On my recent Santa Barbara Choral Society performance tour to Spain, where temperatures were pretty toasty as well, Mike and I discovered the Spanish custom of enjoying ‘the wine of summer’ and drank about a 55-gallon drum of it each.

Much like sangria, but much lighter and more refreshing, tinto de verano substitutes lightly sweetened sparkling water for fruit juice as the diluent of the wine. And this makes for a much superior thirst quencher.

Give a try to my low carb version, but I warn you, they’re addictive!

Low Carb Tinto de Verano
Serves 8

1 (750 ml) bottle red wine (Spanish if you’ve got it)
2 ounces (60 ml) DaVinci Sugar-Free Simple Syrup
3/4 liter (750 ml) sparkling water

1. Pour the wine and simple syrup into a 2 quart pitcher
2. Quarter the limes, squeeze their juice into the wine, and drop in the lime hulls. Or slice the limes and just drop them in.
3. Add the sparkling water and stir to combine.
4. Serve in a tall glass over ice with another slice of lime to garnish

Prepare to be cooled off!

I’m not, nor have I ever been, a big beer drinker, chiefly because I don’t even remotely like bitterness in food or drink. I figure natural selection gave me bitter taste receptors to warn me off of poisonous foods, so why tamper with 4 million years of genetic tweaking?

I can drink the maltier, non-hoppy brews (it’s the hops that impart the bitter character so many beer aficianados covet) and have found a very few microbrewery offerings that go down pretty easily over the years. But I’d still rather have something else and figured what with the carbs and calories involved why push myself to drink something that I don’t really enjoy and that can only cause me bariatric pain in the end? So in days gone by, when all around me were into their Black and Tans or their Guinness Stouts or their Firestone Double Barrel Ales at pub gatherings, I’d either opt for a glass of wine (which sometimes leaves you feeling like a bit of an outcast and in many cases isn’t the very best wine you could hope for) or I would painfully nurse a pint of something just to join in with the gang.

Then, about 10 years ago, I discovered hard cider and pub life was forever changed for me.

Now I had something that tasted as good as it looked, brimming golden over the rim of the glass, and that I truly could enjoy. Now, I, too, could order a pint!

And on this two week sojourn that took us from Dublin to Galway to Lahinch to Kinsale to Cork, I did so with (I admit it) pretty much reckless abandon. It was vacation, after all.

Historians tell us that fermented cider, not ale, was the chief alcoholic drink of the American colonies, so there’s even a patriotic connection to ordering a pint of cider to be proud of. Whereas the colonists probably fermented their apple cider in non-airtight containers and so didn’t capture the carbon dioxide released from the fermentation of sugar to alcohol, today’s hard ciders are made much like beers, giving them a lovely bit of sparkle. The result is a delicate beverage with a lightly sweet flavor and an alcohol content somewhere in the 4 to 5% range. Even though a portion of the natural sugar in the apple juice has been converted to alcohol, to be sure there still a bit there and so drinking a pint of cider is, for a low-carber, something of a guilty pleasure.

Drinking a lot of pints is a real dietary vacation!

I’ve long wished that someone would make a ‘light’ cider, so that I could enjoy with less metabolic impact. And, on this trip, I discovered that, at least in Ireland, someone does. Bulmer’s, the prevailing cider brand throughout Ireland, makes a Bulmer’s Light Cider that has only 92 calories and only about 3 or 4 grams (if I remember the label correctly) of residual sugar. It’s sweetened with a blend of sucralose and aceK. We ran across it in a grocery market in Dublin, sold in cans, and I had great hopes that I’d find it in some pubs along the way, but never did. Still, it’s a comfort to know it exists.

Bulmer’s cider has been imported into the US since about 2000, as I understand it, but under the Magner’s name. So far, I’ve only been able to trace the original product and have found no mention of the ‘light’ but it gives me hope that in the future some savvy beverage importer might bring the reduced carb/reduced calorie version to our shores.

If anyone out there knows of a US available light version, please do share with us all!

Until then, I will just have to content myself with the occasional pint of Hardcore on tap at my local Irish pub.

