So we still carry on. Chemo starts Tuesday, and we hope for remission. We pray for remission.
In the meantime we keep up with Giants baseball and hope they hang in there too. Tonight we listened with increased joy as they won game five of the National League Playoffs. We also attended the local symphony.
The Monterey Symphony started off their 67th season this evening. The concert hall is six minutes from home. It was a little tiring for v, but the music is wonderful. Several of our friends are regular attendees at the concerts and v is acquainted with some of the musicians.
Since starting to attend these concerts I've come to appreciate individual composers so much more. My ears have been opened to the haunting beauty of Von Williams Pastural which had much more to do with the battlefields of WWI than the bucolic beauty of England. I have become a devoted Monte Verde fan. Whenever the Vespers are performed we are there. The last time we heard them was at the Carmel Mission during the Bach Festival. We have just become such ardent classical music fans.
Tonight's program included works by Haydn, John Field, and Mozart. All were beautiful. The pianists, John O'Connor and Heidi Hau were delightful to watch. I'm not a musician so I don't really know which words should be used to describe the delicate touch of their fingers on the keys, especially Heidi Hau's. Her hands floated above the keys. The final piece was Mozart's Concerto No. 10 in E-flat Major for Two Pianos. While I listened I thought about how Mozart had a very talented sister who played piano and I wondered if he'd written the piece to perform with her. At the end of the concert I was informed that that actually was the case.
I love watching the musicians play music that has been played for the past two hundred years, and more. Music written before radio and iPods. Music that synthesized the sounds of the everyday, two hundred years, and more, ago. Consider just how magnificent it would have been to hear music when it wasn't blaring out of a passing auto, or booming out of multiple speakers, or deafening ourselves through ear pieces. Think of a world where music was an event and not random background buzz.
In bocca al lupo. m & v
Music as an event, I love that. I remember when I was the female vocalist in a modest rock band; we would buy the latest releases, take them home, and prepare ourselves to listen, carefully, to the offerings of other musicians. It was an event. m-e
ReplyDeleteI feel that listening carefully to the music gives us a chance to hear the composer's voice over the hills and valleys of time. m
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautifully written post. The photo captures exactly captures the feelings your words expressed, or as I interpreted them, that is. Grace and simplicity rather than background buzz.
ReplyDeleteThank you. And thank you for the comment on the photo as the flowers and the lamp are the chosen backdrop for our baseball and music listening. m:)
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