London

To say that this city has a lot going on would be an understatement. Wednesday night, after hearing one of the producers for the BBC talk about a music/film series she curated, some friends and I went to go hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra perform Schoenberg's Transfigured Night and Mahler's Song of the Earth. They weren't on their A game for Transfigured Night, but the Mahler was killer. Afterwards we walked along the river to a bar called The Rake, which is very quickly becoming my favorite, mostly for their selection.

Thursday morning I met my friend Lee, from home, at Waterloo station. He's in town visiting family but had a day to hang out, so we had an extremely fresh lunch at Borough Market, by my flat, followed by tea in the courtyard of Southwark Cathedral. From there we went to see the Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern, then to a lecture on campus by George Benjamin, about French musical life in the 70's and to introduce Grisey's Espaces Acoustique, which will have it's first performance in the UK next week. For the evening we went to go see a play called Riflemind, mostly because Philip Seymour Hoffman was directing it. Good stuff, although the lead actress was pretty weak.

And today was a whole bunch of studying and composing and running a few errands. I think I'm a bit saturated for going out and doing things anyway. Gotta go keep writing/listen to Benjamin Britten's Church Parables.