We’ve never traveled in the East before and it has been something we were looking forward to doing, particularly as it involves food and nutrition. One big surprise has been the food. I came expecting rice and noodles and vegetables and not much in the way of protein and boy was I wrong.

I would have to say that rice or noodles have been a side dish, not a main dish, at most of our meals here. And there has been plenty of fish, poultry, beef, and pork…often all four at one meal.

For instance, the day we were in Jiang Men, we were treated to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant. I was concerned that it would be all rice and dumplings with little tidbits of meat here and there.

The meal began with steamed stuff clams and fish cakes. Followed by a couple of dumplings

Pork Dumplings

Shrimp Dumplings

And the food just kept on coming.

Most of the food appeared in plates to be shared, placed on the giant lazy Susan always found in the center of a Chinese dining table. But everybody got his or her own ‘main dish’ which at this lunch was steak.

Steak with a brown sauce and fries

You’ll notice that there are a few fries artfully arranged (practically into a Chinese character) on the plate. That’s how many came with the steak. There were eight or nine (both lucky numbers in China–eight for wealth and nine for long life) fries about an inch and a half long on the plate. That’s it. Contrast that with the mountain of fries you’d get with a ‘steak frite’ in the West.

Then a shared chicken dish that was just yummy…

Chicken with mushrooms and fresh cukes and tomatoes

and one of scallops and broccoli…

Scallops and Broccoli

…and a shared plate of corn and a purple sweet potato that is a locally grown specialty. I don’t eat much corn (though I love it) so I passed on the corn on the cob, but I tried a little of the purple sweet potato. Its consistency and taste is pretty much just like an orange one, but purple through and through, like a beet.

Corn and Purple Sweet Potatoes

And finally some little sweets, which I admit to having a taste of, just to try. They were actually quite hard to get into. The outer sticky rice ‘bread’ is soft and cold and really stretchy, a lot like the Ethiopian bread, called Injera, if you’ve ever had that. It was a struggle to get the thing open, but we weren’t alone; the locals struggled a bit, too. Inside was lightly sweet cream and bits of different kinds of fresh fruit, including watermelon.

Snowballs - Steamed Sticky Rice Sweets

Quite a feast…and for lunch, no less! Wait until Mike blogs about dinner that night. Sakes alive, what a meal!

Off to London this afternoon. Will be dining at The Fat Duck, so be prepared for a blow-by-blow on that experience.

While we’ve enjoyed lots of great meals in wonderful restaurants, cafes, and bistros in many trips to Napa (since it’s not far off the I-80 path we regularly travel between Santa Barbara and Tahoe) we’ve never planned far enough in advance to get reservations for TFL. The reservation drill, according to Debbie, is that you must call exactly 2 months in advance of the day you wish to dine and hope that the reservation and phone gods are with you. The first time, she hit redial for an hour and a half before having to finally give up. The next week, she recruited 3 of her employees to help her and all four of them hit redial for another hour and a half before one of them finally got through and was able to secure a table for 4.

Going in, you know it’s going to be expensive. You’ve heard that it is and you expect a stiff tariff. But it still sort of takes your breath away. (Though it’s less, per person I’ve heard, than a few of the toniest Vegas establishments.)

Upon being seated, the wait staff presents you with the menu, embossed with the signature French Laundry clothespin. Some courses offer a choice between two different dishes, but basically, the menu gives you only two alternative tracks: the Chef’s Tasting menu, which runs the gamut of every wonderful meaty, fishy, and fowly thing and the Vegetable Tasting, which is mostly veggie with a couple of choices that include some fish, though always juxtaposed against a purely vegetarian alternative choice.

The fish slip in on that track, I guess, because the so-called beady-eyed vegetarians, who eschew dining on charismatic mega-fauna (aka cows, sheep, deer, elk, bison, etc. ) will bend their principles to eat members of the animal or fish kingdom (i.e., chicken and fish) that have the genetic misfortune to possess beady-eyes, rather than big, brown Bambi eyes. Based on that philosophy, one can only speculate about the pig, which has neither Bambi eyes, nor exactly beady ones. Whatever; they usually eschew dining on pig as well.

At the bottom of the menu–under each track–you’re informed that the dinner is $240 per person prix fixe, service included. But not libations.

