7.31.2004
concert
Last night was a historic event in my family: four of us were on stage for the first time at Tanglewood. We’ve sung together a few times before, church choir, family gatherings, etc., but we had never before sung en masse with the Boston Symphony. It’s probably the last time in a while, since I’m moving to England and my younger brother Andrew is moving to New Jersey to start medical school.
The concert was a pretty nice event too, if it hadn’t been for the humidity. I was pretty much drenched when I came off stage. We sang the Haydn Te Deum, which is a beautiful and spritely piece full of joyous praise and excitement. Second was the Mozart Ave Verum Corpus, an intensely quiet and introspective work. Though the two are fairly close in the realm of music history (relatively speaking), they could not have been more different. At this point I had an opportunity to change and sit in the audience for a fantastic Mozart piano concerto and Haydn’s Symphony no. 92. I had never been a huge fan of Haydn symphonies, but this one hit me pretty hard: it was full of little jokes and quirks that, I’m told, are a huge part of Haydn’s personal compositional style. Incidentally, the 92nd symphony is nicknamed “Oxford” as it was performed there to great applause when Haydn was receiving his honorary doctorate degree from the university.
Still, I was surprised to find that people who pay upwards of $80 per ticket still act just as boorishly as those who pay $14 to sit on the lawn at Tanglewood. I was given one of the empty seats in the front row by an usher who knew that I was a singer. Two rows back and across the aisle sat a woman who, for the first movement of the Oxford, proceeded to conduct along with maestro Edo de Waart, but about a half-beat behind. In the second movement, she was relatively passive, but the third movement saw her slapping her knee and tapping to the music. She fell asleep in the fourth movement. Weird.
Incidentally, that there were open seats in the front row indicates, perhaps, how poorly attended Tanglewood has been of late. It is interesting, too, that a concert of Haydn and Mozart should be so poorly sold when it seems that Classical radio stations in America, and in particular the several with which I am most familiar, can’t get enough of Haydn and Mozart (and Albinoni).
Got back from a delightful lunch with a friend of mine from Princeton: she’s here as a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow, which means that she is a top-notch musician. Indeed, she just finished a masters degree from Juilliard on piano and is one of the most talented pianists I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. However, she was also one of the valedictorians of my class at Princeton, having earned, in a tie, the highest GPA of our class. As a PHYSICS major. While most of the TMC fellows go on to careers in orchestras and concert halls around the country and around the world, Christine is off to build a supercomputer that maps protein folding next year. All this and she can kick my behind in soccer pretty much any day of the week. Amazing...
The concert was a pretty nice event too, if it hadn’t been for the humidity. I was pretty much drenched when I came off stage. We sang the Haydn Te Deum, which is a beautiful and spritely piece full of joyous praise and excitement. Second was the Mozart Ave Verum Corpus, an intensely quiet and introspective work. Though the two are fairly close in the realm of music history (relatively speaking), they could not have been more different. At this point I had an opportunity to change and sit in the audience for a fantastic Mozart piano concerto and Haydn’s Symphony no. 92. I had never been a huge fan of Haydn symphonies, but this one hit me pretty hard: it was full of little jokes and quirks that, I’m told, are a huge part of Haydn’s personal compositional style. Incidentally, the 92nd symphony is nicknamed “Oxford” as it was performed there to great applause when Haydn was receiving his honorary doctorate degree from the university.
Still, I was surprised to find that people who pay upwards of $80 per ticket still act just as boorishly as those who pay $14 to sit on the lawn at Tanglewood. I was given one of the empty seats in the front row by an usher who knew that I was a singer. Two rows back and across the aisle sat a woman who, for the first movement of the Oxford, proceeded to conduct along with maestro Edo de Waart, but about a half-beat behind. In the second movement, she was relatively passive, but the third movement saw her slapping her knee and tapping to the music. She fell asleep in the fourth movement. Weird.
Incidentally, that there were open seats in the front row indicates, perhaps, how poorly attended Tanglewood has been of late. It is interesting, too, that a concert of Haydn and Mozart should be so poorly sold when it seems that Classical radio stations in America, and in particular the several with which I am most familiar, can’t get enough of Haydn and Mozart (and Albinoni).
Got back from a delightful lunch with a friend of mine from Princeton: she’s here as a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow, which means that she is a top-notch musician. Indeed, she just finished a masters degree from Juilliard on piano and is one of the most talented pianists I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. However, she was also one of the valedictorians of my class at Princeton, having earned, in a tie, the highest GPA of our class. As a PHYSICS major. While most of the TMC fellows go on to careers in orchestras and concert halls around the country and around the world, Christine is off to build a supercomputer that maps protein folding next year. All this and she can kick my behind in soccer pretty much any day of the week. Amazing...
