The Weak End of the Weekend

[fr_defenestrato]

Friday after work I Metroed to Foggy Bottom and walked to the Kennedy Center to meet Tritelli, erstwhile drinking buddy and friend from way back in Delaware, for an NSO concert of Mozart and Bruckner. The Mozart piano concerto #27 is, as well as I can gather from the mems of mistery, the very first Mozart I ever sat down and listened to as a child: the local Acme Supermarket (on the White Horse Pike in Hammonton, N.J.) had one of those silly promotions that all the markets used to do, selling the first item in a big set for $.49 so that you get hooked and buy all the rest and considerably more money... encyclopaediae, crockery, decorative figurines, etc.—only this one was an LP record set of the greatest classical music ever. Or, needless to say, somebody's opinion about what constitutes the greatest classical music ever. The first record was Beethoven, the Pastoral Symphony. Mozart was secondthird, after Tchaikovsky, though I can't remember what else was on the record with the 27th concerto. The flip side of the record included overtures from, I think, four Mozart operas.



Anyway: I realized I hadnae list to it in many years, and it was nice to hear it live; although the pianist, one Jonathan Biss, did have a tendency to speed up dramatically in the solo bits, especially the numerous 16th-note runs and flourishes, meaning that the orchestra had to come in a lot faster than they went out. It's no secret I'm not a fan of lavish rubato in the music of the Classical Period: I've searched without success for a pianist who keeps the Beethoven sonatas in strict(ish) time. I know, I know, one needs room to be duly expressive; but I argue that the music itself, tonally, performs better in its own right than most artists give it credit for. And speeding up every 16th-note run, in any case, isn't expression; it's just rushing.

Prior to the concert I had little clue about Bruckner beyond having sung not one but two of his (four? five?) setting of the Ave Maria—one in N.J. All State Chorus in high school, one with the Cheese Lords. I have his 4th symphony on CD but never listened to it much, the reasons for which became clear when the NSO played his 9th (unfinished) on Friday night. He's boring. Apologies to any Bruckner fans, but the opening movement seemed to me like a cup of really good, creamy, well-spiced and -herbed potato soup, only thinned out with a gallon of hot water. The scherzo was much fun, and then another glacially plodding adagio. There are plenty moments of beauty to be found, but any sense of motivic organization escaped me on first listen. I know from experience that I could come to love such a work, if I had the patience to listen to it dozens of times and, as it were, find its soul. I do not.

Saturday morning I got up earlyish and took Metro and an abysmal Laurel 'Connect-a-Ride' bus out to the lower pits of P.G. County to look at a piano on a truck. My tuner has been keeping his eye out for an affordable replacement for my 1972 Wurlitzer POS, and alerted me to a recent discard. The innards were certainly beautiful—doesn't look like anyone ever really played this piano—and the sound was pretty nice (considering I was playing it in a box truck) but the action troubles me. There's too broad a range of finger action that results in no sound at all, especially with the soft pedal depressed. I need to call my tuner today and ask about that, but I'm expecting that this is not the piano for me.

Since I had told the bus driver as I exited her conveyance to 'Have a terrible day' (this was a prudent downgrade from the expletives I really wished to unload on her: she was intensely loathsome, the sort of person who talked to everyone she met as if they were kindergarteners and she'd had it up to here with kindergarteners), I had to walk back down Baltimore Avenue a couple miles to a spot where a real Metro bus would pick me up. By this time I was feeling kinda crappy: I had had some abdominal distress just before bed the night before, and while that was no longer acute, I had woken up vaguely achy, which now expanded to include the Dreaded Eyeball Pain, a sure sign of fever. I decided to opt out of seeing Jesus Christ Superstar at the Warner (tickets won at work lottery) and texted faeshale that he and fritterfae were welcome to my pair of tickets; but the former was bogged down in homework and was only going to go because I was going; so the latter stopped by and grabbed the pair of tix while I lay around my living room feeling this vague and annoying malaise.

Sunday was a lot of general computer file and drive maintenance (DLing recent photos, HD backups), a brief visit from maestro_live, and a rewatching of most of The Venture Brothers seasons 1 and 2.