Debbie didn’t ask the price when she called (it was a landmark celebration and price wasn’t the object, after all) and they didn’t offer to enlighten her, which to my way of thinking, they should have. Or at the very least, they should send a nice email, confirming your reservation, and subtly informing you that you have limited choices in selection and that dining there is a prix fixe affair at a cost of $240 per person before wine, and giving you 24 hours to cancel your reservation without penalty if you so choose. It would be the fair and honorable thing to do to be sure that people know exactly what they’ve signed up to buy. Most would still come, but others might opt out and ought to be given the chance to do so. Some folks, who didn’t ask the cost and weren’t told, might really get blindsided and once seated feel obligated to stay, even at a price they could ill afford. (The $100 per person cancellation fee might also figure into their decision to stay and dine, since they’d be in for nearly half the price for none of the fun, if they chose to cut and run.)

Pricey though it is, even after the fact, I can see the value (about $6 a bite) in the incredible amount of skilled culinary labor that goes into each dish. Every one is a work of art, played out in delicious flavors, on a pure white porcelain canvas. The preparations begin early in the day, with under chefs out in the garden across the street at 8 o’clock in the morning, harvesting tender veggies and fragrant herbs for the night’s meal.

Where I parted ways with TFL was in their wine list, which to my mind was obscenely overpriced. There wasn’t a wine on the list under $125, a few in the $160 to $180 range, a few more in the $200s and $300s, but far and away most of the wines were $300 to $1000 per bottle and one was $6600.

I was once told, by a NY Times food writer/restaurant reviewer, that the rule of thumb for appropriate pricing of a wine list was that however extensive it might be, however far into the realm of phenomenally expensive wines it might wish to go, about one-third of its wines should be priced at or below the cost of the most expensive entree on the menu. Of course a fixed menu, such as TFL, doesn’t price the entree, so it’s a slightly different calculus. If one assumes the entree represents approximately one-half the food cost of a meal (with the salad, appetizer, and dessert making up the other half) then the ‘entree’ of the meal at TFL would run $120.

There was nothing on their quite extensive, shockingly expensive wine list at or below that price. And there was but one bottle that I can recall on their lengthy list that was close. You can’t tell me that they can’t find a dozen delicious wines, practically at their back door, that they would be able to sell at a fair price and still make money on. They’re in Napa, for crying out loud!

We ultimately chose a bottle of Peter Michael wine that I believe retails for about $160. Having been in the restaurant biz years ago, I suspect they got it for less than half of that and probably less than that. We paid $285 for the bottle, as I recall, which is a pretty nice mark up from the $80 or less that it likely cost them. But the wine is not what you go to TFL for.

The food is extraordinary and you can’t get a meal of equivalent beauty anywhere else in Napa that I know of. The wine, on the other hand, is the same bottle whether poured at TFL or down the street at Bistro Jeanty, which also has delicious food. It just costs a whole lot more pop the cork and pour it in the former, apparently. And for my money, the overblown pricing of their wine list mars the overall experience. It feels purely and simply like a gouge and totally unworthy of an establishment of this caliber.

But dining at TFL is not even just about the food that’s offered, which to me (and Mike and I disagree on this point) was quite spectacular, but how it’s offered. It’s not so much about eating, as the experience: every course plated to utter perfection, each a work of art, visually and in its combinations of taste and texture.

From the amuse bouche of teeny crispy cornets filled with tuna tartare to the hand-dipped truffles and chocolates that finished the meal, the execution was perfection itself.

But for me, the outstanding course of the evening–perhaps the single most delectable bites of food I’ve ever eaten in my entire life–was the Oysters and Pearls.

On a bed of warm, creamy, large-pearl tapioca–savory, not sweet–two tiny, succulent oysters lay on one side of a quenelle of black caviar. And not a small quenelle, either, a pretty healthy portion. The balance of salty caviar against the savory tapioca imparted a delicate sweetness to the tender, perfectly cooked oysters.

I could have had four of these and nothing else and gone away happy!

This recipe is in The French Laundry Cookbook, which is in my cookbook library in Santa Barbara. I plan to give it a whirl someday, though getting those tiny, tender oysters may prove a challenge.

