Concerts

Last Saturday during my tour around the city I came upon a ticket booth for a Mozart concert and thought 'when in Vienna'. The concert was the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra and the Vienna Boy's Choir performing Mozart's Krönungsmesse in Stephansdom, where it was performed for the first time. It was really good. As my seat was only 25 Euros, I wasn't able to watch directly due to sight lines in the Cathedral, so they have 40" LCD screens on the sides of the pillars. It was really odd to see LCD screens installed in the 800 year old cathedral. I took some pictures, but they all turned out blurry.

On Thursday I went with a bunch of people from work to a free classical music concert in the Palace Schönbrunn. First of all, the palace is amazing, here's a picture of the front.
When you walked through the ground floor doors at the center of the palace you come out the other side and see this:
Here's the back side of the Palace:
We walked up very close to the front, so this was our view of the stage. Thankfully they had speakers and giant screens everywhere so we really had a better view than Bill Clinton and Sharon Stone.All my pictures from the concert were blurry, so here's some from the official website:

Never would I have imagined that 140,000 people would stand silently for 2 hours listening to classical music. As I think I said in my last post, the concert this year was Russian themed so they played a lot of Tchaikovsky, most of which was recognizable.

After the concert was over I'd say at least 100,000 of the people headed towards the U-Bahn. Surprisingly it went extremely smoothly, and although we were crammed in pretty tight, I never had to wait for anything.

Yesterday I took the morning off to finish my paperwork, so now it's all done and I'm very relieved.

I think today we're going to watch the red carpet at the 'Life Ball' which is an AIDs fundraiser where people dress up in elaborate costumes in an attempt to win the title of "Queen of the Ball".

Oh, I almost forgot, I took a picture of my office.