mushin no shin

Friday afternoon, the employer sponsored a couple of hours of knocking over bowling pins and knocking back brews. Then when I got to the Schermerhorn a short while later, the lovely bar mistress Anita had my Dos Perros ready and waiting. So by the time the NSO started in on Avner Dorman’s Variations Without a Theme, I was feeling pretty toasty, which somehow seemed appropriate for the piece, what with its “urban night music” flavor (as the composer described it during the pre-show discussion). My season ticket neighbors Brian & Madeline probably thought I fell asleep, but no, I was just off in the faraway place the composer wanted to take us. I was more coherent by the time they played the Tchaikovsky piano concerto and then Stravinsky’s Firebird. The Tchaikovsky didn’t do much for me — it sort of reminded me of the 80s guitar-hero work — lovely, and stunningly technical, but thin on content and purpose. The Firebird though was fantastic. It wasn’t the suite, which is what usually gets played in concert settings, but the full ballet, and they had the opera-style lyric/title projector going, telling us the story as it played. Very nice.

(That whole paragraph was mostly for Kate’s benefit, since I couldn’t remember what they were going to be playing when we talked about it after bowling, and so I promised to blog about it : )

UPDATE: Pitcher’s review was spot-on.

The real musical highlight of the weekend turned out to be the Blair piano faculty recital Saturday night. I’ve never seen a Turner Hall show fill up before, but for this one they sold out and then some, and for very good reason. The performers worked a theme of “From Zero to Eight Hands”, beginning with the mercurial John Cage piece 4:33, where the pianist lays a stopwatch on the keyboard and sits there quietly for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and working up to a finale featuring four pianists on two pianos performing an interpretation of themes from Bizet’s Carmen. Absolutely phenomenal. I think the topper of the set was the dual piano, ragtime inspired work The Serpent’s Kiss by William Bolcom, or perhaps Jacques Castérède’s Ménage à trois for Piano Six Hands, a humorously staged piece which featured three pianists fighting over the piano.

To finish on a non sequitur, sometime in between I bought a lawn mower. So this afternoon I’ll be mowing grass for the first time since I was kid. To quote Lesley — I should have bought a condo : )

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Babble, House & Home, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.