Posts in category: Uncategorized

Over the coming months there will be four blog posts for each city on the Davis High School Baroque Ensemble’s 2020 England-France Tour tour: Place of Interest; Concert Venue; Music; History of the city. This week’s post, the seventeenth of the series, is on places of interest in Paris.

The final concert of the DHSBE tour will take place in Paris. The choice of places of interest in the city is overwhelming, with some of the best known being the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre and Sacre Coeur church, the Louvre museum, and Ile de Paris & Notre Dame Cathedral – all of which all well worth a visit, as well as a cruise on the Seine, and shopping! The following are places of interest that may be less well known:

Les Invalides is one of the finest buildings from the Baroque period in Europe. It was built in 1670 as a hospital and retirement home for veterans, and still serves that purpose today. It is also the home of a military museum, and a church that is the burial site of many ‘war heroes’, including Napoleon Bonaparte. Les Invalides is where rioters obtained the cannons and muskets they used to storm the Bastille prison in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.

Place des Vosges, dating from 1605, was the prototype for all formal residential squares in Europe. All houses were built using the same materials: red brick with steep pitched slate roofs. The building of the Square turned the Marais district, in which it is situated, into a fashionable area for French nobility up until the French Revolution.

Musée Rodin is housed in the grand early 18th century town-house Hôtel Biron. The museum collection includes Rodin’s well known sculptures ‘The Thinker’, ‘Honore Balzac’, and ‘The Burgers of Calais’, and many hundreds of his other works. Many of his famous works are displayed in the formal gardens surrounding the house.

The Pantheon was originally a church dedicated to St. Genevieve, Patron Saint of Paris. The church was re-built in Neoclassical style by Louis XV. It became a mausoleum during the French Revolutions to honor revolutionary martyrs, and many famous famous French citizens, including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie, are buried there.

Musée de l’Orangerie is located in a corner of the Tuileries Garden (adjacent the the large courtyard containing the entrance to the Louvre.) It is the home of eight enormous ‘Water Lilly’ murals by Monet, and also contains paintings by other Impressionists, and by Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

Les Catacombes under the streets of Paris, and just under a mile long, houses the remains of millions of Parisians who were removed from old cemeteries, some dating from the Roman and medieval periods. The bones were arranged artistically in the early 19th century.

The original Shakespeare & Company bookshop was opened by Sylvia Whitman, an American, in 1919, in part to be a place for writers to meet such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce. A second S&C bookstore opened in the 1950s, and was also frequented by writers including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, some of whom lodged in the store for a time.

Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris, situated at the eastern end of Avenue des Champs-Élysées, is where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and many others were guillotined during the French Revolution. The tall 3,200 year-old obelisk in the center of the square was brought from the Temple of Luxor in the 19th century.

Sainte Chapelle is recognised as one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in the world. Construction began c.1239 and the chapel was consecrated in 1248. Fifteen huge mid-13th century stained glass windows, some of the finest in the world, fill the nave and apse, and a large ‘rose’ window was added to the west wall in 1490.

Musée d’Orsay is known for the world’s premier collection of Impressionist paintings.  Located in a former railway station on the banks of the Seine, this grand museum showcases thousands of art works from the mid 19th century until the early 1900s, including work by Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Pissaro, and Renoir.

Centre Pompidou, built in a still controversial high-tech style in 1977 at the instigation of President Pompidou. It is a cultural institution that houses a huge public library, the largest collection of modern art in Europe, a bookshop, movie theater, and has a panoramic terrace. Musée National Picasso –  Hôtel Salé,contains several thousand of his works of art including paintings, sculpture, ceramics, prints and engravings in an beautiful mid-17th century town-house.

Jardin du Luxembourg is a public park on the ‘left bank’ of the Seine. The gardens contain the original palace built in 1612 for Marie de’ Medici, widow of Henry IV of France. Visitors can stroll around the formal and informal gardens, and there are opportunities for sailing model boats, riding ponies, playing tennis, and there is a playground for children.

Over the coming months there will be four blog posts for each city on the Davis High School Baroque Ensemble’s 2020 England-France Tour tour: Place of Interest; Concert Venue; Music; History of the city. This week’s post, the sixteenth of the series, is on the history of Brussels.

