The best concert ever.
I must have forgotten to tag the last time I heard Tchaikovsky's violin concerto played, because I can't find the post. Anyhow, if you don't know what it is: Tchaikovsky wrote only one violin concerto, but it's widely considered the most difficult piece of violin music ever composed. It's beautiful, but hoo boy, it is insane to play. The first movement is full of harmonics and other notes so high that you practically have to invent an all-new clef just to write them. I'm sure there were older people in the audience whose hearing is sufficiently degraded that they can't hear things at that frequency. The third movement is marked by crazy pizzicato, both for the soloist and the orchestra. Much of the rest is the violin equivalent of thrash metal.
It's so difficult, that the first guy Tchaikovsky offered it to, to debut it, turned it down and pronounced it "unplayable." The second guy, who did eventually debut it, took two years to learn it until he felt comfortable to play it in public.
Only virtuosos ever have the stones to perform this piece. So it was great to hear the ultimate contemporary violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, play it. What's more, we could really hear him, entirely distinct from the orchestra, because the only person closer to him was the conductor. No shit, Shizu and I had the two seats in the front row directly in front of his shoes. There's little space between the seats and the stage--I could touch the edge of the stage from my chair. We could have counted his nose hairs.
I don't know how we got those seats, but wow, that was amazing.