It was a weekday afternoon (3-ish) and I was starving. Having wondered around the Darlinghurst and Surry Hills areas, I was in need of something nourishing and wholesome. I remember Bills on Crown Street adjacent to the famous Aussie Chinese restaurant Billy Kwong - so I thought I'd pop along for a quick bite.
The staff was friendly, my Wagyu beef burger with Swiss cheese and diced beetroot just hit the spot. I am not a Wagyu beef fan - too fatty and lacking in flavour - but somehow the beetroot really made the whole burger really tast. It came with fries (fresh out of the fryer) with homemade barbecue-ketchup. Really scrumptious.
Those of us London-centric folks easily forget there are great concert halls in other parts of the world. I remember as a young kid buying DG LPs with von Karajan on the front cover conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. So as my first visit to the city, a visit to the Philharmonie to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was a must. Ivan Fisher started the evening's concert with Haydn Symphony 88. A light and delightful work. As I'd expected, the acoustic of the hall was amazing - probably a good 2.5 second of reverberation - and much more generous than the Royal Festival Hall in London. The strings sounded sweet and the timpani came through clearly with definition. The audience was then treated to Béla Bartók's Seven Pieces for Choir and Chamber Orchestra: the Berlin Phil reduced in size occupying only half of the stage while the Netherlands Youth Choir took the other half. These young performers (all female) sang in Hungarian from memory - not easy at all - and rea...
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