Mont des Arts

Brussels – Bruxelles, the capital of Belgium, is in the region of Wallonia to the east of Bruges. Traces of human settlement go back to the Stone Age, and the area was later occupied by Ancient Rome. The city was founded c.980. and because of its location on the shores of the river Senne on an important trade route between Bruges, Ghent, and Cologne, Brussels became a flourishing commercial centre in the Middle Ages specialising in the textile trade. Flanders  and Wallonia were unified in 1831 to create Belgium (named for the ‘Belgae’, the indigenous peoples during the Roman period), but to this day Flemish is spoken in the north of the country, and French in the south. Brussels serves as the de facto capital of the European Union, and is the headquarters of NATO.

Medieval Brussels

Unlike Bruges, there is little left from the medieval period in Brussels. As was typical of medieval cities in Europe, Brussels was surrounded by a wall.The first city wall was placed around Brussels in the 12th or 13th century. One of its towers, named the Black Tower, still stands at the Place Sainte-Catherine. Other remaining parts of the first wall can be seen at Rue des Alexiens and Boulevard de l’Empereur. When the city started to expand beyond the walls, a stronger fortification was built in a similar design in the late 14th century. Both walls surrounded Brussels until the 16th century, when the first set was demolished. The destruction of the outer wall and its gates followed gradually throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

Grande Place, Brussels

The Grand Place is the most impressive historical area of the city, and includes buildings from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. As the Grand Place, referred to in 1147 as the ‘lower market’, was situated close to the port on the Senne and along an important road, the marketplace did well as a bustling center for trade. The Grand Place was bombarded by the army of Louis XIV in 1695, and only the front of the Town Hall and some stone walls remained standing. The Grand Place was subsequently rebuilt in the original styles we see it today.

Ceremony of the Grand Oath, Great Sablon Square, Brussels, 1615

Another of the major squares in the city is Place du Grand Sablon. The original sablon area was unused wetland, grassland, and sand (‘sablon’ means fine-grained sand halfway between silt and sand) just outside the original city walls. The area was later used as a cemetary, and a small chapel was built there in the 14th century. In the 15th century, the neighbourhood was enlarged substantially, and the chapel was rebuilt as the larger and more elegant Église Notre-Dame du Sablon, still standing today.

There are fine examples of Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture in the city, and striking contemporary buildings beyond the historic center; and a plan for a new entrance to Headquarters of the European Union.

Over the coming months there will be four blog posts for each city on the Davis High School Baroque Ensemble’s 2020 England-France Tour tour: Place of Interest; Concert Venue; Music; History of the city. This week’s post, the fifteenth of the series, is on the Music, Art, Fries, & Sprouts of Brussels.

Unlike France, England, Germany, or Italy, ‘Belgium’ had few native-born composers or artists during the baroque period. As with painting, the heyday of music in Flanders & Wallonia was in the 15thc. Peter Paul Rubens was a notable exception – one of the most important painters in the early baroque period in Europe who, in addition to running a large studio in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, was a classically educated humanist scholar and diplomat.

Anthony van Dyck, here seen in a self portrait, was a student of Rubens in
Antwerp. After further study in Italy, he work for the Royal Court in England for many years.

Holland, immediately to the north of Flanders had a rich history of ‘genre’ painting during the baroque period. Many of the paintings depict musical instruments and groups of musicians. These paintings are a valuable source of information about the ‘set-up’ of the instruments – design of bridge, shape of neck of the instrument, string length, type of strings and bow, and playing position etc:

As mentioned in the Bruges blog, the few baroque composers in Flanders and Wallonia are not well known – with the exception of the Loeillet cousins, and Fiocco.

Historically Informed Performance
From late 1960’s the Belgian brothers Weiland (viola da gamba), Bart (baroque flute) & Sigiswald Kuijken (baroque violin), together with Frans Bruggen (recorder), Anner Bylsma (baroque cello), and Gustav Leonhardt (harpsichord) started recording historically informed performances of baroque music, and in the process inspired a whole generation of musicians to take an interest in the repertoire and in period style performance. While still a music student in London in 1972, their early recordings influenced my decision to specialize in the performance of baroque music. A year later I became a founder member of the first baroque orchestras in England since the 18thc. – The English Concert, and Academy of Ancient Music.

French Fries (US), Chips (‘British’), Pomme Frites (French, S. Belgium – Brussels), Frieten (Flemish, northern Belgium – Bruges):

The French and Belgians have an ongoing dispute about where fries were invented, with both countries claiming ownership. The potato was introduced to France and Belgium as animal feed at the beginning of the late 16th. via Spain, but its true value as food was not recognized until the late 18th century, when a renowned army chemist, A.A. Parmentier, in his comprehensive study: Examen chymique des pommes de terres, Paris, 1774, recommended potatoes as the solution to endemic famines that were then devastating the country,

Brussels Sprouts:
Native to the Mediterranean region with other cabbage species, brussels sprouts were first cultivated in Ancient Rome. They first appeared in northern Europe during the fifth century, and in the 13th century especially in the Brussels area – from which they derived their name. During the 16th century, they enjoyed a popularity in Holland and Flanders that eventually spread throughout the cooler parts of Northern Europe, and eventually to US and other temperate parts of the world.

