Travelogue #2 – The Cultural Mile -Lintz
Sunday Night (Whit Sunday, aka Pentacost, and Catholic holidays RULE in this part of the country) and Mike returns. We trade stories and think about Monday. Remember, this is Linz, the designated Cultural Capital of Europe for 2009.
Along with a mind numbing schedule of “happenings”, there is an impressive collection of cultural venues. We decide
on a Mozart concert at the Brukenhaus Concert Hall on the banks of the Danube River in the area dubbed as the Cultural Mile. How perfect.
Light Rail takes us everywhere. We give ourselves lots of time to wonder about aimlessly. One can burn hours just ogling in the center of the old downtown Lintz. Clean, really clean. You’d think a city founded in 799AD would show a little dirt! We get lost in neighborhood pockets where the elders hang out at the cafés and wax eloquent and cobblestone streets are barely wide enough for a Peugeot.
At dusk we walk the southern edge of the Danube towards the Concert Hall. It’s a holiday (a Catholic Holy day weekend — Whitsunday or Pentacost). The expansive grass, park, and sculpture area is filled with parents and kids, lovers, old folks and teenagers doing weird things —my favorite was tying lines of rope about two feet off the ground between three trees to practice tightrope walking.
Walking past the Lentos Museum (the museum of contemporary art) images are everywhere. The Danube frames the north side but the reflective glass construction stops you in your tracks. What an outstanding way to offer modern architecture while totally embracing and magnifying the natural beauty around it! We stop and have a glass of wine at the outside café to celebrate our good fortunes.
LENTOS MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
The Mozart Concert was lightly attended (about 200 people). No surprise with a city full of competing events and happenings. We passed up an opportunity to go on a “treasure hunt” type event billed as “Rooftop Art”. Renowned artists from the region were commissioned to design and display a significant piece of art on roofs of various structures around the city. I’d never heard of such a thing and | give kudos for originality (at least until | find out in my ignorance that this is a trend — like the Urban Race thing that we’ve seen come through Phoenix) but a Mozart Concert on the Danube won out.
Stunning as the concert was — three pieces – Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Peter Ruzicka, it wasn’t without controversy. The smaller, chamber music-sized venue was outstanding. The clarity of the music, the talent of the musicians, and the very appreciative audience made for one of those nights to remember. The contemporary composer, Ruzicka, was very edgy. Some of the compositions included “playing the instrument”. That’s the only way I can describe it. The violinists played the wooden part of the violin that produced a haunting blowing wind type of sound. | kept wondering — how do you write those notes on a sheet of music?? The soothing beautiful segments got confused with the discordant, choppy segments. The harsh staccato bumped up against soaring melody. The four musicians were in perfect synch in a very complicated piece. We jumped to our feet at the end along with the rest of the audience. We managed to get three encore pieces before the evening was over. The full moon lit the ancient streets as we slowly walked the % mile to the tram/light rail quietly wishing the night wouldn’t end and wondering out loud, “how does a musician give birth to such original work”.
Tuesday afternoon we followed the recommendation of a local expert. We were hoping for a local pub type spot and that’s exactly what we got at the Fischerhaus on the north side of the Danube tucked behind a commercial building. A table in the corner had five “60 something” men smoking cigarettes and having an animated discussion over large steins of beer. At the table next to us were two businessmen, an Austrian and a French man speaking English as their + common language. After a while, a couple probably in their 60’s took the , table on the other side of us. It was a fun afternoon at the pub with a daily fish catch for lunch. We got up to leave and the lady sitting next to us asked, in English with very German accent, where we were from. They told us they came down the Danube from Palau, Germany on the small cruise ship the night before and went to the Mozart Concert. “Oh”, we say, “we were there too”. Talk, talk, talk. They seemed to be having a good time speaking English and we were having fun just having the conversation and thinking this was like bumping into someone we know. They tell us they came down specifically for the concert as they know the composer of the new piece. This just kicked up the
conversation a few notches as the concert was pretty extraordinary and suddenly hearing about the composer brought a whole new life to the already fun night. They explained that the piece was written as his mother way dying. There were good days and bad days and then the loss he felt when she passed was very painful.
At the first opportunity, | translate the title of the composition: iber ein Verschwinden, String Quartet No.3 (1992) —A disappearance.
We find the greatest value in travel is giving enough time to explore and visit with the people around us. We thought…”what were the chances of bumping into someone, in some little hidden away pub, who went to the concert and knew the Composer of the concert piece that moved us but also confused us, AND with no motivation except to speak English, they strike up a conversation with us?” The world is full of small
concentric circles that seem to bring us all closer together…..and you wondered where this story was going!
