Freude, schoener Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium!

Kleinhans, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

That's the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in warm-ups prior to a recent performance of "Beethoven Lives Upstairs", a wonderful program of excerpts of Beethoven's music performed alongside a live show in which two actors, a young man and an older one, play the parts of a musician in Vienna and his nephew who, for a time, has a very eccentric upstairs neighbor: Ludwig van Beethoven. We took The Daughter for her first ever BPO concert, and she enjoyed it despite kinda-sorta pretending to not be too enthusiastic about it.

I hadn't heard the BPO live in over ten years; attending live music performances simply hasn't been a priority with me, which I now realize I miss terribly. I remember every concert I've been to: the cycle of the Brahms symphonies the BPO did for Semyon Bychkov's final concerts as music director; I remember his Berlioz Symphonie fantastique and his Dvorak New World, which was a scintillating performance that was made more memorable by the fact that the audience seemed to be filled with emphysemacs. There was so much coughing during the slow movement that Maestro Bychkov actually turned to the audience after that movement and admonished them; and then he and the BPO repeated the movement "for those who missed it the first time". Wow.

The concert that is most engraved on my brain, though, wasn't the BPO. In my sophomore year in college, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played at our school. Their program began with Berlioz's Roman Carnival overture, and then followed with a concerto for Pipa and orchestra (the pipa is a Chinese stringed instrument). The second half of the program? My beloved Rachmaninov Symphony No. 2. I was nearly in tears by the time that concert ended.

Anyhow, hearing the BPO live again was truly wonderful, and I deeply thank Jennifer for acquiring the tickets for my family. (BTW, the BPO's current resident conductor, a man named Robert Franz, looks suspiciously like Bob Cobb, "The Maestro", from Seinfeld. I wonder if Maestro Franz has a house in Tuscany!)