So we’ve been, now, on a pilgrimage to the famed Laundry, the Mecca of French Haute Cuisine in Napa. Would we go back? Mike says ‘no’! I say, probably so, though I’d likely take my own wine and pay the corkage fee (which is steep) next time.

I had to admit that she had us there. While the book contains at least an entree recipe or two for dishes that derive from a wide array of ethnic cuisines (Tex-Mex, Korean, Finnish, Italian, Greek, and French) there aren’t any recipes specifically derivative of Indian cuisine.

I responded to her that there were a number of traditional Indian dishes that would work well, sans rice, for a low-carb lunch or dinner that are listed in the dining out section in Protein Power: tandoori chicken or lamb, chicken beef or lamb curry, chicken tikka or chicken masala, zukeni bhaghi (stewed zucchini and yellow squash) and saag paneer (creamy spinach) but that I had to admit that we were unfamiliar with traditional Indian breakfasts or other types of lunch fare. I offered that if she would send me a few recipes of her favorite traditional breakfast or lunch dishes, I would endeavor to adapt them for her. If and when she does, I will post them on the blog for all.

In the meantime, I decided to get started with what I currently could do and adapt a recipe for curry that caught my eye in a Healthy Plate column by Jim Romanoff that appeared recently in our local paper. While mine uses chicken, his used shrimp, which would work just fine, though you’d want to cut the cooking time down to a couple of minutes, cooking just until the shrimp were opaque and tender. Where his used cous cous, I built mine around our old low-carb friend, cauliflower.

Here it is, for all readers wanting/needing a little curry fix.

Curried Chicken and Veggie Cauli-Cauli
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

1 large head cauliflower, washed and trimmed
2 tablespoon olive oil (divided use)
2 tablespoons butter (divided use)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped finely (divided use)
2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 1 pound), diced to 1/2″ to 3/4″ cubes
1 cup chicken broth (divided use)
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1 cup broccoli, broken into small florets
1 small zucchini, diced
1 small red bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt (divided use)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (divided use)

1. Cut the raw cauliflower head in half and then each half into 1/2″ slices.
2. Place cauliflower slices into the food processor and pulse to chop evenly into small cous-cous sized bits. Set aside.
3. Put chicken pieces in a bowl and season with a little salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon of the curry powder. Toss to coat.
4. Heat 1 tablespoon oil and 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet large enough to hold the chicken. Add the garlic and saute until slightly limp. Add the chicken pieces and brown on all sides.
5. Add 1/2 cup of the chicken broth, stir to pick up the brown bits on the pan. Add the broccoli, zucchini and red bell pepper (not the scallions); cover and cook over medium low heat for another 5 or 6 minutes, until vegetables are tender. Turn heat off and hold, covered.
6. In another large skillet, heat the remaining olive oil and butter over medium heat. Add the remaining garlic and the scallions and saute for a few minutes until tender. Add the cauliflower, remaining salt, and pepper, stir to coat in the flavorful oil, then cook for another 3 or 4 minutes.
7. Meanwhile, return the chicken skillet to a low flame to heat the chicken through.
8. Add the remaining chicken broth to the cauliflower and continue to cook, uncovered, until cauliflower is tender and moisture is mostly gone.
9. When the cauliflower is ready, add the chicken and veggies and toss.
10. Serve with a glass of sugar free hot or iced chai.

Enjoy!

Every good feast has to have a fish course. A few years back, we sprung the hinges on our wallet for some really good caviar for New Year’s Eve. We still had our Santa Fe casa then and were spending the holiday there. Some good friends flew out to join us for that New Year’s Eve celebration and we all decided we’d enjoy blinis with caviar as a part of the meal. We bundled up against the snowy cold and headed over to the Cookworks gourmet shop that used to be on Guadalupe Street where we knew we’d find something fabulous.

And we did. Granted, it set us back a pretty penny…or more like several pretty pennies, but it was worth every one of them. I’ve never enjoyed caviar more.

A view of the Hotel Loretto in Santa Fe at Christmas.

If you ever get the chance to enjoy a Christmas in Santa Fe, take it. It’s positively magical there: crisp cold air, bright stars in the clear night sky, the smell of pinon fires burning, pretty farolitos lining the rooftops all over town. But that’s another tale for another day…back to the fish story.

