Cantabile
More free music, this time in the amazing Notre Dame du Travail, set behind the Gare Montparnasse, and just past the neo-Stalinist or Mussolini-inspired architecture of Place de Catalogne. (I read the street sign as Catalogue when I first went past it : that would have been much more interesting!)
What a mistake! It all leads to the Place de l’Ampitheatre, near which sits the much gentler industrialisation of the select church, with its steel girders and ironwork exposed. It is a barn of a place, and relies on agricultural structure for its building, almost a celebration of work and industry in a bare-faced sort of way.
An equally gentle quartet played contemporary Peruvian classical music and a late quartet by Haydn, very soft and almost pitch-perfect. I think there may be less free music in the city than there used to be. You have to comb the pages of the Concert section of l’Official when it comes out on Wednesdays, and armed with a map and a pen, mark off your journeys for the days ahead. SC
notes from an urban hibernation 