and sprouts, and we charge about two-thirds less for it. Such are the lessons of value-added marketing we must learn from our brethren in the West.

Day 3 is spent on a day-trip to Toledo via the Atocha station (the site of the 2004 terrorist attack. What happens when NATO forces leave Afghanistan? Sadly, I’m pretty sure more of these.)

Toledo is sort of the obligatory day trip for first time visitors to Madrid. As medieval cities go, there are lots of more impressive one in Europe, but it’s fun to walk around here for an afternoon, more if you have an unusually strong interest in Spanish history from the Reconquista, El Greco, or Jewish Spain prior to the Inquisition. We walked down to the new town to get lunch in a regular café, rather than an overpriced tourist restaurant.

Our fourth and final day is Palm Sunday, the first day of Santa Semana, which one day I will have to experience in Spain in its totality. After duly watching palm fronds being marched around town and into churches, we spend the day in the Prado. And not only the Prado, because half of the Hermitage has also come to visit. We toured the Hermitage in St. Petersburg a few years back, but since chances aren’t bad I will never return to Russia (whereas I probably will to Madrid) we decided to do some catching up with those work too. Anyway, as can be imagined, it was total painting overload, but I did get to fully assimilate the Brueghels (esp. The Triumph of Death), the works of Bosch and most of the Goyas, but several thousand paintings later ran out of steam to fully appreciate the more subtle Spanish masters, Velazquez in paticular.

Oh well, next time, because Madrid has definitely made it onto my list of favorite cities. I think for a next trip to Spain I would like to start and end here an extended tour through the Basque Country, Asturias, and Galicia.

Budapest Walks: Erzsébetváros

Spring made a tentative appearance today so it's time to take a break from boring everyone with opera reviews. Saturday lunch (yes, it was stuffed cabbage!) was digested with a quick stroll around the neighborhood:  District VII, Erszébetváros, Elizabethtown, named after the Empress Elizabeth, wife of Franz Josef. This is the smallest district in Budapest, just over 2 km square, and the most densely packed of them all, with 60,000 people crammed into it. You can walk the perimeter in an hour. It's kind of a mix of regular Joes and better educated, but not necessarily better paid, classes, with a contingent of students and ex-pat loafers thrown in as well.

It's also probably the most vibrantly developing district in Budapest, with an increasingly cosmopolitan flavor. Except for my first year in Bp in 1999, when I lived in the somewhat staid area near the Parliament, I've lived in District VII, first at the downtown end and since then on the City Park end, and it's changed enormously over that time, with bright new restaurants, cafés, and specialty shops opening in the storefronts, which used to be more dominated more by workshops in various degrees of defunctness.

And the development is not just on the downtown end either. On our local shopping streets, like István utca above, our shopping street one block over, we have several Chinese restaurants, including the Chinese restaurant that in summer feeds busloads of happy Chinese tourists embarked on one of their surveys of all the Chinese restaurants of Europe. We have a decent sushi place, we have a new Russian restaurant, and a Russian grocery and an Italian grocery among other delicatessens. Lots of pizza of various levels of mediocrity. Flagrant plugs: the best pizza in Budapest, for my money, is New York Pizza and the best Chinese is Master Wang's, both of which are a little further afield. We have the best cevapcici in town here though!

(Can you tell I got a new high-res cell phone camera? The only problem is I haven't learned how to keep my finger off the lens while I'm taking pictures yet.)

This part of the district was built very rapidly in the last decades of the 19th century, when industrializing Budapest was one of the most quickly growing cities in Europe. To accommodate the new demand for housing, the district was built out according to a modern grid pattern, which gave it the nickname Chicago.

A good example is our neoclassical building, above, on a street named after a famous veterinarian (not many countries, I wager, name streets after veterinarians, even if the famous veterinarian's soul is blessed nightly by millions of contented healthy chickens all over the world. The veterinary university, which has quite a strong reputation, is on the other end of the street, and attracts students from all over Europe.) Like other buildings in the area, the house was built and owned by a single wealthy family that itself would have lived on the second floor (which we call the first floor). The ground floor would be given over to ateliers or shops. The flats in the upper floors were rented out to more humble tenants.

Like most of the buildings in the area, it still needs a coat of paint, although we got the plastering done a few years ago. Hungary has an extremely high-rate of homeownership by world standards, owing to the conjunction of collectivation policies during the communist period and privatization policies immediately afterwards, but many of these homes are owned by elderly or otherwise hard-up persons with no significant cash income to speak of, hence the funds for major refurbishments in a cooperative apartment building like this one, for which usually repairing the facade is the last priority, after the roof, fixtures etc., has to come from municipal grants, which gives our local chiefs the opportunity to cultivate the patronage networks they love so much. It's happening, but slowly. On the bright side, the municipal government seems to have put a big dent in our graffiti problem, which had gotten so completely out of hand a few years ago.

