I spent last evening with the Missus in what has now become my favorite place to be on the planet – Carnegie Hall.  Inspirational music rose to another high point with a visit from the Philadelphia Orchestra to our fair city.  The Missus and I were given gift tickets (better n’ Christmas) and though we sat up in the nose-bleed section, 4^th Tier and no place for vertigo sufferers, I was amazed once again by the acoustics of this wondrous concert hall.

When I first came to NYC back in my early twenties to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, I got a job at night selling orange drink in the tiers of Carnegie Hall and then eventually bar tending in its intermission café.  Though I made decent money in pay and tips, the real payment for me was the fact that for two years I got to see every concert presented in the main hall during that time.

I could fill a book with the stories and memories of those evenings and matinees.  It was certainly a huge and unexpected part of my education as an artist.  I had a place where I would stand in the back of the main floor and knew all the ushers who dubbed that spot, “Pete’s Place”.  In those two years I saw and heard a lifetime of great performances.

Since then I have had the great fortune to visit this hallowed hall many times and often had great seats.  Last night was, in fact, the first time I’ve ever watched a performance from the 4^th Tier.  But I must say I loved it.  There you sit above the orchestra looking down on the body of players and instruments and can watch the bowings of the strings and the bassoonists prepping their reeds and the timpanist tuning his kettle drums and the bass bassoonist endlessly counting bars of rests waiting for her big moment.

And the acoustics are simply magnificent.  No sound in the human hearing spectrum suffers from distance to the stage in either volume or clarity.  The high end of the 9’ Steinway Concert Grand sparkled and danced through my delighted eardrums during Lang Lang’s magical encore of Franz Liszt’s La Campanella.  The double basses and cello section both roared and warmed the walls and the piccolos cut through the distance like a knife.

And the music!  Oh my goodness, the music.  I was not particularly familiar with Gabriel

Fauré’s Pavane in F-sharp Minor, Op. 50, but I am now.  It’s melody still soars through my brain and the way he harmonizes that melody in his orchestration was simply genius originality.

Lang Lang’s glorious performance of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19 was like soft hands smoothing silk sheets.  This piano concerto, written when Beethoven was a teenager and in his early twenties is certainly portent for things to come from the master, but was not my particular cup of tea when it came to Beethoven.  It struck me as far too derivative and never really grabbed my ear and imagination except in the beginning of the second movement.  But who am I to complain about Ludwig – the man was a teeny-bopper when he wrote it.  Pretty amazing…

It was the Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93 that I was really up for, however.  During it, I literally sat on the edge of my seat throughout in rapt amazement of the way he handled his orchestra.  I felt I was in a master class of orchestration as he spun out his themes evoking Russia at the time of Stalin’s death.  In the music was the war and the heartbreak and the devastation and the tonality of the Russian mind all captured in the double basses and cellos.  I would never need to travel back in time to experience that difficult period in history.  I was there last night in his music.

I was swept up by the beauty of his composition throughout the first half of the symphony and then, strangely enough, I found myself getting bored and asking, “Where are we going with all this?”  It seemed like themes would begin to be developed and then rejected as new ideas sprang forth.  I began to lose continuity and the end of the symphony seemed like a list of unrelated ideas tied together with only the sadness of a lost soul.  I was always swept up by the pure orchestration mastery of both the Philly and Dmitri’s sound, but I’ll have to admit that he lost me a bit compositionally.

I found myself thinking, “Well, he’s no Stravinsky” though he was a contemporary of Stravinsky’s.  If I sound critical, well perhaps I am a bit, but nit-picking the masters is legal, I suppose.  It’s a bit like booing the multi-million dollar baseball star at a ball game.

Then later I read the following in my program regarding Shostakovich’s work:

The personal meaning of the Allegretto is encoded in the music. This was one of several pieces from the latter part of Shostakovich’s career in which he spelled out his name musically. D[mitri] SCH[ostakowitsch], as it is spelled in German, corresponds to the pitches D, E-flat, C, and B-natural in German. (Other composers have done similar things since as far back as the Middle Ages, Bach most notably.) Shostakovich’s initials appear at first in the upper woodwinds near the start of the movement. The motto is later taken up by the cellos and basses, which leads to a forte solo horn theme that encrypts Nazirova’s (his girlfriend) name: The pitches are E-A-E-D-A (corresponding to E-L(a)-Mi-R(e)-A). The two motifs are combined at the end of the movement.

I guess I’m just not a fan of this kind of intellectual approach to musical composition.  I deeply believe in emotional story-telling, in the depth of the soul and height of the spirit and clarity of the beauty of the moment.  To write as a puzzle maker puzzles me and in the end, loses me.

I want to be moved, not intellectually challenged.  Who cares how his name is spelled and how that relates to music?  I don’t.

And looking back, that’s what lost me in the performance of his symphony.  I lost his connection to the Russian soul because he was off playing with word puzzles while Stalin was dying and the world was recovering from the most tragic war in its history.  Rather he had stuck to his brilliance and written about that instead of his name’s initials.

My rant for the day…

Did this ruin the evening for me?  Not at all.  I am blessed to live down the street from this magnificent music room.  I am blessed for the opportunity to hear and study this wondrous orchestra.  I am blessed to sit in the nose-bleed section and float off on the wings of the masters and their music.

I am blessed to work in the industry and play a part in the grand scheme of music.