Tonight I had the privilege of hearing the Rudolf Steiner-Schule Wien-Mauer spring concert, with orchestra and enormous chorus, at the school on the outskirts of Vienna that Yvonne attends as an exchange student. An up-and-coming specialist on the altblockflöte (aka recorder), Matthias Knopp, took center stage in Telemann’s Concerto in C Major, for recorder, string quartet, and basso continuo. Joseph Haydn’s Te Deum, written for the first Nicolaus Esterházy, was sung with great spirit by the sonorous choir of students, friends, alums, and teachers.
Yvonne is a tenth-grader at Highland Hall, a Steiner school in Northridge, CA. In America, Steiner schools are more commonly known as Waldorf schools. There are many such schools in the world, principally in Germany, Austria, and the U.S., grounded in the anthroposophic research and beliefs of the Austrian esoteric philosopher, Rudolf Steiner (that's him in the photograph). Todd Oppenheimer wrote about the unique blend of traditional and progressive methods used in these schools in The Atlantic: “Schooling the Imagination.”
Another serendipitous discovery last night, at a gallery featuring the work of the Salzburg-based artist Eva Kaiser, was her intensely energetic painting entitled ‘Die Loa.’ My opera-in-progress, Crescent City, (one of the projects I’m working on while living in Vienna), is populated by several loa (gods of the Voodoo pantheon), who inhabit the bodies of regular folk at the bequest of Marie Laveau. It’s not every day that you run across another artist in another discipline and another country who even knows about the loa. It was my favorite painting in the gallery. Alas, doesn’t exist on the artist's website.
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