Concert and a supper

Good morning!

Yesterday afternoon my friend Patricia took me to a concert. The San Diego Symphony Orchestra  played The Overture to the Marriage of Figaro.  I love that piece and it seemed that the orchestra enjoyed playing it too.

Second on the program was Brahms' Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. I think I know that piece by heart from listening to it over and over in the old days.  I used to have the leisure sometimes to just listen to music or read for hours, it seems, so I would put on a recording and get out my novel and read and listen together. I think the recording we had was the one with Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose. The solo parts were played with genius and abandon.  Yesterday's performance was  by William Preucil, violin, and Eric Kim, cello.  Their style was more delicate and restrained than I expected, but still very beautiful.  The two lines talk back and forth, scroll back and forth, finish each other in the midst of a run or figure, in an exquisite way, and I felt that these two musicians gave every measure to that part of the presentation.  There was one note, in the third part, which the violin makes at the top of a beautiful run, and Preucil played it so masterfully, like a little gnat of a note that he tossed into the air. It enchanted me and I give him an A+ if only on the strength of that note.  The piece itself is just wonderful in its entirity, complicated, complex, joyous, charming.  You can see that I do not have the professional reviewer's vocabulary for this, but you understand how much I liked it. My ear is actually more sophisticated than my brain.

Then, after a long long intermission, of which more later,we came back to hear the piece de resistence of the afternoon, Schubert's Mass No.  6  in E-Flat Major.  Here is where I start to get crabby and reveal my whole carefully glossed-over mean self.

Let me say first that I think that religious music belongs in church. And, second, I had already been to the Episcopal Church and been through the Mass that day.  That I am not really religious is not the point.  Surely there are other large choral works, secular ones,  that could have been presented.  Well, at least it was a Mass and not a Requiem. I don't want to listen to another requiem, because I fear that the rash of Requiems that are being presented now, to be a cry for our foundering civilization.  Maybe I am gloomy as well as crabby.

Another horrifying confession: I don't like choirs. I have been in them, and I am just not the type.  Young choirs, church choirs, senior choirs. Not for me. I may have some sixth sense; as I look at a choir I seem to feel a very negative impact arising from the whole gang.  I feel respect for the brave man or woman who can take on the management of that whole welter of voices, egos, hormones, and human flesh and try to corral it.  No matter how innocuous the program seems to be, I always expect to  hear them singing the Chorus of the Damned from Faust.  The closer to professional they are, the worse.  They are scary.  Little church choirs open to all, children's choirs at church or school, fine.  They are okay. But give me your  mighty chorus and I am aghast.  The paper thought they were wonderful, by the way, and so did everybody else in the auditorium it appears.

The soloists were wonderful. There were three men and two women and they hardly got to sing at all. They were meant to be singing in church, after all, as part of a meaningful rite, not sitting on the stage for long long periods waiting for their turn. The mezzo soprano sat there with a look on her face that said: I know something  you don't know. When she arose to sing, we found out what it was. What a beautiful, unusual voice!  And all the others were just wonderful.  I like operas and small ensembles.  You notice that in an opera the chorus always has something to do: they mill about, act natural, do something besides stand there with open mouths emitting cris de coeur, causing you to look for the smoke and flames in the background.  Ouch. I dont mean to hurt so many feelings. I certainly dont mean to be mean.  But sometimes I am. And a blog has to be true to me, doesn't it? First of all?

After it was over, I drove home in the opalescent twilight and when I got home I walked straight to the refrigerator and brought out a pack of baby carrots and put them in the saucepan with water. When they were boiling merrily I threw in a lot of brussels sprouts that I'd trimmed up and washed.  I took two plates and  put on two thick slices of (peeled, of course) tomato, and when the vegetables were nearly ready I grilled the meat that had been waiting there while the vegetables cooked.  I cheated on the vegetables by adding a big dab of butter and some s and p after I drained them...but oh it makes them so much tastier. There ya go, a nice nutricious little supper with fresh food, ready in twenty minutes from start to finish. For dessert I had my mother's chocolate pudding made with cornstarch and cocoa, which I made and put in the refrigerator two days ago.  As I worked I kept thinking of this post, and how grouchy I am about certain kinds of music, and thinking all the time how much I'd have loved it it that whole huge chorus of magnificent voices had just broken down and regaled us with a might roar of "Oh Shenandoah!" Ah, that were pleasure indeed. YAZZYBEL