this past week or so has been rather arty. first off, on friday andy and i went to a dance performance with bess. it was this woman named maureen fleming at the emerson majestic i think. her dance has a rather japanese aesthetic so it's veeeery slow, which is highly unusual. it relies a lot on the lighting and music to keep it interesting. it wasn't bad as a concept, but fleming doesn't really do much revelatory with it so it ended up being a little long and the kind of thing you only need to see once. it was fun seeing it w/ bess, though, and we all went to excelsior (apparently it's lydia shire's) for drinks afterwards. andy had the tuna tartare and fried artichoke which he said were both pretty good. the artichoke came w/ these two subpar limp, kind of soggy things that looked like fries and were some sort of goat cheese/potato concoction. not so good. the bread that came w/ the tartare was very buttery and kind of like naan, and rather addictive although really heavy. the two desserts we had were really quite bad. the apple meuille feuille (hmm is that the right spelling, winnie?) was far too sweet (it came w/ rum raisin ice cream i believe) as was the chocolate cake we got. i forget what it was exactly, but it came w/ peppermint ice cream. (by the way, did you know that troquet, which i still need to go back to, is expanding to include a lounge as well?) then yesterday andy and i went to hear the BSO, conducted by a fellow named rozhdestvensky. andy had gotten free tickets randomly from virgin and they were prob worth less than 30 bucks each since they were in the first row, but we thought we might as well. the program was: GLAZUNOV Overture on Greek Themes No. 2, Op. 6 SIBELIUS Six Humoresques for Violin and Orchestra PROKOFIEV American Overture --- SHOSTAKOVICH Suite on Finnish Folk Tunes, for soprano, tenor and chamber orchestra (American Premiere) SHOSTAKOVICH Excerpts from Hypothetically Murdered we've both agreed previously that whoever does the programming for the BSO's season needs to be fired. we had to leave after the first half b/c every single piece we heard was so fluffy it left a distinctly saccharine taste. i felt like it was the boston pops or something. the programme must have been geared towards people with extremely short attention spans since every piece was in itty bitty, easily digestible sections. blech! dull, dull, dull. i actually like sibelius but in this context it was hard to appreciate it. it wasn't helped out by the violinist, alexander rozhdestvensky (the son of the conductor. gimmick anyone?), who had a rather uneven sound; overly rough and masculine on the low strings and too thin on the high ones. his vibrato also seemed a little weird to me. his runs were flawless, though. i wasn't fond of the conducting either, which felt lackluster to me. dyer (of the globe) didn't seem to have a problem with any of it, though, which makes me wonder if i'm just being overly critical. well, he prob. had better seats than we did, heh.