This year’s splurge, however, was the foie gras, so we decided to retain the blini theme, but topped them instead with a slice of good lox from wild caught salmon, a dollop of creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of tasty, if decidedly more pedestrian caviar.

Blinis are basically just little pancakes, therefore a touch on the carby side, unless you do a little adapting wizardry, particularly if you give in to temptation and eat too many of them. So I pulled out my Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything, flipped to his Fluffy Pancake recipe and promptly replaced half the flour in it with almond flour and the milk with cream to cut the carbs somewhat. I had the temptation part covered, since I planned to portion them out two to a person, with no extras to worry about.

The Bittman verison I adapted is a pretty standard pancake recipe: eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, touch of salt. All the usual suspects, meaning that any recipe would work for a blini. But the fluffiness in this one comes, as it often does in waffle recipes, from separating the eggs and beating the whites to soft peaks and folding them gently into the batter at the last moment; it lightens the batter and makes, just as the name says, Fluffy Pancakes. The technique is especially helpful when you’re substituting denser, fattier, heavier almond flour for the lighter, softer all purpose wheat flour.

Since all we were going to need was two small (about 2-inch) blinis for each of us, I only made half the recipe on the morning of the party. Like crepes, you can make the blinis ahead of time, cool them slightly on a rack, then put them between and under several thicknesses of paper towels on something oven proof, wrap them tightly with aluminum foil and tuck them into the refrigerator until the dinner gets going. When the time comes, you can reheat them, right in the foil packet, in a 200 degree oven for about 20 to 30 minutes or so and they’ll be perfect. They stay nice and moist in their packet and warm gently.

To save time between courses, I had portioned the lox into 16 little piles on a plate, covered it with plastic wrap, and popped it into the fridge earlier in the day. That way, when it came time for the fish course, I just had to take the warm blinis out of the oven, put two on each plate, top each one with a portion of lox, add a dollop of creme fraiche, and a bit of caviar and voila! Fish course.

Next on the New Year’s menu: the Cornish Hens.

Those Sex in the City girls started it all a few years back by standing around in their Manolo Blahniks and Jimmie Choos, sipping Cosmos, and since then, the martini craze seems to have taken over the entire country. Every restaurant menu now sports a baker’s dozen options in the category, often concocted with some pretty far out ingredients.

But I can’t even see the word ‘martini’ without remembering my introduction to the species many years ago. Mike and I had invited some friends over for a casual ‘grill out’ supper at our house and they brought along all the accoutrement for making martinis. Not the new fangled tutti fruity kind, mind you, but the classic martini, made the old fashioned way with gin, a touch of vermouth, and a twist of lemon or an olive. Shaken not stirred.

The evening began early and we were all in the kitchen and on the deck by the grill. The hot wings were cooking away, Mike was playing the guitar, we were all singing, laughing, and chopping, and our friend, Jayme, was shaking up martinis. Her then-husband, Jack, and I kept an eye on the wings, Mike kept on strumming, and Jayme kept on shaking and topping off the martini glasses. Nobody much was paying attention, we were just having fun, enjoying ourselves.

Then, all at once, Mike put down his guitar and–I am not making this up–stretched out, prostrate, right in the middle of the kitchen floor, mumbling something about how good the cool tiles felt on his cheek and to please help him get to the pool. Right.

It was about then that we all–well at least 75% of us–realized that we’d been imbibing from a bottomless martini glass, had had no food, and were all pretty well sloshed. Dinner was ready, so those still vertical ate. Those horizontal continued to mumble unintelligibly from the cool tiles.

The Great Martini Fiasco, as we referred to that evening in later years, represented the first–and last–time I partook of a martini for about 25 years. Based on that episode, we made a tacit agreement never to drink another one.

Then a few months ago, that decades-long ban ended at a favorite restaurant of ours in Santa Barbara, called Bucatini. (Italian, yes, but they’ve got a most delicious Vegetable Minestrone that doesn’t have a whisper of a noodle or potato in it along with plenty of hearty meat and poultry dishes on the menu, not just pasta and the pizzas.) I was in the mood for something different and saw on the menu a drink called a Santa Barbara Sunset. It was basically a juiced up vodka martini, made with pomegranate juice and a splash of lime juice.

