The German Symphony

Friday night, T and I attended the second to last of our symphonies for the season -- well, we tried to anyway.  The show started at 8:00, and we left my house about 7:40.  I live mere minutes from Powell Symphony Hall, so usually this is not a problem.  Minor miscalculation.

This weekend, highway 40 was closed for construction work on the Jefferson Avenue bridge.  We missed the start of the show.

This was a bummer, because the three pieces that made up the first half of the show were run together as one piece, so there was no break during which we were permitted to go to our seats.  This was further a bummer because I love choral music, and all the choral music in the performance was happening in the first have.  But the bummer-ness of all of this was mitigated when I realized that, due to the 100% German nature of the performance, they were giving out free beer and pretzels at that particular performance.  (The pieces we missed were Brahms' Song of the Fates, Webern's Im Sommerwind, and Brahms' Song of Destiny.)

We must have just missed the start, because we were the first people in the bar and got the best seat at a table right in front of the TV monitor broadcasting the performance.  Other people trickled in after us, but none had the view of the TV that we did.  And we had all that extra time to gorge ourselves on the delicious Companion Bakery pretzels.  Third bummer of the night: they didn't have any nacho cheese (though whole grain mustard would have been much more in keeping with the theme).

We managed to find our seats for the second half of the show, and it was really great.  Germans, in addition to mechanizing the war machine, are also good at composing music; the pieces we got to see were Johann Strauss's Artist's Life and Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.

I have to say, it is a pleasure to watch Ward Stare conduct.  He's so expressive, even though often you're just seeing the back of his head, or maybe a quarter profile.  He's so expressive, and it's obvious he's putting all of his energy into his performance.  And I think it is a performance for him as much as it is for the musicians.  He's like the title character in a play - if he's great, you can't guarantee that the show will be great because there are a lot of other factors; but if he's not great, the show simply cannot be great either.

Lucky for us, he's great.