Glass Flowers

Thanks to Legacy for reminding me about these. Arvin and I went to Harvard this morning to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see their collection of glass flowers. They are totally amazing. They look like normal botanical specimens of flowers and flower parts but they are far from that. They were all made from lamp work glass in the nineteenth century by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in Dresden, Germany. They were made for Harvard to provide life-like representatives of the plant kingdom for teaching botany. More on our day to follow... we are off to our first afternoon concert now.

Continuing...

What an amazing musical day. We went to the 2:30 concert at Jordan Hall. It was Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI playing music from his album Istanbul. Here is one of the pieces from that album. There was a mix of early music of Greek, Turkish, Armenian and Sephardic origin played on instruments I had never heard of. I still have to Google them to see which was which. the music was mesmerizing. They played an encore after receiving a standing ovation. It was the same melody interpreted by the Greeks, Sephardim and Arabs. It made me think about that moment in Spain when all of these cultures mixed together. How different it might have been if they had been allowed to continue to share their cultures instead of splitting them and heading us toward division.

We had two hours between concerts so we went back to UNO and had a late lunch/early dinner there. Then we puttered around a bit. I fiddled around with some photos in my camera. You can see some results in my Blipfolio.

The last concert began at 8:00. It was a short opera by Mark Charpentier, The orchestra consisted of many of the players we've seen during the week including the co-directors of the festival, Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. The singers and dancers were all very young. I think they may be students. They were very good and the opera was enchanting.

Tomorrow is our last day. We will spend it watching the full length opera Almira by Handel. I heard it is four hours long so it will be a long day. Afterwards is the after party at a local pub. Then back to normal life after a day to rest and visit with Helena.

What a week!