It sounded refreshing; I ordered one; and it was. Thus endeth the martini embargo.

Then, on a recent trip to Michigan to see Mike’s folks, his two sisters surprised us after dinner the first night with a Pumpkin Pie dessert martini, complete with whipped cream on the rim. At first, I couldn’t get my head around the notion of a pumpkin cocktail in the abstract, but I have to say that in fact it was pretty yummy.

It was apple harvest time in Michigan while we were there, which necessitated a trip to the nearby Franklin Cider Mill for some fresh cider, which we duly brought home and turned into Apple Cidertinis that night. A martini concoction du jour became a theme of the trip. And we enjoyed them all.

So in honor of Mike’s sisters and the upcoming holiday, I offer my version of a cranberry martini.

The Cranbertini
Makes 2 cocktails

6 fresh cranberries (optional for garnish)

2 ounces cranberry juice, chilled
2 ounces vodka, chilled
1 teaspoon Chambord
2 ounces Hansen’s sugar-free ginger ale, chilled
2 curls of orange zest for garnish

1. In advance, thread 3 cranberries onto each of 2 cocktail spears or long toothpicks, wrap in plastic, and freeze for an hour or more.
2. In a cocktail shaker, place several ice cubes and the remaining ingredients. Shake and strain into a stemmed cocktail (martini) glass.
3. Place cranberry skewer into glass to garnish and as an icy-cold swizzle stick.

A word of warning: These are tasty. Do not top off indiscriminately. It’s hard to cook a turkey with your cheeks on the cool tiles. Happy Thanksgiving!

Mike and I opted, instead of seeing David for the third time, to go to the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, which houses all manner of 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th Century scientific instruments (both real and reproductions) including some of Galileo’s actual telescopes and machines he constructed for determining physical properties, such as the velocity of falling objects. In addition, there are numerous other curiosities, including what’s reputed to be Galileo’s right middle finger bone, purportedly lopped off his hand when his corpse was moved from its initial resting place to the marble tomb in Chiesa Santa Croce that’s much more befitting his monumental contributions to the body of scientific understanding. The bony digit is now enclosed in an ornamented glass reliquary in the museum. Go figure why. Perhaps some Florentine’s idea of dark humor, to have Galileo flipping off the powers that be for all eternity.

We spent a few very hot and sticky, but interesting days in Florence, culminating in our concert there at San Stefano al Ponte Vecchio, right in the shadow of the Uffizi. The photo above, Mike took just after the end of our concert, after our accompanying orchestra (Nova Amadeus Orchestra, again) had left the stage. If we thought Rome was a sweltering venue, it wasn’t shucks up to the side of the heat in Florence, even by concert time at 9 pm. We again performed the Haydn Theresienmesse (which Mike avers we ‘nailed’ and said that it was our best performance ever of it) and the Lauridsen Lux Aeterna. By the time he took this photo, we were pretty limp and worn out, both from the exertion of singing those two major and demanding choral works back to back without intermission and from the heat. The venue was packed, without a seat remaining that I could see and the Florentine’s loved it.

We had arranged with a Florentine audio recording company to make a professional live recording of the performance, which will become a CD. When it does, I’ll post info about it.

On to Vicenza, to enjoy attending a performance of Verdi’s Aida at the Arena di Verona and to give our next two back to back performances (this time of our non-orchestral repertoire) in Asiago and at Villa Coldogna.

Caio for now!

On July 14, we piled into our two big tour buses to make our way north from Rome to Florence, which is our next scheduled concert stop. Our tour guides had scheduled a lunch stop for us at Orvieto, which is a small hill town about half way along in our journey.

Big buses can’t enter the town, which you access via either the furnicular (which was out of order) or smaller city buses. Atop the hill, the little village spreads out from a central piazza dominated by a highly ornamented church (Duomo) that was built there after a miracle occurred during a mass celebration nearby. Apparently there had been some question about the bread for the mass not actually being the body of Christ, yet when the priest broke the bread, blood rand down his arms (the blood of Christ, one assumes) and dropped onto the altar cloth. In the Cappella del Corporal (a side chapel off the main sanctuary) the reliquary containing the cloth, with the two drops of blood still visible, sits encased in glass, displayed over the altar.

