Vienna

Judith with the Head of Holofernes
Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Photo: Colin Talcroft

Between the morning workshop with Christoph Concz and the visit to The Haus der Musik (see previous post), the SRSYO musicians got a little time to explore the city in small groups. Most groups stopped for lunch and coffee or hot chocolate and cake before heading out. One group visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the main boulevard built where Vienna’s fortifications once stood. The museum, often compared with the Louvre, houses the city’s collection of paintings from before the modern period. Time permitted only a brief look, but rooms full of paintings by Breughel, the Cranachs, Memling, Holbein, Van Dyke, and Rubens, in one section were breathtaking. Another group visited the Leopold Museum, which houses modern art, particularly work by Klimt and Schiele. Some groups simply enjoyed shopping and exploring the streets with stops for cakes or frozen yoghurt or ice cream along the way.

Cakes in the window one of the many coffee shops  in Vienna
Photo: Colin Talcroft

Vienna: Cakes and pastries everywhere. The famous Sacher torte, layers of chocolate cake and apricot jam with an icing of smoothest dark chocolate is famous and prestigious enough that two companies—the Sacher Hotel and the confectioner Demel—fought for decades over the right to claim to be its creator. According to our guides, a clever judge finally decided the case by declaring one makes the “original” Sacher torte, the other makes the “real” Sacher torte. But it’s not all Sacher torte. Shop windows in the fashionable central section of the city display all manner of goods—the latest styles, electronics, books and stationery, housewares—and there is food of every description at the restaurants and coffee shops. Horse-drawn carriages draw tourists around the old town. Crowds form outside the cathedral, as it's a popular meeting point. Others wait to enter the church or to climb the 343 steps up its one finished tower (money ran out; the second tower was never completed). So much to see. A few hours hardly suffices, but the young musicians of the SRSYO got at least a taste of the city. Olivia Kulawiak (flute) said "It was wonderful to see so many people carrying instruments on the street, suggesting it's normal to be a musician in Vienna."

Carriage horses behind St. Stephan's Cathedral
in the heart of old Vienna
Photo: Colin Talcroft