Practicing day

I'm back in my cute hotel room now after an exhausting day of rehearsal. It is SO much work to begin from scratch with a new accompanist -- even a good one like Sasha.


This is a bust of Isadore Bajic himself who founded the music school here 100 years ago.


Weeks and weeks ago I spent hours putting together an accompanist's book for him with everything just so including marking pens and an introductory letter, all in a three ring binder. Well, the binder didn't get here until about 3 days before I did, and it literally looked someone had run over it with a truck. Two of the rings were smashed and wouldn't close all the way and only the uppermost one was really holding the music, so the pages were continuously hanging in a wrong way, as well as being hard to see and almost impossible to turn on time. I told Sasha that I'd run by the bookstore and get him another one, but that turned out to be not very easy. In the two bookstores that I found the salesclerks had never heard of a 3 ring binder, but they offered to sell me a clipboard or they showed me a 2 ring binder. We finally did manage to find the 3 ring kind, so now he can turn pages like a real person. The poor thing thought that I had sent it to him like that for some reason which he didn't understand. I took a picture of the crushed notebook but then lost it from this page somehow, and it takes too long for them to upload for me to want to do it again.

This Novi Sad Cathedral in the very certer of town. The music school is just two blocks to the left. Look at how many people are out and walking about. It's almost always like this -- even in bad weather.






Guess what very important room this is.














The "Gala Opening Concert" with two piano concertos is tonight at the Synagogue -- a former Jewish church that was so desecrated by the Nazis in WWII that the Jewish people donated it to the city for use as a concert hall and built another church for worship.