Not that I know much about classical music. For example, one of the pieces played was a quartet by Grieg. The only Grieg I knew was Tony Grieg and I'm pretty sure he hasn't written any string quartets. But this piece of music went off! If you've ever seen the film Amadeus, you may recall the music of the title credits which is I believe some kind of symphony by Mozart - the details escape me right now. The point is, it's urgent and rushy and very NOW-ish, and even if you know two-fifths of bugger-all about music it will grab you by the throat. This Grieg piece was like that. It really made you sit up and take notice.
One of the best bits of live concerts is that you get to watch the players perform. I'm a very visual person (hardly transparent at all!) so I enjoy that part of it. I like to watch Richard Tognetti's nostrils flare when he reaches a slow lilting phrase, as if he's sniffing a glass of fine wine. I like the way his knees bend when he powers into a big crescendo. One of the viola players looked like she was performing at gunpoint. Her eyes were wide open and she looked really alarmed and her mouth was stuck in a perpetual grimace of fear. And Maxime Bibeau, the bass player, kept his forehead in a worried frown and kept casting his eyes out over the audience as if he was looking for his lost cat.
I like to watch just one finger on a musician's hand for a few minutes, watch it work furiously on the strings and then hang idle in mid-air. The contrast between the random twitchings and jerkings of a single finger and the intensity of the composite sound from the whole orchestra that washes over you is ... well, it's quite something.
After the semi-mandatory triple curtain-call, we strolled back to the car for the long drive home. We turned on the radio and lo and behold - the Grieg quartet was playing! The concert was being broadcast on ABC Classic FM with a half-hour delay (at least in Adelaide it was delayed - like the people - ha ha!) so we had the strange experience of listening to ourselves applaud on radio. If only I'd thought to scream out my URL I might have got a whole lot of new readers!
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2 comments:
Do you really want a flood of new readers if they're only going to be the snooty lefty elitist types who go to ACO concerts?
They'll just send smug little in-jokes about your use of apostrophes - rather than the gritty hard-yakka comments on your blog of we, your lumpen-prole readership.
We have nothing to lose but our chain-emails.
Whats wrong with my use of apostrophe's?
You're right though - I'd lose the salt-of-the-earth, school-of-hard-knocks, struggle-street, sand-in-the-vas feel that make my blog the chef d'oeuvre of the workers' voice on the street from Milan to Rio. It's hard to tread the fine line between that and angsty post-teen doubts, but if anyone can do it, it's me.
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