On Wednesday night, I took Brett to the Symphony for the first time in his life. Well, you have to make some effort to educate the philistines right? :) The program was rather strange - a rarely performed piece by Copland, called "Inscape", Tschaikovsky's "Piano Concert No. 1", and John Adams' masterpiece, "Harmonielehre". I thought it was rather cynical of Michael Tilson Thomas to sandwich in the Tschaikovsky between two such tricky pieces, but I'm not sure the strategy worked. Those who came to see the concerto, hated the rest, and voted with their feet after the interval by walking out in the middle of the Adams. While those, like me, who love the Adams piece fell asleep during the Tschaikovsky (literally in my case).

At the Symphony

The Adams is an exciting, driving piece of beauty. The first movements starts with a series of massive, rapid orchestral chords and that motif continues through the next fifteen minutes, giving the movement a motoric energy. And Adams has a way of lacing the tops of all this orchestral color with scintillating, dancing sparks of brilliance which, I'm not sure why, are immensely appealing. The middle movement stretched the patience of a few audience members, since it's much slower. Unless you listen to it closely, it's almost dreary - but even here there's a wealth of detail and texture. And how the composer can breathe such life and meaning into the series of slow, solemn chords, each of the same pitch, that end the movement is beyond me.

I think this guy is a master of orchestration. The final movement starts relatively quietly, but the dancing sparks return and the energy builds. When the motoric rythyms start up again, and the marimbas, xylophones and glockenspiels start to hammer out an insistent beat, you know you're in a for a major climax, and you're not dissapointed as the whole orchestra builds up the noise, with all the percussion bashing away at the same beat: tremendously exciting! When the composer himself took to the stage in the midst of the applause, most of the audience came to their feet - he is a local of course, but how can you go wrong with a guy named Adams? :)

But I'm not sure how much Brett enjoyed it. He said he did, but then he hasn't mentioned it since. It's odd, is it not, how when we find a piece of music, or a book, that we truly love, that we want to share it with othes? We want others to feel what we feel? Yet it rarely if ever succeeds. You play a CD for a friend, and they just shrug it off. This is quite in contrast to the joy of dancing with someone to a great disco song - you're both much more in tune with the same feelings and I guess the sharing is more intimate. I wish classical music could be shared in the same way. Maybe next time I take Brett, I should ask him if he wants to get up on stage and dance with me? :)

This week has been way too busy. Honestly, it felt like I would roll out of bed early in the morning and run a marathon during the daytime, and collapse back into the same unmade bed around midnight. Everything non-essential got left undone (I'm considering that going to the symphony was essential :) When I have weeks like this, I get VERY sloppy. I throw my clothes in a pile when I undress, and they're still in that same pile at the end of the week. Last thing I do each night is finish the New York Times in bed, then toss it on the floor, a floor that, come the weekend, is layered with newsprint.

Thursday night, the only way I could make my appointment with Brian to go to the movies, was to plan on doing a couple of hours of work after getting back from the movies. I drove over to the Castro around 6. I paused next to my car to take a photo looking downhill at the Castro, all lit up, when somebody yelled across the street at me. It was a guy in a convertible who recognized me from the website! I kind of grunted an acknowledgement, but it was only walking down the hill towards the theater that I started to laugh - it kind of gave me a kick.

The Castro at dusk

The movie was the restored "Rear Window", by Hitchcock. It's the second time I've seen it, but I just love to see old movies in the Castro Theater, and it's a masterpiece of a movie, worth seeing twice. I was very, very tired though, and afterwards, there was no way that I could stay up to work. I was in bed by ten thirty. Unfortunately, I was awake again at three thirty, and awake I stayed! So, since I had a lot of work to catch up on, I worked from around four in the morning to one in the afternoon, and got everything finished that I needed to. Finally - I'd made it through the week and hit the breathing space of the weekend!