zOMG
I went to Cirque de la Symphonie with Miko last night. Now I'm thoroughly convinced that Gerard Schwarz needs to step down as principal conductor -- it was the best I'd ever heard the Symphony perform and it was under their associate conductor, AND all their principal string players (plus several stands' worth of other players in most sections) had left for the summer chamber music festivals.
The performance was AMAZING. ZOMG. Acrobats, a juggler, a contortionist, and strongmen were all there. And with the student discount, a pair of tickets set me back only $10 when the seats would have ordinarily retailed for $43 apiece in advance. I think my plugging of the event at the RC worked quite nicely as when I arrived the pair of seats next to mine were taken by two EEPers.
so I had a good weekend.
Also, I am in the process of convincing Sarah the class(ic)ist that it's worth her time to go to the Emerson String Quartet concert in October. Student tickets are cheap, and that ensemble has won eight or nine GRAMMY awards in their time together. She's a sponge for anything you can get her to believe is "culture" (although she doesn't use "culture" as a biologist might -- "learned behavior". She is only concerned with "civilized" culture), and right now she's entirely convinced that classical music is culture of interest. It probably stems from watching the classically trained musicians in the RC talking about composers or whistling/humming melodies at each other and playing the guess-what-this-is game. She probably feels a bit left out when the girl next to her can pick out a theme from Dvorak's "American" quartet when it's idly whistled at the bus stop.
In any case, I've now lent her two of the Emerson Quartet's GRAMMY-winning albums (the complete Shostakovich quartets, 2001 winner for best chamber music album and best classical album; also "Intimate Voices" which was the best chamber music album of 2006, featuring Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius) for the weekend and will probably hear her opinion of these tomorrow. If she's listened to ALL of it then she's probably crazier than she's shown herself to be as that's six CDs' worth, but you never know with a girl like Sarah.
so there's my update. I should do this more often.
The performance was AMAZING. ZOMG. Acrobats, a juggler, a contortionist, and strongmen were all there. And with the student discount, a pair of tickets set me back only $10 when the seats would have ordinarily retailed for $43 apiece in advance. I think my plugging of the event at the RC worked quite nicely as when I arrived the pair of seats next to mine were taken by two EEPers.
so I had a good weekend.
Also, I am in the process of convincing Sarah the class(ic)ist that it's worth her time to go to the Emerson String Quartet concert in October. Student tickets are cheap, and that ensemble has won eight or nine GRAMMY awards in their time together. She's a sponge for anything you can get her to believe is "culture" (although she doesn't use "culture" as a biologist might -- "learned behavior". She is only concerned with "civilized" culture), and right now she's entirely convinced that classical music is culture of interest. It probably stems from watching the classically trained musicians in the RC talking about composers or whistling/humming melodies at each other and playing the guess-what-this-is game. She probably feels a bit left out when the girl next to her can pick out a theme from Dvorak's "American" quartet when it's idly whistled at the bus stop.
In any case, I've now lent her two of the Emerson Quartet's GRAMMY-winning albums (the complete Shostakovich quartets, 2001 winner for best chamber music album and best classical album; also "Intimate Voices" which was the best chamber music album of 2006, featuring Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius) for the weekend and will probably hear her opinion of these tomorrow. If she's listened to ALL of it then she's probably crazier than she's shown herself to be as that's six CDs' worth, but you never know with a girl like Sarah.
so there's my update. I should do this more often.