The MSJO in Florence
“Un Offerta Musicale”
July 12, 2018
Chiesa de San Egidio, Florence, Italy
Music: “Handog” by Florante
Arrangement by Alejandro Consolacion II
String Orchestra transcription by Jeffrey Solares
Our tour organizers told us that it would be very difficult to mount a concert in Florence, given our tight itinerary and the challenge of finding a parking space for our buses close enough to where the concerts can be held. At that time I did not really appreciate the extent of this difficulty and pushed on to organize a concert with the help of a friend of the MSJO who was based in Florence and could find us a venue and an audience.
True enough as soon as we arrived in Florence after 4 hours on the road from Venice, we had to walk about 3 kilometers from our buses to reach our concert venue. I was lucky that I only had to bring my baton and my barong, while the rest of the orchestra had to carry their concert dress, music stands and instruments (we had eleven cellos and three contrabasses!). I felt sorry for our musicians and realized that I should have listened to the advise of our tour managers, but at the same time I was also excited at the prospect of being able to perform in the city where the Renaissance was born (sounds a bit odd- the city where the ‘rebirth’ was born, hahaha). It was almost concert time when we reached the concert venue, and we barely had enough time to rest and get into our concert attire.
We performed in a chapel inside one of the world’s oldest hospital still in operation, the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova. It was founded in 1288 by Folco Portinari, father of Beatrice, the famous Beloved of the poet Dante Alighieri. We were told that it was in this hospital that Leonardo Da Vinci performed some of his anatomical studies. The association with these famous historic personages got us all very excited (or at least I was very excited, I hoped the others were excited too), and forgot the ordeal we had to go through to have our Italian debut in Florence. The day before we were in Venice but did not hold any concert, we just visited that city as tourists. Perhaps it was also the exhilaration of our first place victory in Vienna a few days earlier gave us the energy and adrenaline we needed to keep our spirits up.
After the concert we had to return to our buses, which proved to be more challenging as half of our group got lost and it took more than two hours and several more kilometers of walking the streets of Florence for our delegation to be complete. I was in the group that waited in vain by the side of the Arno River for about an hour, before someone returned to show us where to go and find our bus to take us to our hotel and our dinner.
The hotel was located in the outskirts of Florence, and it was almost midnight when we arrived. The hotel manager could not wait for us anymore and already instructed his staff to keep the food and go home. So there we were, all eighty four of us hungry and exhausted Pinoys in Florence being told that there is no dinner anymore. It was a very tense situation but we were lucky that our tour manager did his best to convince the hotel to reopen their dining room and serve us our meal before we all retired to our rooms to rest and prepare for the city tour the next day.