A Week of Culture and Information

This week Erin seized a couple opportunities to make herself more culturally knowledgeable. The American Women's Club (AWC) gathered Wednesday to hear a free orchestra concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and met once again this morning for a free tour of Sotheby's auction house.

Now, Erin didn't actually ever meet up with the AWC on Wednesday but she did manage to hear the free concert. Erin traveled to the Concertgebouw with Annette and ended up getting there a bit earlier than the Club was going to meet. It was pretty cold and windy Wednesday, so Erin decided it would be much more comfortable to wait inside the Concertgebouw rather than stand outside for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for the AWC group to show up. Once inside the building Erin and Annette quickly found themselves trapped in a crowd of wall-to-wall people within just minutes! Since it was almost impossible to escape (and they happened to be very close to the door into the concert hall) they decided to stay put and not venture through the growing mob of people to meet the AWC. After being so cold outside it felt really nice to stand inside next to a window with the sun pouring in...for about 10 minutes. The sun, indoor heating, and probably also the hundreds of people crammed into the lobby soon made for a rather uncomfortably warm wait.

The Concertgebouw offers these free lunchtime concerts every Wednesday from September to June, and apparently the concert hall is packed each week. Erin and Annette got there about an hour prior to the concert and soon after they entered the concert hall all the seats were taken. The Symphony Orchestra played, joined by a pianist, Valentina Igoshina, for approximately 30 minutes. The piece, a piano concerto by Skrjabin, was one of the pieces the orchestra would perform in their evening concert later that day. (Erin's not all that knowledgeable about classical music, so she doesn't know who Skrjabin is, but the music was excellent and the hall is beautiful!)

This morning Erin joined a handful of women for the Sotheby's tour - with coffee and cake of course. Almost every AWC activity, or any gathering in this country for that matter, has to be accompanied by coffee, tea, and cookies or cake. When we eventually return to the U.S. we will probably have a hard time breaking the habit of offering people coffee or tea at all hours of the day and night! One of Sotheby's 40 or 50 auctioneers conducted a brief talk for us telling us all about Sotheby's history and how they do business.

Sotheby's began with its first auction in 1744 in London. For a long time the auction house only sold books, including those owned by Napoleon, Prince Talleyrand, John Wilkes, and the Duke of Buckingham. Only in the last century has the company expanded to include all areas of fine art and furnishings. Even from the beginning, much of what Sotheby's sells is not so much about the object as it is about the history that comes with the object. A Renaissance writing desk on which President Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty sold for 10 times what a regular Renaissance writing desk would normally fetch. While Europeans clamor for belongings of royalty, Sotheby's caters to Americans by auctioning off items belonging to actors, actresses, and musicians - American "royalty."

Erin got to see the lots housed in the Sotheby's building currently, all of which will be sold in upcoming auctions. One of the auctions will be for photography, a recently identified type of art that can sell for big bucks. Erin has to say, some of those photos she would not take for free much less shell out €1500 for! The other auction will be of fine jewelry. No one famous is attached in any way to the particular pieces Erin saw today, but there were still some quite pricey items, a diamond plaque brooch, for instance, that is estimated at €20,000 - 25,000! Some of the jewelry was amazingly gorgeous, other pieces quite gaudy. Now Erin can say she's been in Sotheby's, the building she looked at out of the Novotel window for a month after we moved to Amsterdam.