concert review: Mozart or the moon
Feb. 20th, 2008 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI missed the entire bleedin' eclipse.
I was out walking in the City for much of the hour of totality, 19:00+ our time, and I kept looking around the sky, but whether it was behind a building or a cloud or something else, they hadn't got a Moon, not anywhere there!
I'd gone up for an SFS concert. An all-Mozart concert. Listen, I have had so much Mozart stuffed at me over the past few years that the only all-Mozart concert that would excite me today would be a triple-decker of his entire final symphonic trilogy. (Which I have gotten, a couple of times.) I only went to this one because I already had a ticket anyway, and because Herbert Blomstedt, who's always good, was conducting.
For my pains I got one of Mozart's more tedious divertimenti (K. 251), one of his less interesting piano concerti (K. 482), and - at least - one of his better symphonies (the Prague, K. 504 - if it'd been the Haffner I'd have split). Blomstedt took all the repeats in the symphony.
The divertimento was telling. This performance included the final march that's usually omitted, and the audience hadn't read the program book saying so, but they sure did know the piece, so they started giving their final applause after the previous movement even though Blomstedt hadn't lowered his arms.
Before the concert I'd eaten at a restaurant in the upper Tenderloin, of all places, whose gourmet pho I'd seen touted somewhere. It was gourmet pho, all right, but I think I'll stick to regular pho. The meat in pho shouldn't be too thick and rich, and the broth - I've had better.
I was out walking in the City for much of the hour of totality, 19:00+ our time, and I kept looking around the sky, but whether it was behind a building or a cloud or something else, they hadn't got a Moon, not anywhere there!
I'd gone up for an SFS concert. An all-Mozart concert. Listen, I have had so much Mozart stuffed at me over the past few years that the only all-Mozart concert that would excite me today would be a triple-decker of his entire final symphonic trilogy. (Which I have gotten, a couple of times.) I only went to this one because I already had a ticket anyway, and because Herbert Blomstedt, who's always good, was conducting.
For my pains I got one of Mozart's more tedious divertimenti (K. 251), one of his less interesting piano concerti (K. 482), and - at least - one of his better symphonies (the Prague, K. 504 - if it'd been the Haffner I'd have split). Blomstedt took all the repeats in the symphony.
The divertimento was telling. This performance included the final march that's usually omitted, and the audience hadn't read the program book saying so, but they sure did know the piece, so they started giving their final applause after the previous movement even though Blomstedt hadn't lowered his arms.
Before the concert I'd eaten at a restaurant in the upper Tenderloin, of all places, whose gourmet pho I'd seen touted somewhere. It was gourmet pho, all right, but I think I'll stick to regular pho. The meat in pho shouldn't be too thick and rich, and the broth - I've had better.
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Date: 2008-02-22 10:26 am (UTC)But if I have a favorite Apollo flight, it may be one that didn't go to the moon at all: Apollo 9, the Earth-orbit test of the lunar module. One might consider that to be disappointing, but what appeals to me about this one is Jim McDivitt's attitude towards it: he was a test pilot, and here he was getting to take an entirely new kind of vehicle on its first flight ever. What a dream!
Of the moon landings, I think the one best treated in the miniseries is Apollo 15, where the astronauts first learned to be geologists rather than tourists on the surface. Most of the astronauts had not found geology training very interesting, with a few exceptions like Roger Chaffee, who sadly never got the chance to do anything about it.