Too Good to be True? - June 3, 2018

My day started with some fine music at St. Stephan's high mass where I tried to fit in reasonably well by standing and sitting with my pew mates, though the hand signals evaded me. 

The concluding organ toccata was a knockout and left me soaring as I headed to meet Howard at the Kunsthistorisches museum in a fine Hapsburgian gilded building.

The more time I spend in art museums the more sensitive I become to the value of curation and where in the Belvedere of a day ago, everything looks blah and drains energy, here everything looks and feels uplifting and it is. A very fine collection of the best of the best, well curated, with modern pieces interspersed intelligently.

Rembrandt and Rothko (who's from Latvia)

And then we heard a concert of fine piano music played in another magnificent venue on an extremely beautiful piano. The playing was fast and technically perfect and left us both cold. The Bach was too fancied up by both piano and musician.

It all leaves me feeling like too much of a good thing is just unsettling, not perfect, but rather overdone and sort of like gorging on cheesecake … wait a minute, bad choice.


And then there's this - I've always loved the Fayum mummy portraits - I wonder why?