And then there's the Garay fiasco. This used to be a run-down covered market serving the nearby area. The previous Socialist mayor (each district has its own mayor, which isn't a particularly efficient way to run a metropolis), who was involved up to his eyeballs in various real estate schemes and spent a couple years in jail, much less than he deserved, arranged for it to be torn down and the property taken over by a developer who, in exchange for building a new market and fixing up the facades of the adjacent buildings, would be able to develop luxury flats in the upper floors. I don't know who wants a luxury flat in the slightly dodgy area two blocks from the main train station, but somehow the corrupt ex-mayor's wife ended up with a good chunk of them (this happens quite a lot in this country: our politicians live very modestly but their spouses and often young children turn out to be exceptionally successful business operators. The new mayor seems to have cleaned things up somewhat.) They tried to create a mini-shopping mall on the ground and first floors in addition to the food market in the basement, but completely miscalculated the demand for retail space for what was, at the end of the day, a neighborhood market, and at least half of it remains empty including the entire upstairs floor. The food market does a brisk business though, mostly on Friday or Saturdays, and I'm on a friendly basis with many of the merchants. We'll visit there one day, maybe when I show you how to make a stuffed cabbage.

I've always like this eclectic building. Reminds me of the Kennedy-Warren on Connecticut Avenue in Washington done up Budapest style, and I wonder what it looks like inside.

The Square of Rose's Church, dedicated to St. Elizabeth (who wasn't an empress), and designed by the same architect who gave us our wacky overdone neo-gothic parliament building. Angelina Jolie and frequent Budapest visitor husband Brad had it blocked off with sandbags for a couple days last year when filming their Bosnian war film In The Land of Blood and Honey, which I'll maybe review here later, and you can see it clearly in the last few minutes of the film. I'm not sure there are too many Catholic churches in that part of eastern Bosnia where the film takes place, at least not dating from the era of the Austrian occupation, but who am I to nitpick with Angelina?

Now we're crossing the Grand Boulevard, which encloses the downtown area of the city. Behind the ubiquitous 4-6 tram is the New York Palace, which houses the New York coffeehouse, where the city's  artists and writers used to amuse each other around the turn of the century. Prices have increased considerably since then, but if you don't mind shelling out 1000 forints for a coffee it's a nice place to sit surrounded by frescoes and baldachins.

On the other side of the boulevard, we enter the older part of the district and the character, atmosphere and scale all change. The streets are narrower, curvier and darker. This is the old Jewish quarter, the focal point of the more religious and more working class components of Budapest's Jewish pre-war society, which is showing lots of signs of recovery today. It's also full of pubs and the outdoor beer gardens built into courtyards that should be opening for the season in a month or so.

The Great Synagogue is probably the chief tourist attraction in the 7th District. The largest synagogue in Europe, with a Jewish museum and holocaust memorial attached and, through a twist of fate, the birthplace of Theodore Herzl, conceiver of the modern Israeli state. I used to live right around the corner on the street on the left, but I only had a view of pigeons nesting in a lichthof -- a lightwell (one of the many German words dealing with urban life that made it into Budapest Hungarian). My next door neighbor was the head Lubavitcher rabbi for all of Hungary and he got the panorama windows to liven up his divinely ordained all-night boogie parties. Good thing no one lived under him. Where is the second largest synagogue in Europe? Answer: Pilsen. 

I've always like this prominently placed block of 1930s flats which I think doesn't have a proper name. Just the Madách Square flats. The arcades house cafés and a theater.

Now we're heading back out toward the Grand Boulevard on Király (King) Street. This is another street that used to be a little spooky despite running parallel to Andrássy Avenue. It's been fixed up (more or less, watch out for loose flagstones) and now houses some of the boutique spillover from Andrássy, art galleries and more pubs.

The Gozsdu courtyards are a series of 6 courtyards runing between Király street and the next street over. Originally designed as workshops and housing for local craftsmen, now they host more boutiques and pubs. Seriously, you wouldn't know the country has been teetering on the brink of bankrupcy to walk around this neighborhood. Walking through is kind of a thrill, although difficult to capture adequately in a photograph. It was even more thrilling before it was fixed up and there was nobody there at night except a chained up german shepherd to welcome you.

And back across the Grand Boulevard. Here is the city's first - or is it second? - Starbucks. I don't know what one of the joint (sort of) capitals of the Empire that invented the coffee house needs a Starbucks, but maybe that's what they think everywhere else too.

A few blocks up, at Lövölde "Arsenal" Square, where they used to keep the weoponry, Király Street turns into a bucolic country lane with villas, churches and schools on either side. There are embassies too, but only on the 6th District (Terézváros) side, which is known as the embassy district. For some reason the embassies are afraid to encroach on our side of the street.

The Lutheran High School was responsible for educating Nobel-winning mathematician Eugene Wigner, Nobel-winning economist János Harsányi, and Nobel-losing inventor of modern computing John von Neumann, all of whom I'm pretty sure weren't Lutherans, as well as numerous other luminaries, some of whom may have been.

And in case they felt unstimulated, atomic physicist Leo Szilard was growing up next door. I kind of like this house. Today the Liszt Music Academy is using it so little hope it will go on the market any time soon.

Now we've walked enough so it's time to pick up some cakes at Katalin Cukrászda, my favorite pastry shop in the area. Many of the cukrászdas truck in lacklustre cakes from industrial bakeries somewhere, but this is the real thing. A little bit pricier, but the crowds waiting on weekend afternoons seem to know the difference too. That's Katalin serving out the cakes behind the counter and husband Géza the chef on the right. I'd like 2 Pándi sour cherry cakes, please, and 1 Sacher, 1 melon cake and a "Katalin" cake! (I'm not going to eat them all myself.)