Ginastera and Rachmaninoff and Elgar, Oh My!

Grandpa shared a set of symphony tickets with me last weekend.  A solid show all the way through, and fairly contemporary, as classical music goes.

Let's start at the beginning.  First was Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes.  The music wasn't my favorite, but what was awesome about it was that each movement highlighted a different instrument.  It didn't hurt a bit that it opened with a cello solo, and the first cello is probably my favorite musician in the whole place.  Each section of the music moved on to a new section of the orchestra: flute, clarinet, oboe, contrabassoon, and on and on.  It was neat.

Then came the Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.  It was amazing to watch the pianist's hands fly over the keys.  Very impressive.

We finished with the title piece, Elgar's Enigma Variations.  I was good and read the blurb in the program about this piece before it started (it was entertaining!), and I found out that he patterned and named each movement after a friend of his, except the last, which he named after himself.  (Humble guy.)  Nimrod, Variation IX, is the most famous.

The piece starts.  We travel from movement to movement.  I'm really not counting.  Then I hear it, and I know this has to be Variation IX -- probably because it sounded familiar and IX was the one I was most likely to have heard before.  Sure enough, I count the rest of the movements and we hit the finale, the trombones play, and Variation XIV, E.D.U., wraps up the show.

It only could have been better if one of my favorite conductors had been there.