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So I had this grumpy post I kept writing and deleting, all about how my Nano attempt this year has been filled with various children vomiting for weeks on end, and how every single time I've sat down to write anything, there has been a crisis I needed to fix RIGHT NOW YESTERDAY. Luckily, my oldest son, who is now in jr. high, is required to attend two concerts a trimester for his orchestra class. So I saw in the paper that there was a free one in town tonight (the city orchestra was performing, with harp!). So my husband watched the troops and I took the 13YO.
Wow. It was very nice! I live in a town that's something like five square miles. And we have an orchestra! And a premier harpist. And a pipe organ in a large building that used to be church owned and is now owned by the city. It looks nice outside, but inside it's very pretty--a little baroque looking, if in a turn of the century sort of way. It reminded me a bit of the church said son used to have his choir concerts in in Germany, but on a smaller scale. Plus heat.
This was the director's final concert before retiring, so I guess he wanted to do the most fun and interesting pieces he knew of. We had a harp concerto by Handel and a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi. I didn't even know there were such things. (Although I do know why there are not many piccolo concertos.) I didn't know that Vivaldi was the music director at an orphanage. He wrote some 400 pieces, and presumably his orphans played them. I'm thinking they were lucky (and talented) orphans. We also heard a piece by Rimsky-Korsakoff that showed off all the sounds an orchestra can make, and a couple of pieces by Saint-Saens. One was a wonderfully crashing piece called Dance Baccanale, from the opera Sampson and Delilah. It's the part where Sampson is tied up in the temple and everyone is making fun of him with weird, mocking music--and then he prays for strength and gets it, and pulls down the pillars of the temple, and the whole temple crashes in ruins. It was a wonderful piece of music, as you can imagine! The final piece was Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony, which is one of my favorites. You know the tune of the last movement because it's the theme of the movie Babe. The organ is such a presence in the piece, plus there are these parts that sound like angels leaping through clouds (um, but not frittery angels--I mean the ones with big trumpets!). You can listen to music on a really nice sound system, but there's still no substitute for the 3D nature of live orchestral music, with everything black and white and golden, and all of the notes spreading and rising and raining down from the curved ceiling... I just sat there and thought, of all of the places in the world I could be, I get to be right here, right now.
Wow. It was very nice! I live in a town that's something like five square miles. And we have an orchestra! And a premier harpist. And a pipe organ in a large building that used to be church owned and is now owned by the city. It looks nice outside, but inside it's very pretty--a little baroque looking, if in a turn of the century sort of way. It reminded me a bit of the church said son used to have his choir concerts in in Germany, but on a smaller scale. Plus heat.
This was the director's final concert before retiring, so I guess he wanted to do the most fun and interesting pieces he knew of. We had a harp concerto by Handel and a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi. I didn't even know there were such things. (Although I do know why there are not many piccolo concertos.) I didn't know that Vivaldi was the music director at an orphanage. He wrote some 400 pieces, and presumably his orphans played them. I'm thinking they were lucky (and talented) orphans. We also heard a piece by Rimsky-Korsakoff that showed off all the sounds an orchestra can make, and a couple of pieces by Saint-Saens. One was a wonderfully crashing piece called Dance Baccanale, from the opera Sampson and Delilah. It's the part where Sampson is tied up in the temple and everyone is making fun of him with weird, mocking music--and then he prays for strength and gets it, and pulls down the pillars of the temple, and the whole temple crashes in ruins. It was a wonderful piece of music, as you can imagine! The final piece was Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony, which is one of my favorites. You know the tune of the last movement because it's the theme of the movie Babe. The organ is such a presence in the piece, plus there are these parts that sound like angels leaping through clouds (um, but not frittery angels--I mean the ones with big trumpets!). You can listen to music on a really nice sound system, but there's still no substitute for the 3D nature of live orchestral music, with everything black and white and golden, and all of the notes spreading and rising and raining down from the curved ceiling... I just sat there and thought, of all of the places in the world I could be, I get to be right here, right now.