After a delicious lunch, about which Mike has already blogged, at the Trattoria del Etrusca, the church doors opened for a wedding and we were all able to get inside. The outside is spectacular enough to hold your attention, however, since the entire front façade of the building is covered in bright mosaics depicting various scenes of the life of Christ. Inside, the space is cool and, again, highly decorated.
Here’s a rather blurry image of our impromptu concert of a few motets, taken before Mike figured out how to do the low light clear picture maneuver on his new camera. I apologize for the blur, but at least you’ll get an idea of what it looks like inside.

Our tour guides were able to persuade the priest to allow us to sing a couple of motets in the space; the acoustics at the Duomo at Orvieta are even more perfectly suited for Renaissance music than St. Peter’s, because of Orvieto’s more intimate size. The sound of Ubi Caritas and Sicut Cervus done impromptu there is something none of us will forget.

In Rome, we had two opportunities to perform: the first, at Chiesa San Marcello al Corso, where we performed an evening concert of Josef Haydn’s Thereseinmesse and Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna for a packed house in absolutely brutal heat. The temperature in Rome during the heat of the day was between 96 and 102 degrees and it didn’t cool off all that much by 9 pm at concert time. Between the heat the church gathered during the day and the 65 singers on the altar steps and the hundreds of bodies in the audience producing plenty of BTUs, we were melting into hot, sweaty puddles inside our black concert gowns and tuxes by the end of the evening.

Despite the trying conditions, it was a glorious experience to hear the Lux Aeterna echo from the marble pillars and frescoed ceiling vaults. It was especially rewarding to introduce Italian audiences (and orchestra members) to Lauridsen, a still-active, modern American composer, whose work they were previously unfamiliar with. The members of Nova Amadeus Orchestra, who accompanied us both in Rome (where they’re based) and in Florence, were positively taken with the piece and gifted us with the loudest and most appreciative ovations and many, many personally communicated comments of Bravi! and Grazie mille!

At the conclusion as the last Alleluias still bounced around in the vaulted space and the piece had resolved itself into the final deep, quiet Amens, the audience thundered its approval and wanted more. So we complied. Our encore pieces were chosen from our repertoire of African-American Spirituals, which European audiences go absolutely nuts for. When we sang Soon Ah Will Be Done their applause shook the rafters.

The highlight in Rome, however, was singing the Friday evening mass at Basilica San Pietro.

It’s hard to imagine a more powerful setting in which to sing sacred motets. The acoustics are so lively that the harmonies echo back and back and back, even in that immense space. To sing at St. Peter’s requires application to the proper authority within the Vatican: a letter in Italian describing your requested date, who you are, a CD of your group in performance, and a ‘program’ detailing 4 or 5 motets suitable for the mass, that must be in Latin, along with the details of their composer and approximate dates of composition. We submitted the required information and received our nod of approval.

Our conductor, JoAnne Wasserman, chose as our repertoire for the mass: Sicut Cervus (Palestrina), Ubi Caritas (Durufle), O Nata Lux (Tallis), Vere Languores Nostros (Victoria), and Superflumina Babylonis (also Palestrina).

Here we are, in the choir stalls of St. Peter’s, just before the mass. When you perform renaissance music (or music written to the renaissance form) in a space like St. Peter’s, you feel somehow connected to hundreds of years of choral music history and to the monks and novices who sang the same songs in the same spaces centuries ago. There’s just no choral experience quite like it, to me. Afterward, a gentleman came up to our conductor and thanked her for including Durufle (his countryman) telling her that hearing Durufle there that day had made his trip to the Vatican special.

I wish you could have been there to hear it; fortunately, we were able to record a performance of these motets just prior to our concert in Florence a few days later, so if the recording comes out well, we’ll include it on the SB Choral Society CD of the Haydn and Lauridsen performance there and make it available to those who want to get it so you’ll be able to hear it for yourself if you choose.

Stay tuned…more on Florence, Verona, Vicenza, Asiago and Munich to follow.