Tonight was the first concert of
Symphony Under the Sky, the
Edmonton Symphony Orchestra's annual outdoor Labour Day Weekend concert series. The concerts have been going on for fourteen years, and my mom and I have gone to thirteen of the fourteen - we missed one in the middle because I moved to Boston! Needless to say, it's a really big and important tradition to me and I was glad to be back in the familiar and wonderfully strange setting, smack in between high arts and the forces of nature.
The Friday evening concert is generally reflective of the ESO Masters' Series - i.e., the most serious works of the standard orchestral repertoire. This is the one I always look forward to the most. Sure, I enjoy the Pops night, and the Movie Music night, but my first true musical love was classical music - for years I thought I was going to grow up to be a classical musician, and not until I was 19 did I figure out it probably wasn't the path for me. Anyhow, the ESO performed wonderfully tonight. They began with Brahms' Academic Festival Overture, the backstory of which amuses me to no end! Brahms wrote the piece when he was given an honorary doctorate degree from a university which he really didn't care for, and understood the degree was a ruse to get him to compose a piece for them for free. So, he wrote a piece full of drinking songs which the university students loved, but the faculty was unimpressed with. Still, it is a beautifully written piece, even for being an amalgamation of drinking songs. But, that's Brahms for you.
The next two pieces on the program were by Liszt. We heard the First Piano Concerto in E-flat major, and Totentanz, both performed amazingly by Kemal Gekic. I've heard Gekic play before with the ESO; in 2005 he played a Rachmaninoff concerto and I was blown away by his stage presence and power then as well as now. The biggest issue I have with concert pianists is their tendency toward histrionics. They sway and swoon all over the stage, and to be quite honest, watching them makes me seasick! Partly, yes, because I do get pretty bad motion sickness, but also in part because as a pianist, I know these movements are completely unnecessary to the point of hindering the pianist's playing. It's all in order to impress the plebes in the audience. Gekic was not like this at all. He was all business, but brought a huge amount of sound out of the piano, and played Liszt with great delicacy and ease - and believe me, Liszt is not easy music to master. I was completely impressed by Gekic's playing, and he deserved both the standing ovations he received from the audience in the park tonight.
The last piece was excerpted from Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Wagner's never been on my top-ten list of composers (or maybe even twenty...) mostly because he can't stop being so freaking serious all the time. His operas never have a moment of comic relief in them, and when you're sitting in an opera house for two hours at a minimum, you kinda need it. Yes, he writes gorgeous music, but it's too heavy for me. It's like cheesecake; a little bit is good, but you can only ever have one piece otherwise you'll barf. Anyways, I did enjoy these excerpts! Meistersinger was apparently Wagner's lightest opera, and of course, the music would follow that. Too bad he didn't write more light stuff, maybe I would have liked him more. However, all in all the concert was wonderful.
Until the ESO completely screwed it up! Okay, true, the audience at Symphony Under the Sky is a very different audience from the one that goes to the Winspear Centre to hear concerts during the year. They are a very different audience from the one that subscribes solely to the Masters' Series. But that doesn't mean that it is okay to end a concert like that with the most stupid encore piece I have ever heard in my life!!! I wish I knew what it was called, but it's one of those idiotic "classical" pieces that everyone knows when they hear it. It's one of the ones people always clap to, and it always conjures up images of prancing horses in my mind. I have NO IDEA what the crap the artistic staff were thinking when they OK'd this as an encore piece. I mean... to be quite honest, I look forward to the Friday evening concert of Symphony Under the Sky the most because it isn't trying to cater to the masses of people who might buy tickets. It's the one concert of the whole entire festival that's purpose is just to bring beautiful music to the outdoors. The rest of the weekend is usually programmed to sell tickets; we have Movie Music night, and Beatles afternoon, and some concerts where Tyler Hamilton, the Canadian Idol finalist, get featured. (We've had Tyler Hamilton for two years in a row now. I want someone different! What happened to, oh, I don't know, Nathan Berg?! Let's have that guy back for a change!) And you know, that's okay. I still buy my full-weekend pass, even though I already know I'm going to enjoy the Friday night concert the most, because I support the ESO, and I support the fact that they're trying to bring classical and orchestral music to more people. I think that's fabulous. I don't appreciate the ESO selling themselves and classical music short with prancing horse music. Especially when that prancing horse song got the biggest cheer of the evening from the audience. How awful is that?
Like I said, I appreciate that the ESO is reaching out to more people. But you know what, guys? The Friday tickets were already sold when you started playing this stupid little encore. You don't need to attract more people with that when the sales had already been made. I had hoped that you'd show some respect to your Masters' audience who still buys full weekend passes, even though they only really want to hear the Masters' series for four days - like me - and leave one evening free from the ticket-selling ploys.
Le sigh... there's always next year. It'll probably take that long to get this stupid horse-prancing song out of my head.
Edit: I am well aware that I can be a terrible snob when I want to. Maybe I should have left out "plebes"... oh well.