On a more positive note.

Helen sends me a link to a very positive aspect to the global online community, the virtual choir.



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Last night our lovely friends R & D invited us to join them for a performance of Orange County's  Pacific Symphony. It was a wonderful evening. We started off with a great dinner at Pascals, I won't bore you with the particulars except to note that I had quail stuffed with black truffles. I don't want to get off topic and so will instead concentrate on the delicious music we were treated to at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

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I will not pretend that I am any great maven of classical music. There are things I like and things that I do not particularly care for. I played cello in elementary school but after four years realized that I was suffering from a remarkable lack of talent. Truth be known, practicing my cello always took a back seat to playing sandlot baseball, my true passion at the time. Saw Casals when I was young and occasionally joined my dad at the symphony.

With my bona fides and confession duly noted I would like to talk about last night's performance. The pianist that was supposed to give the concert, Yuja Wang was ill and they brought in a 16 year old wunderkind named Conrad Tao to take her place on the program on short notice.  Tao is remarkable. At 18 months his parents found him banging out children's songs on the piano. He won the 2003 Walgreens National Concerto competition, on the violin. Let's see that would have made him 8 at the time. This Illinois native is Julliard trained and lives in New York with his parents. He is going to be huge, and is being hailed by renowned critic Harris Goldberg as "the most exciting prodigy to come my way." He is starting to play with major symphonies all over the world, debuting in Italy and Switzerland last year.

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Carl St. Clair, conducted the night's performances. He has been the Pacific Symphony's Music Director for 21 years. Very warm and engaging.

The night's selections started with Memorial to Lidice, a work by Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). Martinu was termed a degenerate artist by the nazis. Being blacklisted, and fleeing the reich, he fled Paris with his wife in 1940, abandoning his home and his manuscripts. This is a story of the town of Lidice in his native Czechoslovakia which the Nazis destroyed in its entirety the year after his arrival in the United States. Stormtroopers killed every man in the village, deported the women and children and burned down every building.

This was a very powerful work, a haunting counterpoint between a C minor and C #minor scale. My favorite piece of the night, it ended in a haunting refrain of silence as taut as an invisible bow string.

The Rachmaninoff performance was next, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This is an athletic piece designed to display the late Russian's dazzling virtuosity. It is a run down of 24 variations drawn from Paganini's violin melodies. Tao played brilliantly but the work itself had more pyrotechnics than emotive resonation for me. Rachmaninoff was one of the last russian romantic composers, but was just a tad ongepotch, or slick and ornamented for me. I prefer a bit more pathos but then again, I am rather strange.

Tao came back from a big round of applause and launched into Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, which was forceful, honest and wonderful, sans orchestra.

I talked to a viola player during the break and she says that the young pianist is truly remarkable and never broke tempo. And also very nice. His playing lacked a bit of emotional bandwidth but after all, the kid is only 16.

After the brief intermission we came back for Shostakovich's Symphony #5 in D minor, Opus 47. As St. Clair explained, Dimitri's wildly successful opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District  had been personally shut down by Stalin two years earlier and his liaison with the state, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky tried for treason and shot. The state wanted social realist work that would promote the dictatorship, not a protest symphony that critiqued the gulag. This symphony was an apology to get back into the state's fair graces but filled with musical sarcasm and irony. He had to appear to toe the line or die.

The work is divided into four movements, my favorite being the third or Largo, a movement that focused on a long melodic line, played over and over by the strings section. The fourth movement ended with some serious bashing of the kettle drum. The orchestra is world class and played brilliantly all night. I especially liked the clarinetist solo in the allegro non troppo or fourth movement.

I really enjoyed the evening. It was our second time at the hall. Our friend Matt was one of the principal site architects and we were there for the opening. It is very live sounding room acoustically. If I had one beef it would be that the acoustics are so accurate that the audience noise was amplified to the extreme. I felt every one of the many coughs coming from audience members too boorish to leave the hall.

Love the big Richard Serra sculpture outside as well. Nice echoes when you walk inside. Looking forward to another go, one of these days, hopefully sooner than later. Many thanks to our hosts.