We actu­ally have some time off this after­noon. We had a pretty busy week­end, so the break is nice. Sat­ur­day was much like a week day, with mas­ter classes in the morn­ing, a dress rehearsal in the after­noon, and an orches­tra con­cert in the evening. The con­cert con­sisted of Beethoven’s fifth piano con­certo and the Rite of Spring. I played only on the Beethoven, and sat in the hall for the Stravin­sky. Most of the pro­fes­sors played in the Rite of Spring, along with enough stu­dents to fill out the sec­tions. The group only had a week to put the piece together, but it cer­tainly didn’t sound like it. The per­for­mance was much bet­ter than the only other live per­for­mance I’ve seen, which was with the Phoenix Sym­phony. The bas­soon solo at the begin­ning was gor­geous, and sounded com­pletely effort­less. The other var­i­ous solos — most played by pro­fes­sors, but a few by stu­dents — were great, too.

Yes­ter­day we had the day off from music, but it was still a long day. A travel agent had orga­nized a num­ber of trips to var­i­ous rel­a­tively nearby places. Mad­Winds picked the trip to Flo­ri­a­nop­o­lis, an island south of Jaragua do Sul. We loaded up buses at 7am and headed out. It was nice to see the coun­try­side in day­light, since it was dark long before we arrived here last week. We drove along the coast for much of the trip, which was nice. When we got to the city of Flo­ri­a­nop­o­lis (which lies par­tially on the island and partly on the main­land), we picked up a tour guide. She told us a bit about the island, and about the spe­cific places we were going. We ended up going to three dif­fer­ent beaches, with 40–60 minute bus trips in between. I kind of wish that we’d gone some­place where they could have just dropped us off and picked up up at the end of the day. None of the places we stopped really had enough to do to jus­tify stay­ing there all day, though. Oh, well. At the first beach we went to, the water was pretty rough, and the life­guards weren’t let­ting any­body out in it. I swam briefly at the sec­ond beach, but there was almost no surf, so it was kind of boring.

Well, I just got the one minute warn­ing on my com­puter, so tschau!