MOZART IN ST. STEPHENS


Mozart's Requiem

Sir George Solti conducting Mozart's Requiem in St. Stephens in Vienna in 1991 on the anniversary of Mozart's death in VIenna 200 years before.

In September of 1998 a year after Solti's death, the Chicago Symphony was playing the Proms Concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall and one afternoon members of the symphony were invited by Lady Solti, his widow, to an open house at their London home. A friend, with whom I was in London who plays 1st violin with the symphony, invited me to come with her to the open house. Lady Solti had left her husband's conservatory studio exactly as it was when he died. It was a very open and airy room, filled with light. I was welcomed very cordially as a non symphony member, though Lady Solti did seem to me, for the time I was there, to be trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing there. She was very much at home with the symphony members, as if they were part of her family. All in all it was an interesting experience of many that week in London, among which we attended the non-symphony musical "Buddy" a biographical rendering of the Buddy Holly Story. Very much a constrast for my symphony friend.

Then it was on to Birmingham for their final concert in England after which the symphony left for Belgium and I left to meet a friend for three weeks to tour the West Country and stay for several days on the beautiful Cornish coast at Pennycrocker Farm, a Farmhouse B and B just north of Boscastle. Then it was onto Oxfordshire for almost two weeks where I traveled almost daily by train into Oxford to walk the ancient streets of that beautiful city and to sit and read on the ancient quads of the colleges. All in all it was one of the most remembered trips of any I've ever had.