Skybound!

Saturday
A beautiful day today, after a chilly start. Lots of sunshine and blue skies, dotted with fluffy white clouds. I treated us to pancakes with blueberries for breakfast this morning, then later in the morning we drove up to Hamilton to Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, where we walked, rather than drove the roads, admiring some of the 60 or so sculptures. I have blipped this sculpture before as part of a collage, but today I decided it deserved pride of place, as it was quite eye-catching, glistening in the sun, and set against that beautiful sky. The sculpture is called Skybound, and is by American sculptor Barton Rubenstein. It was installed in 2012. He typically works with stainless steel, as seen here, or with bronze, and focuses on water, kinetics, light and suspension. We were out for a couple of hours, but needed to get back home by 4 pm, as we had someone coming round to look at something we were selling on Craig’s List. Happily they showed up, and were interested and paid the asking price, so a successful day!
In the evening we were out at an electrifying performance by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It was a sold-out performance, and featured two American pieces and two French pieces. The first piece was Gerschwin’s American in Paris, though not quite the version that everyone is familiar with, but a recently released unabridged version. It’s not greatly different, but does have about 110 extra measures/bars, and some different phrasing and intonation, and the taxi horns are tuned differently! Apparently the tuning was changed from what Gerschwin originally wrote - to be more “in tune” with the rest of the music - but as the conductor Louis Langrée said, who as his name would suggest is French, Paris at rush hour is NOT musical!! Anyway, the performance was amazing, and met with a standing ovation. The second piece was the beautiful Barber violin concerto, played by Augustin Hadelich - born in Italy of German parents, and trained In Italy and at the Juilliard School. After the intermission he played again - this time Tzigane by Ravel. The final piece, sort of echoing the opening one was Varèse Ameriques, a French composer’s impressions of New York. Composed in 1921, it is still quite modern sounding to our ears today, with shades of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It uses a huge orchestra - there were apparently about 150 musicians on stage, including about 15 percussionists, playing a huge variety of “instruments”, including a siren!