Interesting facts about Belgium:

• Interesting facts about Belgium

Over the coming months there will be four blog posts for each city on the Davis High School Baroque Ensemble’s 2020 England-France Tour tour: Place of Interest; Concert Venue; Music; History of the city. This week’s post, the fourteenth of the series, is on the concert venue in Brussels.

The Cathedral of Saint Michael & Saint Gudula in Brussels is the venue for the 4th concert of the DHSBE tour. It is the main Catholic church in Belgium, and very close to the city center. A Romanesque style church was built on the site in the 11th century, and dedicated to Saint Michael, who is mentioned in the Old Testament as a fighter of dragons, and housed the relics of the martyr Saint Gudula. In the 13th century two towers were added, and the church, later designated a Cathedral, was completed in 1519. The interior of the Cathedral is 374 feet long, and is built in Gothic style. The south tower contains a 49-bell carilion on which Sunday concerts are often given.

Saint Michael’s Cathedral

The Great Organ of the Cathedral, built in 2000, has a total of 4,300 pipes, 63 stops (sets of pipes), 4 keyboards, and pedal-board. The style of the organ of the is mostly baroque, including the casework, but the wide range of stops allows for performance neo-classical and modern repertoire. The organ hangs impressively on the wall of the nave.
YotuWP warning: API Key was removed, please contact to your admin about this issues.

On the right of the nave is a beautiful baroque pulpit carved in oak, dated 1699, as well as the original 17th century oak confessionals. The earliest stained glass windows date from the 16th century. The Cathedrals treasures and relics are kept locked behind 18th century forged iron door. Inside the chamber are numerous liturgical objects including tunics, crosses, chalices and several  sculptures and altarpieces.

Will you help us make this amazing trip possible by making a contribution? We’ve made it easy to donate by going to https://dhs-holmes-orchestras.org/store/product-category/2020-baroque-tour-public-donations/

All donations are tax deductible. DHS/Holmes Orchestra Boosters 501(c)(3) tax identification#: 82-5177533

Over the coming months there will be four blog posts for each city on the Davis High School Baroque Ensemble’s 2020 England-France Tour tour: Place of Interest; Concert Venue; Music; History of the city. This week’s post, the thirteenth of the series, is on the places of interest in Brussels.

Brussels has several important art and history museums including the excellent Museum of Musical Instruments, a collection of over 8,000 instruments. The city has a number of fine Art Nouveau style buildings, most famously by the Belgian architect Victor Horta, and also buildings in the Art Deco style. The Grand Place, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the main cultural site in the city center. The square is dominated by the 15thc. Town Hall, and the baroque Guildhalls of the various guilds of Brussels.

One of the most popular tourist attractions in the city is the Atomium – a symbolic 338ft tall modernist structure built for the 1958 World’s Fair north of the city center. It consists of 9 steel spheres connected by tubes, and forms a giant model of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. The spheres contain exhibitions, with the the central sphere providing a venue for movies, concerts, & parties, and the top sphere is a restaurant. According to the website, ‘Mini-Europe’ located next to the Atomium, “…is the only park where you can visit the whole of Europe in a couple of hours. A truly unique voyage! Stroll amid the typical ambiance of the most beautiful towns of the ‘Old Continent.”

Other places of interest:

• Belgian Museum of Fine Arts, and Parc du Cinquantenaire
• 15th century church Notre Dame-du-Sablon
• Mont des Artes
• Victor Horta’s Art Nouveau Town Houses
• Abbaye de la Cambre & gardens
• 19th century Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert – one of Europe’s first covered shopping arcades
• Train World
• liCoudenberg Palace Archaeological Site
• liBelgian Comic Strip Center – museum dedicated to cartoons
• Place du Jeu de Balle – bric-a- brac street market

Will you help us make this amazing trip possible by making a contribution? We’ve made it easy to donate by going to https://dhs-holmes-orchestras.org/store/product-category/2020-baroque-tour-public-donations/

All donations are tax deductible. DHS/Holmes Orchestra Boosters 501(c)(3) tax identification#: 82-5177533